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The Internet Your Rights Online

Geographical Borders on the Web 119

Posted by michael from the it's-all-fun-and-games-until-the-lawyers-come-along dept.
Boise3981 writes "An article for the New York Times is talking about geolocation software, originally meant to deliver localized ads to web surfers, being used by some countries (and possibly even states or cities) to enforce local decency laws on the internet. In one instance a judge in France decided to fine Yahoo! $13,000 a day for displaying nazi memorabilia on its auction website. The article talks about web sites dumbing down their content to the lowest common denominator, lest they break some obscure decency law in some tiny village somewhere. fun."
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Geographical Borders on the Web More

Geographical Borders on the Web

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  • Re:SHE were blind? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is why I don't post comments much... but yes, I am female. Now go masturbate in your bathroom while I go and have sex with basically anyone I want to.

  • Other downside to geo-sensitive content (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The other problem, besides official censorship, is the "region coding" of the Web by corporations.

    This is particularly thorny for news content. One of the positives of the Web is that you can see what journalists in France, Russia, or Singapore think about issues. Is that content going to be walled-off when Murdoch or CNN own the media everywhere?

    Even now CNN's site will ask you whether you want CNN USA or CNN Europe, and save that info in a cookie. I can easily envision a corporation publishing one editorial slant for the North American edition, another for the Europe edition, and still another for the Middle East edition.

    Then you'll only be able to see the version that appeals to your prejudices.

  • This is backwards. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These governments should require (via legislation) that users will provide their approximate locale with a HTTP header. Then, the web provider will be able to selectively feed content based on that.

    The beauty of this design (user-requirement rather than server) is that the users can just thumb their noses at it and not use it or (better yet) put in bogus data.

    I bet it'll come down to this, since ultimately you can't really make demands of foreign companies (France, relative to Yahoo) but you CAN make demands of your own citizens!

  • Bad idea. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great. So now I'll see ad's that say:

    "See hot, sexy women...and get fired from (insert your company here)"

  • It sure will happen (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You know, I can get in a car, find an empty highway, and drive 100+ MPH. In fact I've done this more than once and never been stopped for it.

    People send out millions of illegal spams every day using a variety of technical measures. Most of the spammers don't get caught. Do you think we should repeal the laws against spam?

    Yeah, so maybe one German telecommuter working fo r a U.S. company can buy one illegal Nazi uniform and somehow arrange to for delivery. Big fucking deal.

    A law doesn't have to be perfectly enforceable in order to affect your life. If it knocks the profitability out of the nexus of illegal activity, and if it stops a lot of individual people from participating in the activity, then the amount of that activity will decrease. Think of it as Le Chatelier's principle applied to social reactions.

    Note that I am not expressing an opinion on whether such laws are good in a moral sense. I'm simply rebutting your value-neutral "it's not workable" argument.

    As far as governments and jurisdiction -- governments like to extend jurisdiction to every human activity where some people's actions affect other people. This definitely includes the Internet. I expect to see government-issued Internet Licenses in France and Germany by the end of 2005, and in the USA soon after.

  • The only way to defeat Geo Tracking (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    To the first approximation privacy/anonymity services or dynamic IP dialup solutions can defeat Geographical Tracking.

    To the second approximation most will fail because a simple subpoena/warrant/etc can force any privacy/anonymity company to turn such information over no matter how complex the technology. Even dial-up ISPs or public Internet access points with dynamically assigned IPs (Kinko's, libraries, etc) can usually track dial-ups or at least narrow down the search to specific individuals in situations that demand it. As this geo tracking technology matures it will become easier and easier to identify you so don't be fooled into a false sense of anonymity.

    The best way to protect yourself is to use a solution that (1) has effective masking technology, (2) collects no personal information, and (3) has a strong privacy statement and then (4) to use a combination of these.

    The best solution possible now is to wear sunglasses, go to Kinko's [slashdot.org], pay with cash and fire up any browser pointed to SafeWeb.com [slashdot.org] via a Triangle Boy relay so no one could track you at all. SafeWeb is free, has no registration or login, records no content and destroys all logs while Kinko's has no way to track you either under such conditions. (Once they get rid of cash it will be very difficult to remain anonymous) There is no information either Kinko's or SafeWeb could turn over even if they wanted to or were legally compelled to do so.

    Can anyone think of any better solution? Any privacy/anonymity service with a registration, login, download, etc can be eventually be linked back up and tracked down no matter how complex. Any Internet connection, even dynamically assigned IP networks, could be linked up to your phone number/login/account as well.

    Against this, assume that everyone is tracking you online unless they explicitedly say they aren't (even then be suspicious and factor in legal coercion). Even privacy services Anonymizer.com [anonymizer.com] state in their privacy policy that they share your private surfing data with invasive 3rd party advertisers like flycast.

    Bottom line: The less anyone knows about you the less able they are to abuse your privacy.

  • What I don't understand is why more businesses don't just outright ignore courts that have no juristiction over them issuing rulings that are rediculous on their face for anyone with even a cursury knowledge of how the internet is pieced together.

    Um, France does have jurisdiction, because Yahoo has an office in France. If Yahoo ignored the French government, the French government could have Yahoo employees in France arrested, their equipment impounded, and other nasty things. So, it's in Yahoo's best interests to comply with the law.

    --

  • Check out Resonate's Global Dispatch which is a WAN-based traffic management that provides consistent, reliable availability and performance across multiple sites and geographies.
  • The URL to Global Dispatch [resonate.com] would be nice... ;>
  • The USA (And maybe Canada and Australia) are about the only countries in the world where there has not at some point been some state policy of persicuting, killing or expelling the Jews. There as far as I know are no countries in Europe that have ever had a significant Jewish population that has not at some point expelled or seriously persicuted the Jews. (Note some of these occured in countries before they assumed their modern names or borders)
  • I said I would love to see them go away, not I think they should be censored. I admit they have every legal right to do what they do. But Freedom of speach also allows me to say that I think they are positivly vile and I would like nothing better that to see the Neo-Nazi's crawl back under whatever rock they came from and never be seen again. Ok its not going to happen but I can dream.
  • The point is that since Yahoo had a branch in France the French court could hold the whole company acountable. Sure they could have closed down the whole France operation but was it worth it? Probably not. They would much rather have a .fr and a .de than have nazi memorabilia for sale. (I would assume I don't work for them)
  • There has been descrimination here but not on anything close to the scale of what was seen in Europe. Most US universities did accept Jews, just only a few each year. The school I went to <A HREF="www.brandeis.edu">Brandeis</A> was founded to be a school that Jews could go to without a quoata. Richard Fienman went to MIT because he could not get into Columbia, same reason.

    On the other hand the US is one of very few places in the world where I don't fear a mob comming down the street yelling "Kill the Jews"
  • Well if the company had operations in Saudi Arabia the Saudi government could try to fine the company or make their life hard. I don't know of any cases where they have done that.

    I don't know that they French should be able to do what they did to yahoo, except to say that Yahoo desided that it was not worth it to fight it. Remeber also that the first amendment does not give you the right to sell stuff on a private companies web site. Yahoo has every right to set guidelines for what they will and will not accept for auction on their web site.
  • The French court had the ability to regulate Yahoo because Yahoo has a branch that operates in France. If Yahoo was operating only in the USA the French court could not have done much. You will note that the French (or German) courts have not shut down a large number of Neo-Nazi sites running in the USA. (Though I would love to see them go) Its because the people who run them have no pressense in France or Germany that can be made subject to a local court.

    I used to work for DHL (The shipping company) they have a big book that comes out every so often that explains what you can and can not import into each country that they deliver too, over 200.

    The Upshot of this is that Slashdot only has to follow laws of the USA and Whichever states (Mi, CA and MA maybe others) that they have offices or staff in. A French court would have a very hard time making a ruling stick agenst Slashdot.

    Disclaimer IANAL.
  • It seems worthwhile to point out the often-neglected RFC1876 [ckdhr.com] which is an established method of using DNS LOC records to accomplish this sort of thing on a voluntary basis.

    The DNS LOC (location) resource record is designed to make this data available. Using the distributed nature of the Domain Name System, it allows individual organizations to manage their own latitude and longitude information (including the use of deliberately imprecise data when needed for security reasons), while making the data available to all who need it without requiring a single point of failure hosting a large database of location information.

    RFC1876 has been long-championed by these guys [ckdhr.com]. If you're a DNS admin, please consider joining the movement! It's fun and useful to list your LOC [ckdhr.com].

  • This is not an example of a condition mistreated as an act. Saying something IS an act. Words can do as much harm as physical aggression can.

    Under certain circumstances. But laws prohibiting speech invariably precipitate governments that perpetrate the most appalling acts of physical aggression. Like Nazi Germany, for example, a state that employed the same kind of oleaginous excuses for political suppression -- and that is the correct term -- that you appear to be advocating here.

    Playing free and easy with the tradeoff between freedom and security is another common practice of politically oppressive states. The flaw with the argument is that selling freedom in the name of security diminishes minor violence in the short term while ensuring major violence, i.e., war, in the long term. The road to despotism always begins with regulation in the name of security and always ends in war: civil, foreign, or both.

    Isolated acts of violence by officially tolerated skinheads are a fair price to pay to avoid millions of deaths in a war against the sort of government we would create if we chose to suppress them. We cannot afford to yield to the temptation to become what we hate.

    And please don't think I take "isolated acts of violence" lightly. I've been beaten to within an inch of my life more than once by skinheads. But it is for precisely this reason that I don't want to give the national government, which is far better organized and armed, carte blanche to employ violence to suppress dissent.

    --

  • Re:Its a matter of where you have a location (Score:4)

    by Angst Badger ( 8636 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @01:18PM (#358794)
    You will note that the French (or German) courts have not shut down a large number of Neo-Nazi sites running in the USA. (Though I would love to see them go)

    I would not. Not because I like Nazis, but because it's easier to keep track of them when they're out in the open, and because shutting them down would only serve to give them credibility, additional propaganda ("The Jews in the government are trying to suppress our message!"), and power.

    Freedom of speech either exists or it does not. As soon as you start laying conditions on it, it ceases to be freedom and instead becomes permission, which is something else entirely. Your freedom to debunk Nazism as a pack of vicious lies depends on their freedom to spew those lies.

    Faith in the power of truth to win out in open debate is a hard thing. But in the long run, the only thing that can stop truth is the absence of that debate. Countries like Germany, France, and Australia are only laying the groundwork for future resurgences of the very things they are, no doubt with the best of intentions, trying to suppress.

    --

  • Why doesn't anybody ever design software for the Greatest Common Denominator instead of always going for the LCD ?
  • There's no way even half of the western countries could agree on single legislation that would cover the net. Remember US-EU banana wars? Let alone French an German Nazi and hate-speech laws. Or French and US cryptography laws. Or UK cryptography laws, for the matter. All the while leaving aside the rest of the world, which comprises of many more countries than the EU + North America together.

    No, internet can't be covered by a single jurisdiction. We'll just have to continue living and understand that local jurisdiction covers whoever has presence or does business in the particular country or state.

    And what's the actual problem with that? You probably have grown used to local laws already? Just act as usual. And if You want to drive faster than the speed limit, order illegal materials from abroad (hoping that it'll not be opened in the customs post office), lie to police officers, and whatever, You already know how to circumvent local laws. Internet may make that easier in some cases, but most every real transaction relates to physical goods that have to be transported and thus risk being caught at the border.

    Now, I'd like to note that even the western world consists of many countries with different views towards the net. Not all are as close-minded as the French, USA, UK, Germany, and Italy. Checking that list You might also note that they are the bigger ones, ones with bad memories from WWII and WWI, ones that have been world powers at one time or another, and haven't gotten over it yet. Don't expect them to be liberal until 2-3 generations down the road.
  • Say a pornographer places a billboard of a beautiful naked woman near the border between his agnostic nation with its liberal sex and speech laws, and a fanatically religious one with censorious blue laws and no freedom of speech. But he covers it up during the day and uncovers it only on cloudy, moonless nights.

    Then say a person from the tyrannical nation starts showing up at the border on those nights with a flashlight and a pair of binoculars.

    (setting: a Sheriff's office, whose occupant is busy whittling a piece of wood, his feet comfortably lodged besides the telephone)

    [PHONE RINGS] - Sherrif picks it up

    - Sheriff's office... Yes... Yes miss Smedley, how are you... What? Oh, the kids are swimming naked in Sawmill Creek besides your house? Fine, I'll go tell them. That's fine. Thank-you.

    * * *

    (One day later, same setting, same phone, same sheriff, piece of wood has dwindled to a lone splinter).

    [PHONE RINGS] - Sherrif picks it up

    - Sheriffs's office... Hi, miss Smedl... Hey, hey, cool off!!! What? ... You say that the kids are *STILL* swimming naked in the creek? But that's impossible: they promised me yesterday that they would move a quarter of a mile downstreams. ... That's what they did? Well, you should not see them anymore! What? ... With binoculars you can see them?

    --

  • The US has been accused of a variety of antisemitic activities in history -- including the rejection of a boat load of Jewish refugees during the Nazi era, and a variety of industrial relationships with the Nazis that could be taken as condoning if not aiding the rise of the Nazis.
    Plenty of american universities did not accept jews; the same went for clubs and other social organizations. Mc-Gill University in Canada, as well as Queens University in Toronto had, until the 1960's, very strict quotas towards the jews. And plenty of canadian clubs (in the british sense) has "NO JEWS" signs in plain view on their doors.

    Isaac Asimov was not accepted in Columbia University, even though he had perfect grades. It was simply because he was a jew.

    --

  • Go there, and enter *FALSE INFORMATION*.

    Been there, done that.

    --

  • Why is it that every problem requires an incredibly complicated technical solution to overcome? It seems to me that problems that arise through legal silliness can often be solved the same way.
    It need not. A simple bit of redesign oughta do the job:

    Scrap countryless TLD. No more .COMs, no more .ORGs, whatever.

    FORCE everybody to register under their country TLD.

    Patch NAMEd so it returns AT LEAST the Fully-Qualified-Hostname of the closest router

    Extract country(/area) suffix(es).


    Voilà!

    --

  • So what if [...] and there is a Frenchnet and an entirely separate Internet?
    For more than 20 years, there has been such a thing; a "separate" (well, it was there FIRST) Joe Q. PUBLIC usable Frenchnet, which was squarely aimed to the public, and the terminals were given free of charge by the State, to boot: the MINITEL [minitel.fr].

    --

  • MAD had the right of it. Northview Middle School here in Indy was brow-beaten into lowering the passing grade to 40% by parents of children who were flunking because they
    1. A: Were not studying, doing their work, paying attention, etc.
    1. B: Or were just stupid.
    They didn't want their kids held back, or feel humiliated, so they forced the school to lower their standards. Fehh.

    --
  • IIRC neotrace uses DNS loc entries... (Yes, just as forgeable)
  • Right now, I'm in London using a UK ISP but if I go to www.google.com, it has a redirector that thinks that I am in Germany and so it force redirects me to www.google.de.

    They admit they have problems with their redirection based on IP but you know what their answer is? Turn on cookies and set my preferences to English!

    Wouldn't it make more sense to remove the force redirects instead of showing a German web page to people from 212.137.x.x who probably don't speak German?

  • Given France's desire to speak only French, why are they upset about something that appears in English? :-)
  • before you mangle it repeatedly in one post.
    You've made yourself look ridiculous.
  • If you are a US citizen with a hokey little homepage and you get a 'cease and desist' letter from Zambia because some content of your homepage violates Zambian law how exactly are the Zambians going to come over and use their guns to enforce their law on you?

    You took my statement out of context by ignoring the qualifier: 'courts outside their juristiction'
  • Perhaps you should encourge the slashdot folks to add a spellchecker to the posting system.
    Until then, lern to deel wit my afful speling.

    -- Greg

  • Geo-location an impossible task. (Score:5)

    by Greg@RageNet ( 39860 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @12:11PM (#358809) Homepage
    Geolocation software has always been iffy at best; IP addresses are doled out based on network provider, rather then geo-location. The biggest nightmare of all for someone trying to solve this problem is AOL; who uses internal addresses for clients while all requests go through proxies. The biggest internet provider in the world and there's no way to geo-locate it's users.

    Geo-location is nearly useful for technical uses; it's less than useless for the enforcement of juristictional directives.

    What I don't understand is why more businesses don't just outright ignore courts that have no juristiction over them issuing rulings that are rediculous on their face for anyone with even a cursury knowledge of how the internet is pieced together. I think bowing to rediculous demands now is just going to result in the demands made becoming more outlandish and the application of these demands to smaller organizations who cannot afford to fight them will become more widespread.

    -- Greg
  • Let's face it, people who say "your opinion doesn't count" are facists and that is exactly what decency laws say.
  • Their opinions most definitely count and that's why we should be so afraid of them.
  • There's a certain stupidity in your comment that is exactly the stupidity which is present in my sig line. Think about it. What do you think an average is?! Exactly 50% of people are below average intelligence and exactly 50% are above it. I would like to think that you are below it but obviously I am wrong.
  • First of all, IIRC, the ruling was not just against yahoo.fr, which had agreed to stop accepting Nazi paraphernalia, but against yahoo.com, which is US based.

    That said, I'd love to see a ruling against a french porn site (and you know there have to be a ton of these) by a Saudi complaintant in a Saudi court. Maybe then Monsieur Gomez would get the point.
  • Yes, I agree that yahoo.fr was subject to French law, but yahoo.com should not be.
  • Besides, auctions on yahoo.fr banned Nazi items. The ruling was against yahoo.com, a US website, operating in the US, violating no US laws.
  • But the point is that yahoo.fr did not accept nazi memorabilia for auction. The French court ruled against yahoo.com, which was a US site based in the US, breaking no US law.

    It's an attempt to enforce French sovereignty over the US. How would the French like it if a Saudi court ruled that a something.something.fr site had to be shut down because it was showing the unclothed female body, in violation of Saudi law?
  • I would not. Not because I like Nazis, but because it's easier to keep track of them when they're out in the open, and because shutting them down would only serve to give them credibility, additional propaganda ("The Jews in the government are trying to suppress our message!"), and power.

    I say we have to draw the line if the sites actually advocate doing some harm or evil, for example, telling their visitors that the Jews must all be sent to concentration camps and gassed to death, or condoning harm or violence against anyone in any other way, in which case, it would not be a free speech matter, but a matter of soliciting or conspiring to evil activity, much like telling a hitman to kill your ex-wife or something to that effect.

  • I say we have to draw the line if the sites actually advocate doing some harm or evil, for example, telling their visitors that the Jews must all be sent to concentration camps and gassed to death, or condoning harm or violence against anyone in any other way, in which case, it would not be a free speech matter, but a matter of soliciting or conspiring to evil activity, much like telling a hitman to kill your ex-wife or something to that effect.

    Of course, there is also the matter of defamation and the damage that comes with it. Imagine wrongfully being accused of being the town child molestor. Kind of like the Jews being accused of making up the story about the holocaust to swindle money from the Germans and Swiss Bank accounts.

  • I would not. Not because I like Nazis, but because it's easier to keep track of them when they're out in the open, and because shutting them down would only serve to give them credibility, additional propaganda ("The Jews in the government are trying to suppress our message!"), and power.

    Do you know of any countries in the western world, other than the United States, that do not have laws that prohibit certain kinds of political speech regarding Jews?

  • Do you know of any countries in the western world that have not participated in, condoned, or acquiesed in atrocities against jews, other than the United States?

    The US has been accused of a variety of antisemitic activities in history -- including the rejection of a boat load of Jewish refugees during the Nazi era, and a variety of industrial relationships with the Nazis that could be taken as condoning if not aiding the rise of the Nazis.

    And this is not off-topic -- the fact is that there is more international impact on free flow of information due to concern about a repeat of Naziism than there is about child pornography.

  • The USA (And maybe Canada and Australia) are about the only countries in the world where there has not at some point been some state policy of persicuting, killing or expelling the Jews.

    Is that why USA, Canada and Australia have enjoyed the most energetic Jewish lobbying to liberalize their immigration laws, in spite of the desires of the body politic of their host society [csulb.edu]?

  • ...whether you implement boundry codes through the webbrower, operating system, or even in the computer's hardware (not bloody likely), the code will have to be stored clientside, and if that's the case, it's gonna be suseptable to tampering. If the websever has to check the client to see where it's located, then the system is instantly faulty because it can be tampered with. Please, correct me if I'm wrong here.

  • I can understand why people might not want their physical location tracked. But as many have already pointed out, if you don't want your location identified, there are lots of ways to hide it.

    Let's not let paranoia blind us to the fact that in some situations this could be useful. Forget about the restaraunt trying to beep your cell-phone. Turn the tables, and put yourself in control. Wouldn't you perhaps like to know if there is any good chinese food nearby? Perhaps you'd like to find your stolen laptop? There are many types of queries I can think of in which location would be a useful attribute.

    How would this be done? Dunno. What does Akamai do to locate the nearest caching server? Perhaps that technology would be relevant. (Probably also patented).

    There's no reason to fear this type of technology. The only thing to fear would be the *imposition* of this type of technology.
  • RealMapping, Quova, BorderControl, EdgeScape. That's what the article seems to be saying. If your business does something that illegal somewhere - and what isn't - then you'll have to subscribe to a geolocator.

    But I don't get Yahoo doesn't just filter on the .fr domain.

  • Why is it that every problem requires an incredibly complicated technical solution to overcome? It seems to me that problems that arise through legal silliness can often be solved the same way.

    For the French courts to arbitrarily start talking about "localization software" is just a symptom of the over-teching people always seem to fall victim to these days. If they want to bar French citizens from being able to view these materials, and the problem is that they don't know which users are French, then the answer is incredibly simple: add a verification screen to the account creation process, requiring that users of French origin identify themselves, and agree (terms of use) not to attempt to view anything having to do with Nazi origin. Microsoft and Netscape had to do the same thing for years with regard to their browsers and 128-bit encryption, due to the lame US laws regarding encryption export. They simply "asked" downloaders to verify and agree not to do that which they shouldn't do. From a legal perspective, that's all that was required. Surely if French users are required to agree to a similar statement when they first create their accounts, then it is the user, not Yahoo!, who becomes legally responsible at that moment. If the user then deliberately violates Yahoo!'s Terms of Use agreement, Yahoo! can simply claim that they were the ones who were violated. And if catching new users isn't sufficient, cause a one-time agreement screen to pop up whenever any existing user accounts are next accessed as well.

    Given the DCMA, I'd say that French users accessing Nazi materials after clicking through such an "access control" page would be violating *US* law - so at that point the French courts could bite Yahoo!'s collective bums. Figuratively speaking.

  • I think it includes "forcibly shutting up people you disagree with and/or think may be 'dangerous'". That is exactly what you are advocating.
  • So their opinion doesn't count?
  • Y'know, there's damned little on the web that's really become essential. Getting information from vendor sites is an INCREDIBLE boon to us all, but that's not likely to be banned or severly regulated any time soon--it's non-dangerous information first, and advertising second.

    As for all that other stuff, who really CARES if you can't buy Nazi memorabilia in France from a website? If you really desperately want it, you'll find a way to get it.

    I know, I know--Freedom! Freedom of information, freedom from artificial (or even natural) boundaries, freedom from government intervention, etc. But at the end of the day, when the writing is on the wall, how much will this affect your crucial day-to-day activities? (emphasis on crucial)

    As a final aside, I'm quite sure that the internet as a whole will survive and thwart any attempts at geolocation, although it may mean a revitalisation of the glory days of Usenet.

  • Anytime you call an 800 number, your caller ID is available

    Well, not really caller ID. It's called ANI, I think. It is unrelated to caller ID. It has to do with billing. The owner of an 800 number has the right to know who is calling since they pay the bill.
  • While this might make me worry about goverments shutting down gnutella or freeweb users, the fact is that several ways to change your IP address exist. I could use a proxy server, do some dns spoofing, or just let the anonymizer do the work for me...
  • Anytime you call an 800 number, your caller ID is available for display. It doesn't matter if you have it blocked or not.
  • subscriber id: censorship4 password: sucks
  • Subscriber ID: censorship4
    Password: sucks

    [the preview button is my friend... the preview button is my friend...]
  • It was only one town off for me.
  • I don't think you are looking at this problem as you should. That is, with an eye to the long term. Because geolocation is not possible now, does not mean we will be free from it in 10 or 20 years. Don't forget that caller ID for phone calls wasn't possible just a couple of decades ago.
  • There is a great book that chronicles the years when radio became heavily regulated called Telecommunications, Mass Media, and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935, [oup-usa.org] by Robert McChesney. If you are concerned that the internet may be going to hell in a hand basket, this book is for you.

    Basically, the book illustrates how those in power can shape the uses of new technologies to meet their needs. In 10 maybe 20 years the rules for using the internet will be much different. And if history repeats istelf those rules won't be in our favor.

  • ...The government has hardly any control over the internet. This is the worst position for them, so they have to figure out a way to localize parts of the internet so they have better control.
    How do they do it? Make it appease corporate america. Local marketing... good idea, right? Good idea for the gov't to get what they want. Marketing seems to drive the country now-a-days. Its sad. I can see the positive of marketing: a great product no one knows about but can all benefit from. But marketing is rarely used this way. Corporate america sees marketing as a quick way to make a buck.
    Localization is the quickest way to loose all freedom of the net. Sure it'll kill the nastiness like kiddy pron, but it will kill any idea of stuff like a napster in china idea.

    --

  • There are some cases where the host of a site must be liable for it's content.

    Kinda scary... if someone breaks into my (hypothetical) Windoze box and leaves stuff there, am I liable for it? Guilty until proven innocent... worse, what if they encrypted it? How can someone tell whether I'm hiding it or I just don't know it?

  • I think that most of the world would prefer to pretend that the French don't exist.

  • WOW!!!

    You mean there is disagreement, perhaps even non-conformity on the web! I thought, from reading posts here and in other places, that all forms for disagreement, nonconforminity, honest misunderstanding, and other such evil had all been eradicated from the 'net, and only the trolls remained prevent perfect concessus! :P

    Gee, nice to hear, actually....

  • Note to the clueless.

    "ptuogh" is one of several ways to spell the sound of spitting at something in disgust.

    Have a nice day.

  • Destroy the Web. (Score:5)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @12:24PM (#358842) Journal
    The only solution for all these folks, is to cut the wire between them selves and the rest of the world.

    The list of all the things people are offended by goes on like you would not believe.

    But they want all of the benefits of world wide connectivity.

    Heck you see it even here on Slash all of the time. Someone takes an unpopular stand, say, heaven forbid pro Microsoft, and watch the flame throwers come out of the wall.

    But tolerance is what makes the web. If you cannot be tolerant here, is there any hope out there?

    Or can only the party line have access?

    The web is segmenting bit and piece as the technology is developed to separate everyone from everyone else based on "the social norm" and the community standard. The final outcome is this, to destroy the web, for the public good, inorder to save what is the best of the web, for the greedy few.

    [ptuogh]

  • Hey, I said that this ethnic group were spawn of the devil, but prove I assaulted members of that ethnic group.

    This is not an example of a condition mistreated as an act. Saying something IS an act. Words can do as much harm as physical aggression can.

    In theory, laws are created for the benefit of society as a whole or to protect those who can not defend themselves sufficiently against attacks which the majority considers "immoral". Laws are agreements on limiting everyone's freedom in exchange for something else: security and hopefully better "overall throughput" (resulting in a better situation for the individual).

    Now that was easy. The hard part is deciding how to limit freedom to gain some advantage (over a no-limits society). Two problems with this are obvious: First, you can hardly predict the results of adding a rule to the system, just like you can't predict the outcome of not adding the rule. Second, it is impossible to get the full picture on how much the sacrifice and the (intended) gain mean to "the public".

    Because these two problems can't be solved, there are several approaches to making good decisions nevertheless. Some say, you can't predict anything and no one knows if it's even worth it, so don't bother and let evolution have her way. They choose anarchy. Then there are others who take the opposite approach. They establish morals, try to make educated guesses about near future developments and base the rules on this "best effort" information. These tend to overregulate sooner or later. But there really is no way to rationally decide which approach is best and thus in the end *evolution has her way* on this higher abstraction level.

    The problem with banning Nazi sites is that the outcome of such laws are extremely hard to predict. Is the effect that Nazi propaganda has on uneducated or unexperienced people (kids come to mind) more or less important than the effect of making Nazi ideology more interesting (or even believable) by pushing it underground? People naturally disagree on this topic and depending on your historical background you fear one effect more than the other.

  • I don't advocate political suppression. You say that selling freedom in the name of security invariably leads to major violence in the long term. I doubt that it's the fact of freedom being limited which leads to aggression. It's lost balance which leads to aggression. And that is lost balance either in the freedom-security tradeoff or in some other way. The task is to keep the balance. While I do acknowledge that once you start limiting freedom it's easy to leave the path of balance in the direction of overregulation, I think that on the other hand you have already left the path of balance in the direction of underregulation if you don't make any freedom-security tradeoff at all.

    There is a difference between banning Nazi memorabilia and banning web sites which openly demand aggression against individuals or groups.

    Your distrust against national government is well respected, but I don't trust society in its current state much more. After all, it could not avoid being governed. Balance is not easy to keep and it's a process, not a state.

  • Yes, the definition includes "forcibly shutting up people". But no, "you disagree with and/or think may be 'dangerous'" is not part of it. Instead I require for the act to be political suppression that people are shut up "with the intention of strengthening your own position".

    Suppose I took a picture of you, modified it to show you interviewing for a job at a competing company/having sex with kid/committing some other crime. Then I'd show this picture to your boss/around/etc. You'd probably have a hard time explaining this and not few would fail to correct their image (suppose I were really good at creating fake pictures). Now if you ask for such behaviour to be illegal you are asking for the same kind of "political suppression" which I am advocating. I am all for free speech, but people should not be allowed to hurt others on purpose, neither by physical action nor with words.

  • Heh. It nailed me dead on.

    I told it it was wrong. Guess I was in a "fight the Man" mood this afternoon.

  • Damn, it go me DEAD ON too.

    Of course, I'm coming from a huge section of IPs associated with a university, so I bet that makes it easier.

  • dost this mean mine Amish brethen shalt learn of mine foot fetish?

  • If it works like Neo Trace [neoworx.com] (shows a map of server locations), it pretty much just does a whois on your domain and says "hey, this is in france". So of course it could be easily faked. Do they have a better way?
  • Oddly enough, that kind of thing is also happening at my University.

    The students of CompSys Engineering have seen several of their classes changed into easier ones. F'rinstance, they no longer take Computing Algorythms (sp?), or Differential Equations. Instead, they take such courses as Culture in Northern Mexico (OK, so that's where we live) and Web Design (final proyect: do your own web page).

    Also, they stopped taking Assembler and started taking Windows NT. Oh, and they replaced Lineal Algebra with Ethics in the Workplace. I took that class, and it was basically "don't do bad things to your employers or else you could get caught and get fired and GO TO HELL AND MEET SATAN!!!". Or close enough.

    The result? They breeze through school, graduate, and get their a$$e$ kicked HARD when they join the real world.
  • The article talks about web sites dumbing down their content to the lowest common denominator, lest they break some obscure decency law in some tiny village somewhere. I havent read the article yet (and I'm not planning on registering to the NY Times, thank you), but...

    I recall something I read once on Mad Magazine: the schools are lowering their education standards in order to help the underachievers, and thus turning whole generations into underachievers.

    Give a troll a comment, and he'll flame and bitch for a day. Give a troll a dumbed-down Internet, and he'll flame and bitch for life.
  • Bush's take on this is melting his face?
  • That would defeat this software.

    And it would, but do you think that the Moral Guardians Of The Universe(tm) will stop there? Pretty soon every web user will have a code in their browser indentifying their country, with strong crypto to back it up. And anyone without this code would be denied access by default. DMCA-like laws would make reverse-engineering the browser illegal. Come up with a way around this, and the browser makers will just one-up you. It's an impossible-to-win battle, unless it never starts (ie: if this geolocation never becomes widespread).

  • "Dumbing down" may be a bit snobbish, but 100% true. Here's why:

    1. The good ol' government passes a law, basically enforcing geolocation as a means to uphold local "obscenity" standards.
    2. The website hosters try this new-fangled software, find out that it doesn't work worth a <censored in this geographic area>, and give up.
    3. But the stupid law lives on, forcing webmasters to meet the most conservitive standards possible.
    4. As a result, everything that might be obscene is pulled, for fear that someone in a conservitive town might access it.
    5. The web solidifies into a ball of solid <censored in this geographic area>.
    Almost anything thought-provoking, interesting, or insightful will be offensive to someone. What remains after all of that is thrown out is utter crap and fluff.
  • The article talks about web sites dumbing down their content to the lowest common denominator, lest they break some obscure decency law in some tiny village somewhere.

    Far be it from me to try to impose any sort of logic on a Your Rights Online story, but the ability to deliver geographically specific content frees sites from having to meet any common denominator. It's providing the same content to everyone that creates the need to make that material acceptable everywhere.

    Incidentally, the use of the term "dumbing down" to mean "recognizing the perspectives of people other than doctrinaire Slashbots" is a telling bit of snobbery. Also incidentally, if anything the article states that sites are not changing anything in response to laws in other jurisdictions.

    Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

  • Personal attack! Hah! If my plan was in action, you'd be banned from Slashdot for an entire week!

    Just pray that CmdrTaco or Hemos don't get wind of this idea. Pray, because that's all that you can do.

  • ...how about having the IP address of every disgusting troll banned for two weeks from Slashdot? It'd sure increase the morality of the comments, not to mention getting rid of all those morons.

    (Anti-Linus, Anti-RMS, ASCII art, goatse, L337 5P34K, personal attacks, pr0n links, repetitive posts [same post made over a range of time, be it short or long; e.g., Bob Abooey], and stupidity in action are all examples of "disgusting trolls")

    P.S.: To those moderators stabbing for the moderation box looking for "Offtopic", go use your moderation points elsewhere. Slashdot itself is always the topic, especially when the principles of a story can be applied to improve the site. Go find those trolls and moderate them down. Or better yet, find an insightful or interesting post, and moderate it up.

  • They're not. But most people are scared by such things and will take down their site if threatened. Who wants to actually read laws when a big scarw lawyer/company/country tells you what to do? Not most people...

  • I dont know what's scarier looking, that stamp with Hitlers profile on it, or that Dr. Cerf guy in the picture right above it... yikes!
    "Me Ted"
  • How are they gonna track who owns the domain anyway? It's not like they could type
    "whois domainname.com" anyway


  • This stuff [digitalisland.net] claims to soon be able to get down to the zip code. AOL is cooperating.
  • I know it's not about Nazis, but about whether a country should block access to certain materials based on their laws. However, it's nonsensical for the same reason. If you try to shelter someone from a hot topic through ignorance, you only end up hurting those you try to protect. If we talked to our kids more about adult stuff on the web, they'd be more protected from it.

    Exactly. The censorship approach is basically the cultural equivalent of "security through obscurity." Preventing the next Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot isn't just a matter of pointing to the genocides they carried out once they were given power, because that doesn't define them early enough in their development to stop them from doing harm. By the time you can say "Look, he's rounding up people and sending them to death camps, he's another Hitler!", it's too late. You need to be able to point to the similarity of their underlying ideas, early on. You need to be able to say, "Look, he's saying just what Hitler said in 'Mein Kampf.'" How are you supposed to be able to do that, when you or the rest of the population aren't familiar with it?

    "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow", that's the phrase, right? These writings should have everyone's eyes on them, for precisely that reason.


  • That way, people in France couldn't look at the Nazi material.
    What do they even care anyways? WW2 is over!
  • It will keep corporations away from 'serious' websites.

    Instead of people who are whoring their sites to the first corporation who comes along with a nice big check, individuals will start to think a little bit before they hand over their content to a big site network like IGN or *gasp* V.A. Linux.

    Despite the fact that not all of these networks are evil, I would rather see people keep their sites to themselves and free of corporate content and control. If there are fewer Excite's and Go Networks out there, it can only benefit the rest of us.

    http://www.furinkan.net [furinkan.net] - Never had ads, never will.
  • Go here [networldmap.com] and find out for yourself how useful geographic addressing through IP address can be.

    I first saw this site about a year ago, and at that time gave it my address and geographic location to put into its database, thinking, "hey, this is kinda nifty."

    This afternoon, it took one look at my current IP (probably not the same one I gave it last time, but it shouldn't be vastly different), and immediately gave me three incorrect guesses as to where I'm physically located. None was within 300 miles, but they were all within the continental United States, so I guess the site should get some credit.

    Anyone else note that ./ has been ./ed today?

  • One point, what if I run from a proxy in another country? That would defeat this software.
    Use the KISS method, it works!




    Plug for my website:
    www.techsplanet.com/wlan.htm [techsplanet.com]
    wLAN Products and more!
  • the article states that sites are not changing anything

    The article clearly stated that Yahoo has stopped selling Nazi memorabilia *everywhere*, just to appease the French.

    This is just the thin end of the wedge. How about CNN filtering their news if they think your IP address is in China? I wonder what the people who risk their lives running proxy servers in China would think of that.
    --
    #include "stdio.h"
  • You are exactly right, but good luck convincing the masses. A few examples: We don't want our kids having sex, so we won't teach sex education classes. So instead of getting real answers, our kids get often-incorrect information passed to them from other kids. We don't want our kids looking at porn, so we censor it as much as we can, making it even more attractive to them. We don't want our kids drinking, so instead of demystifying what alcohol is, what it tastes like, and what effects it has, we try to put it out of reach to the point that kids want it even more. Terrorists do what they do to destroy our way of life, to make us prisoners in our own cities. We claim that we will never give in to them. We then use draconian measures to try to protect ourselves against the perceived threat, thereby destroying our way of life and making us prisoners in our own cities. As I said, you are exactly right. And when the human race has evolved to the point that logic makes sense, you might have a shot at convincing people that you are right. The only problem is, the whole process of natural selection has been undermined by our technological society. Since stupid people have just as much of an opportunity to breed these days, how will we continue to evolve and get smarter?
  • This isn't a contradiction of anything, it's just for the sake of getting it off my brain and onto yours. But that's your fault, as you shall see:

    Say a pornographer places a billboard of a beautiful naked woman near the border between his agnostic nation with its liberal sex and speech laws, and a fanatically religious one with censorious blue laws and no freedom of speech. But he covers it up during the day and uncovers it only on cloudy, moonless nights.

    Then say a person from the tyrannical nation starts showing up at the border on those nights with a flashlight and a pair of binoculars.

    Who's breaking the law, here?

    The pornographer has done nothing to cause the image to be transmitted across the border other than to place it where the viewer can, through his own actions and emissions across the border, cause the image to be reflected to him.

    This is how internet works. All connections are client-server. Nothing gets done until the server receives that first SYN packet is sent by the client. After that, it can devolve to many kinds of virtual protocols, but that first connection has to be initiated by the client host.

    Within a nation, laws that say things like "making such-and-such material available for viewing" would be relevant. But across international boundaries, you'd have to have it written into a treaty or it wouldn't mean a damned thing.

    --Blair
    "If the French banned websites about every culture that ever beat them up, all they'd be left with is www.babar.com [babar.com]..."
  • You can expect more attacks on American providers of Internet information in the future, due to a few factors:
    • There will always be governments and other groups who have..er..problems with content on the net.
    • Most of the world does not have a robust infrastructure for data transmission, so they know the content is not coming from home. For example, in China, less than ten percent of the population is hooked up to a phone line.
    • The United States virtually is the Internet. Almost all web content originates from the US, and further, more than 98% of the world's bandwitdh is located in the US. Everyone else is light-years behind, and falling further behind as telecoms cram more fiber and copper, install more D-SLAMs...hell, they just added 2 new area codes to the metro area I live in.
    Therefore, the best way to get something you don't care for off of the net is to shut down the American who posted it.

    The EU cannot afford to cut the trans-Atlantic cable. But it, and everyone else, will try to remove as much from the net as they can get away with. Don't be surprised if the UN gets involved with this.

    (There is, in fact, a series of books by Tad Williams (Otherland), in which the UN has authority over the global data network.)

  • ... shouldn't the French government be fining the ISPs in France which deliver this content to the French citizens? I understand that they don't want anyone to even link to these sites (does this sound like the RIAA and decss?) but France COULD proactively do something about this...

    Why don't they force their ISPs to block the IP addresses of servers which contain "offensive" material? Whenever anyone finds anything, they could simply tell the gov't, which could keep a list of censored IP addresses. The ISPs could use this "centralized" list of offensive IP addresses and not allow traffic from them. "BUT...", I hear you cry, there are thousands of ways to use proxies to get at the material.... So what? If France finds 'em, block the proxies too...

    If you can call out of France to a POP in some other country, France *could* block those phone numbers... And, yes, I know there are "phone" proxies too... Block them (and see the revolt from the French who use the proxies every day for cheap France -> US phone calls).

    This, IMHO, will become the only real way to censor the 'net whilst allowing free speech. You CAN'T know where your viewer is (because of proxies). You CAN know where the traffic is coming from (and, if somehow it comes "anonymously" (proxies) or "spoofed", you block it.)

    The French could take proactive steps to remedy this problem. They won't be able to stop people from publishing offensive or illegal web pages, but, as they find the holes, they can patch them.

    (So what if it's expensive - so what if it ruins their economy because no one can call into or out of France anymore and there is a Frenchnet and an entirely separate Internet? - it's their problem. And, if there are Frenchmen or women reading this - yes, it's your problem. If you don't like it change your government, but you can't tell the rest of the world what to do.)

    Before you all cry "censorship" at ME... I'm all for free speech. I personally believe that anyone should be able to publish anything they want. If you publish something that is illegal in the country in which you publish it, you'll be shut down. I have no problem with that either. If the French don't want certain material to reach their citizens, I think this is really the only way to do it. I don't approve, but I'm just saying it is the French government's job, NOT Yahoo's.

    At any rate, the "Internet" will not bow to France's demands... I don't think we have anything to fear.

    Oh, darn.... I just know someone is going to reply "What about accessing the Internet via satellite?"

  • It won't happen (Score:5)

    by CyberDawg ( 318613 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @12:08PM (#358887) Homepage

    This will never be workable.

    First, the use of VPNs and VLANs makes it just about impossible to find people. I am currently connected to my employer's network, behind their firewall, despite being over an hour drive away at my home. I could just as easily be across the country. You have no way of telling where my notebook computer is connected. Until IPv6 is deployed, this will only get more common, as will use of NAT (network address translation) and PAT (port address translation), both of which make it impossible to locate a system by IP address.

    Secondly, proxy servers make it easy to dodge geographical constraints, for those who wish to do so.

    Third, ISPs often offer 800 numbers in addition to the local POPs. How is anyone supposed to know where you are when you're dialed up through an 800 number?

    A local government does not (and should not) have jurisdiction over the Internet any more than it has jurisdiction over satellite television and radio broadcasts from neighboring towns or countries.


  • ..that if I am using a proxy server, this software really does nothing.

    That was was the point that Yahoo was trying to make in a French court. That is, there is really no way for them to tell where a person is sitting. The person could be routed through servers in Iraq. But the French decided that it didn't matter

    Therefore, the argument that this software applies to Yahoo is invalid.

  • Get this - there were, and are, Nazis.

    No amount of regulation saying, "Hey, you can't look at pictures of Nazi stuff!" is going to change that. You cannot hide something and think that nobody will find out about it or talk about it. It is only through education and discussion that we can deal with things like the Holocaust and the rebirth of Naziesque movements. If you never talk to your kids about Nazis, and your school never talks about Nazis, and and your country never talks about Nazis, guess who will talk to your kids about Nazis? That's right, Nazis. I'm not sure they'd have what we'd call "a historically accurate portrayal of events", either. Banning the discussion of something like this is exactly what Nazi recruiters want - people who have never discussed the issue, and have never thought critically about Nazis.

    I know it's not about Nazis, but about whether a country should block access to certain materials based on their laws. However, it's nonsensical for the same reason. If you try to shelter someone from a hot topic through ignorance, you only end up hurting those you try to protect. If we talked to our kids more about adult stuff on the web, they'd be more protected from it. If we talked to our friends about cults, we'd be more protected from them. You can't block someone from researching a topic. If they really want to find out about it, they will. When they go to find out about it, the only ones freely giving the information will be the exact same people you're trying to banish.

  • Yet again we see the need for some sort of international agreement between countries much like those regulating the basic principles of copyright laws in most countries. However, before such agreements can be made, there needs to be a change in the ethnocentric and self-righteous attidudes of countries and corporations that we see today.

    Clearly, the Internet does not belong to a single country, nor does it exist in some kind of spooky metaphysical parallel dimension. Legislation needs to mature in their understanding of technology and take the drama out of the reasoning. The Internet is a part of the infrastructure of the world, and should be dealt with as such.

    The company or agency who builds a road is not held responsible when criminals choose that road when escaping from a bank robbery, neither should server maintainers and other service providers be prosecuted for how their services are used.

  • International Issues (Score:3)

    by nate1138 ( 325593 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @12:15PM (#358895)
    This does raise all kinds of issues about doing business on the web. Just because my company is located somewhere no longer restricts my customer base to nearby regions, or even customers who speak the same language. How will these issues be addressed in the future? I can only hope that it doesn't get to the point where some kind of international board determines what kind of data goes where. However, with anonymous proxy servers and such, I suppose that this would be very hard to implement. The lawyers must really be scratching their heads over this one. ;-)

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