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Malaysian Cyber Cafe Owners Liable For Patron Behavior
An anonymous reader writes "Malaysia's new internet law maybe simply the toughest on the planet. According to the new law which was amended because of protesters the originators of content are those who own, administer, and/or edit websites, blogs, and online forums. This means that a blogger or forum moderator who allows nasty comments against the government on their site can be held liable. An internet café manager is accountable if one of his or her customers sends illegal content online through the store's WiFi. A mobile phone user is the perpetrator if defamatory content is traced back to his or her electronic device. Critics of the new law contend also that a person is considered guilty until proven innocent."
One of many backward countries around the world that don't see any benefit in having a free internet. Sad but true...
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
What is the point of this kind of shit? Money? The richest countries in the world tend to be the freest. Power? Over what? You are the government, you already have a monopoly on legal force and coercion. The only thing this is going to do is get a lot of people sent to jail that didn't do shit. It makes no sense.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Should the ISP be liable also?
How is it that the owner of an internet cafe is responsible for what a user posts, but the cell phone company isn't responsible for subversive use of a mobile phone? This law sounds so knee jerk I'm surprised they didn't dislocate several bones.
Legislation of this type is a measure of how easy the political process is to buy in a nation.
Congrats to Malaysia on being number one.
I am glad I do not own an internet cafe in Malaysia!!!
Well, that's what you get with a federal constitutional elective monarchy, or whatever they want to call it.
Every Malaysian should blog under the pseudonym of the PM of Malaysia.
He would then be guilty until proven otherwise.
Nice try.
It's not much different in a number of other countries, notably the UK.
If a crime is committed over your internet connection, you are liable - unless you can provide proof of identity of the perpetrator. For a commercial ISP, this isn't too hard - they can tie a communication to an account, and the name of the account holder is good enough.
If you are offering wi-fi as part of a business (e.g. a coffee shop), then unless you keep some form of record of customer IDs, which allow you to match a communication to a customer, then you are on shaky ground. A common business practice is to outsource Wi-fi provision to an ISP, where the customer has to provide their account credentials for that ISP, or otherwise provide some evidence of their identity (e.g. by providing valid credit card details, or less invasively, by sending an SMS containing an activation code to a phone number provided by the customer).
An alternative, and increasingly common is to heavily filter wifi traffic - it's increasingly common to see free wifi locked down like a corporate network with all manner of block lists, and increasingly more so blocked ports (I've come across a few public wifi services where only ports 80 and 443 are available - every other port is blocked - such networks severely disturb smartphones, as it breaks their e-mail, iMessage/facetime, etc. connectivity).
That's different. Right or wrong, Manning swore an oath to the effect that he would not do what he did.
Your use of moral relativism undercuts whatever obscure argument you were really trying to make.
A cell phone carrier is somehow NOT liable or subject to the same punishments if a user of their 3G cell services posts defamatory content via their mobile browser.
Long signatures suck.
Isnt this an affront to privacy?
It will be interesting to see what effects this has. I'd imagine that at least a few people will avoid having connections at all, given the risks. I could also see people hacking other people's WiFi networks, or trying to frame people by posting things through their connections.
Members of Congress took oaths not to do what they do and I do not see any of them getting locked up.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Is the internet cafe manager is liable for messages sent by a customer, then the phone company is liable for such messages sent from a mobile phone?
...Germany. Seriously. There's a particular term in German Legalese, "Mitstörerhaftung" (don't expect me to translate that) which in simple words means: if it's tracked back to your account or found on your site, you're held liable. This applies to open (or not "decently" secure) access points, internet forums, blogs and frequently leads to website owners being sued and -of course- to any account found to be guilty of file-sharing. Any effort to get rid of this anachronism (said jurisdiction is mostly a relic from the analog age) has proven to be in vain: there's way too much easy cash for way too many lawyers in it and our parliament (as pretty much any parliament in the western world) consists mostly from lawyers...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
That's different. Right or wrong, Manning swore an oath to the effect that he would not do what he did.
Manning swore an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution, not the federal government. In fact, here's the oath he took, verbatim:
Emphasis mine. Now, taking said oath into account (with the knowledge that it is an ordered list, i.e. the first item is the most important), how exactly did he violate it?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
He faced a situation where he judged the consequences of breaking his oath to be less onerous than the consequences of keeping it. That's not relativism (as opposed to absolutism), it's act utilitarianism (as opposed to rule utilitarianism).
If you are defending rule utilitarianism, you are defending the Nazi soldiers who were just following orders when they murdered six million Jewish civilians.
If you are defending rule utilitarianism, you are condemning every whistleblower who has ever broken an oath, violated an NDA, or betrayed the trust of a personal friend to blow the whistle--which is all of them.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
Sounds like a great way to punish someone/business that you don't like. Just connect to their wi-fi and start posting.
Do you really think that the Uniform Code of Military Justice has nothing to say about leaking classified information?
I don't know about you, but if I was a small business owner in Malaysia, the first thing I do would be shut down any internet service such as free wifi.
So businesses that revolves around the net, such as cyber cafes, better install a damn good filter or anonymizer or some such.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
My understanding from this is that if I break into someone's wifi, or "borrow" someone's mobile phone, and perform some kind of illegal transaction, the owner of that access point or device is liable? Besides being a great way to avoid legal consequences, it occurs to me that this could be used as a weapon against anyone who owns a wireless device or any company that maintains a wireless network.
Oh, this is too good not to use in a movie. I want to see; perp picks bystander's pocket, makes illegal call, puts phone back in pocket, then walks away as the police tackle bystander.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Malaysia's new internet law maybe simply
No - "may simply be", or just "may be". The "simply" is gratuitous.
The next bit needs some more punctuation to make it easier to read:
According to the new law - which was amended because of protesters - the originators of content are those who own, administer, and/or edit websites, blogs, and online forums.
Not to mention the fact that there's nothing about protestors in the article, so that bit seems to have been slipped in by the submitter.
This means that a blogger or forum moderator who allows nasty comments against the government on their site can be held liable. An internet café manager is accountable if one of his or her customers sends illegal content online through the store's WiFi.
These two sentences seem a bit non-sequitur to me - on reading the article it turns out that the summary has missed out the fact that the internet cafe liability bit is down to a different (part of the?) amendment.
Critics of the new law contend also that a person is considered guilty until proven innocent.
This is ambiguous - do the critics contend that considering someone guilty should be the normal order of things, or do they mean that is what the new amendments are implying? The article is much clearer:
Critics of the amendment contend that under section 114A, a person is considered guilty until proven innocent.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Every cyber cafe and ISP in the country simply stopped operating rather than risk being arrested and presumed guilty for someone else's expression. They wouldn't inform their customers because that could be considered criticism of the government. So everyone's access just suddenly ended. Be careful what you ask for!!!!
Do you really think that the Uniform Code of Military Justice has nothing to say about leaking classified information?
As I stated, the oath is an ordered list, and that particular item is the last one - after defending the Constitution and bearing true faith and allegiance to the same.
So the real question here is, were Manning's actions in accordance with defense of the Constitution? I say yes, as outing corrupt and illegal activity engaged in by federal bureaucrats (A.K.A. treason) is tantamount to ensuring the Constitution's validity on the world stage.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I agree with you that this should be the outcome of the trial. But the fact that he was charged still makes sense - he violated one rule to uphold another. The fact that he's not had a trial yet is the only real issue.
I agree with you that this should be the outcome of the trial. But the fact that he was charged still makes sense - he violated one rule to uphold another. The fact that he's not had a trial yet is the only real issue.
Yes, this sort of thing is exactly what the justice system was (allegedly) designed for.
IMO, every government official should be tried for treason at some point. The innocent will be exonerated, the guilty will be punished accordingly, and so long as the proceedings are carried out in accordance with the Constitution, everybody is a winner (well, everybody but the traitors).
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I don't understand why "presumed guilty" is a problem. We do it every day, and nobody cares. If you were truly presumed innocent, the cops wouldn't beat you before taking you into custody. They wouldn't fingerprint you when they booked you if they didn't presume you guilty. No, you are presumed guilty for all purposes, so long as you are not standing in front of a jury. And that's how the system is "supposed to" work. You are presumed innocent in court, and the prosecutor must prove guilt. But for arrest, booking, charging, you are presumed guilty. That's how it is, and has always been in the US.
So I always get confused when people talk about it in that manner, especially Americans getting on the high horse about other countries and their rules. The US is worse. Just having cash on you gets you presumed guilty of drug crime, and your money taken unless (and sometimes even if) proven innocent.
Learn to love Alaska
No it doesn't ... Christianity guarded science when it was normal for mobs to come and try to destroy it (and lost quite a few priests and monks to those mobs) ... islam WAS the mobs coming to destroy science (example: one of the biggest blows against science ever). Besides, one only needs to walk in a muslim suburb for 5 minutes to remove all doubt as to how the vast majority of muslims think about science, irrespective of where they come from.
We wouldn't have had science if it wasn't for the church stubbornly going against the wishes of society for centuries ... but of course going against wider society is still considered criminal, dirty, "backwards" and dishonorable today.
Furthermore, only 1% of people would know about science if it wasn't for the church building more schools than churches and starting the massive crime of attempting to educate everyone (crime ? Yes, literally, this is one thing the church was convicted of by the government that is now called the "enlightenment" government. The crime of educating everyone. Hundreds of monks and priests were executed for that, and *still* they didn't stop).
Imho all states have the same problem. They try to force an ideological viewpoint onto reality, which obviously never works, forces people into a destructive spiral and ...
In America, the cracks are limited (though of course, viewed in this light national health care is very bad indeed, so the argument could be made it's getting worse), and Americans live in an environment that most other countries would see as "the law of the jungle", and America is not yet completely out of touch with reality.
In malaysia, the government has an islam-inspired view of reality. That living in 6th century conditions (frankly in conditions that were considered disgustingly backward in the 6th century) is the best way to live. And everybody who disagrees with that must be violently convinced otherwise. And for "strange" reasons the people that do best are people with ... a different religion. Those people, needless to say, become a very visible testament to the disgusting nature of islam, and islam's hopeless backwardness, just like muslim ratholes in New York, only the other way round. Malaysia as a whole is the rathole, Christian neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur, by contrast, look like modern cities where it's pleasant to live. And of course, islam tells muslim that they can violently take that from the infidels ... "strangely" that has never worked.
Misery, death, violence and jealousy is what propagates islam. Desperate people see everyone with a different religion succeeding, yet fail to accomplish anything. So they attack and attempt to take the wealth. Of course the only wealth those other religions provide is a different, more effective and better religion, a better way of life. So those massacring muslims immediately fall back into desperate hopelessness. "goto 10".
To kill off cybercafes and free wifi. ( oh, and anonymity of its citizens who want to protest their government )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm from Germany, and the same situation is seen here as well.
It's called "Störerhaftung", roughly translated as "liability for disturbance" according to LEO dictionary. You are responsible for the stuff posted over your connection, if you didn't take adequate precautions to prohibit it. Hamburg's court is famous to cater for all who seek vengeance in online space, and can usually be called upon.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
.. It's Malaysia.
In the federal capital, it's mandatory for open air cafes to have public wifi. At the same time, the owner of that cafe is liable for what their patrons do on their wifi. They're screwed either way.
So how long until some clever guy with a cantenna gets a high-ranking government official in hot water from this law?
So a point that I'm not sure has been brought up... does this mean when I post to a blog etc with my smartphone, AT&T, Verizon etc are held liable? After all they are providing the internet.
1) US maintains a list of blacklisted countries accused of facilitating online piracy by not implementing surveillance and copyright enforcement.
Malaysia just promised to comply and thus got off the list. The OP topic may be a result of this.
http://www.zdnet.com/malaysia-dropped-from-us-piracy-watch-list-2062304676/
2) Malaysia's biggest ISP TM introduced for it's "fastest" internet service UNIFI (a max. 20MBit SDSL connection) blocking of port 6667. This started some weeks ago (August/2012). No official statement so far. Other ports work fine though (e.g. 6666).
http://forum.lowyat.net/topic/2477506/all
What do you expect from a country which is the launching ground for terrorism? Unfortunately since they are trading partners for the States they are not labelled such
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/LI11Ae01.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3126241.stm
This is a country which promotes peodeophiles
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/father-seeks-justice-after-young-daughters-rapist-escapes-jail/
have u ever see how stoneage ppl dress up? its like u guys now.. but islam teach them to cover their body.
Are you sure it was ISLAM which taught human beings to cover up their body?
[citation please]
For your information -
No matter how many blood is in his hand, in Malaysia, as long as you are a Malay, you can get away of any crime you commit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazid_Sufaat
Mr. Yazid Sufaat, the person who organized the "Kuala Lumpur Summit" which led to the bombing of World Trade Center in New York City, is a _FREE_ MAN_ in Malaysia
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So if someone sends a seditious email from a Malaysian government computer, is the government guilty of a crime?
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Laid-back, easy-going tropical island living goes out the window, once - like rats off a ship - religion shows up.