BBC NEWS | Technology | Net censorship spreads worldwide — This is a growing trend that appears unstoppable. This blog has been censored a number of times in various US corporations and via censorship mechanisms. It’s not just about repressive regimes.
Repressive regimes are taking full advantage of the net’s ability to censor and stifle reform and debate, reveals a report.
Written by the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) pressure group the report highlights the ways governments threaten the freedom of the press.
The report has a section dedicated to the internet and the growing roster of nations censoring online life.
This censorship is practised on every continent on Earth, said the report
Living in a country with serious net censorship (we can’t see Flikr, MySpace for insance. ) it occurs to me that we really need a New Net.
The new net needs a doubleblind IP system where the people who own the switches and wires have no idea who is communicating with whom.
That’s the security weakness of the current Internet… my ISP knows exactly who I am communicating with and then can make my surfing decisions for me.
This hole needs to be fixed and seems like it would not be hard to do.
paul
The article you mention appeared back in January. JD did not post an opinion. The article was posted by SN.
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=4009#comments
Maybe wrong poster….but the point is still valid.
The applause was and is deafening for the big internet providers standing up to their own goverment, but not to the dictators and theocrats. Maybe something to do with firing squads, and head choppers as well as economics.
In a world where censorship is reaching out to the remotest of locations, it seems that democracy has now gone the way of the dinosaur…. We attack countries for suppressing the will of the minority or majority and verbally attack countries who do not understand the concept of human rights; we have become the Judge Dread of the world. Standing up for justice and smacking Evil in the face. Or are we becoming the very Evil we fight.
At the age of 14 I was asked to give an oral and written report on a book I had read. I had just completed a book by Vonnegut so I did my report on that. My instructor promptly informed me that Vonnegut was not a “recognized” author and I received an F for the assignment. Although I might have classified Kurt as crazed or at least flamboyant, the book was found in the school library so one might argue the point. So this begs the questions, do we truly live in a free society where the First Amendment rules and there is truly freedom of speech? Or, do we live in a society that likes to say we have this freedom while burning Vonnegut and Theroux or anyone who disagrees with the status quoi is a traitor. Am I a recognized author if I sell one book, two, a thousand, and ten thousand? Someone please tell me when I am recognized….anyway I ultimately won with a first amendment speech and a study of the number of books Vonnegut sold. That was in 1984, and today we seem to be falling into the same trap. I consider John to be a recognized author, and even consider Leo to be one (this is open to argument of course), but at the end of the day, if you are sharing information it is a good thing, if you are censoring information it is bad thing.
The UberGeek