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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."
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.
Think about all the silly laws we have that create an air of uncertainty about the law and opportunities for a timely arrest or fine. It really pisses off the police when they want to slap the bracelets on someone, but there isn't a handy law available that many people break with regularity.
So this makes it easy to imprison anyone running a cyber cafe whenever they want, because chances are that someone posted something illegal in their cafe in the week or two prior.
Or its just to put a chill into people who feel relatively anonymous at a cyber cafe.
The really funny part of this is that in order to remain in compliance, the owner would have to monitor every user or all of their traffic and neither of those is feasible. Thats what I'm sure most are looking for, a cyber cafe reading all the data packets, including breaking encryption, looking for someone bad mouthing a politician. Then they'll be safe...
What if governments realize that the most productive countries are the one's with the highest incarceration rates. They are just doing what they see as a way to catch up to the other productive countries.
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.
Well, what did you expect from a predominantly Muslim country? Progressive politics?
Seriously, these people are being told that god expected them to live in the stone age, and they accept that.
I can't see how anything else could have happened there.
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).
I just think my country would be great and I don't understand why none of the small-time dictators, not even once, have seen it my way.
They have, precisely once.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
...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!
Considering the majority of the country is islamic, with an increasing swing in islamic extremists? Hardly. I'll bet $20 that if you look at the chief architects of the bill, much like the ones in Thailand(who were directly linked to the monarchy--and have a similar law), these ones have deep links to the extremists. These types of laws exist to stifle dissent, nothing more nothing less, and there have been exceptionally brutal crackdowns in Malaysia on people being critical of muslims and islam.
Om, nomnomnom...
Well, what did you expect from a predominantly Muslim country? Progressive politics?
Perhaps you should go to Malaysia some day. It's improving fast, has some of the best roads and infrastructure in the region as well as high levels of education. Food prices are kept low, and so is fuel and electricity, so most people have at least an opportunity to live well.
Nor is it uniformly Islamic. Even on the east coast, where the religion dominates, it's still easy enough to do as you choose, and in places like Penang, it's barely visible.
Most of this stuff is posturing, and has less affect on real people than idiocy like the *IAA pogroms being run out of the US.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."