Academics Take On Government Net Censorship

Anonymous Brave Guy writes "There's an interesting article from the BBC today about a group of academics at the University of Toronto who are working to investigate and break down government-imposed censorship of the Internet. Are they defending human rights, or simply trying to impose their own beliefs on people from other cultures? Incidentally, one of their people was responsible for the previous Slashdot discussion of 'five fundamental problems with open source'."

from

[themusicgod1]

What I understand, freedom of expression is guaranteed in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights [un.org]
"Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression ; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of fronteirs."
[emphasis added]. So if there is any nation that is not a part of the United Nations, sure, imposing these restrictions on the freedom of the government of these nations would be imposing their own beliefs on these other cultures. This does not sound like what these people are doing, however. There is no excuse whatsoever for government censorship by any government who is a member of the United Nations(this means you, China [computeruser.com], United States of America [thememoryhole.org], and Canada [sasktel.com]).

Sure, one may argue that the United Nations may be unnecessary, outdated, completely irrelevent [zmag.org] or otherwise, but as it stands today, we are obligated to fufil our part of the bargain, despite how sometimes we may disagree with it, or alternatively, decline membership to the United Nations and become a Rogue State, with none of the protections to you that The Declaration provides.

These guys sound down-right nuts, though. If a dictator is willing to kill thousands of his own people, what makes you think they won't assasinate you, if you actively mess with them? Kudos to their efforts.

Re:Canadian TV censorship

[nodwick]

Are you kidding me? I live in Canada and all I see is American content -- radio stations are full of American music, television is all American shows, and the products we buy are all American. Where's the censorship? It's obviously not working.

Despite living in Canada, you're apparently not aware that the law requires that 35% of popular music selections broadcast by commercial AM and FM radio stations each broadcast week must be Canadian selections" [crtc.gc.ca]. American TV cable stations are permitted, but satellite TV is not for similar reasons.

Re:Canadian TV censorship

[themusicgod1]

University of Toronto [utoronto.ca] != Canadian Government [parl.gc.ca]

The University itself may have its own problems with censorship [littlegreenfootballs.com], but at least get the organization right.

Re:Canadian TV censorship - Part of the reason

[Craig Nagy]

IIRC, it's more than just a "Canadian content" thing. In Canada there are laws restricting the manner in which corporations can advertise to children. (i.e. no using some super-duper character to sell cereal). Not such a bad idea considering children are so easily influenced.

Being on the largest undefended border makes controlling all those dang signals (tv/radio) a little difficult.

Reflexive Paradox

[yintercept]

"It is impossible to prove anything" which cannot be proven true, because for it to be true, you must have proved something.

It is pretty much established that the reflexive paradox will come up in any complex system. The paradox has created a great deal angst for top thinkers like Goedel [sp], Cantor, Russell, etc..

Unfortunately, we keep building this paradox [descmath.com] into the base of our systems of thought. I personally think the one thing Aristotle and Socrates did right was to acknowledge that their definitions were never really complete, and to procede from there. The systems built with the paradox as a central feature seem a bit mushy to me.

As I recall, Goedel's contribution was to show that the paradox will show up in any system sufficiently complex to include the whole numbers.

Re:In other news...

[AndroidCat]

Education is a provincial matter in Canada, so more likely the government of Ontario. However the provincial legislature (Queen's Park) sits on land that the University of Toronto owns. (Previously the site of a mental institution. Another one, that is.) The lease is probably one of those 99 years for a dollar deals, but those run out eventually. (Under British law, 99 years used to be the max limit for those kind of contracts.)

Hacktivismo

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.hacktivismo.com/ [hacktivismo.com] - a Cult of the Dead Cow project that has been spinning its wheels for a few years. Very similar goals and targets as the academic project featured in the article.

Re:Show me a free by western standards Islamic nat

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megawati_Sukarnoputri

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia :

"Islam is Indonesia's main religion, with almost 87% of the people adhering to it." ... Reasonably could be called an "Islamic nation"

Re:Freenet?

[shostiru]

Unfortunately, people who try Freenet, decide it sucks, and then leave after a day or two are partly to blame for the problem.

If you read the documentation and the mailing list you'll find there are a few simple steps you can take that will dramatically improve the performance of your node:

1. Use the unstable network and release, not the stable network. Performance is at least an order of magnitude better. Make sure to get the unstable seednodes.ref too.
2. Keep your node online for at a week before assessing performance. It takes time for your routing table to fill. Trying links during this time does seem to speed this up, but don't be surprised if you have serious problems in the first week.
3. Increase your cache size to several GB. The recommendations on the website are way too low.
4. Change your browser settings as per the instructions (i.e., increase number of concurrent requests and timeout), otherwise you'll be waiting forever just because a key or two comes up missing. Oh, and don't use IE, it breaks any security Freenet offers.
5. If at all possible, run it on a spare box and accept the CPU load (and configure it to permit web access from your local network and nowhere else). It's a CPU hog, and will probably continue to be a CPU hog for awhile. The unstable release seems to be a lot better.
6. Keep it running as much as possible; whenever you go offline you adversely impact the net.
7. Follow the mailing list, you'll get recommendations for what settings to adjust and why.
8. Realize that whenever a lot of people try Freenet and then quit (e.g., when it's mentioned in slashdot), the performance of the network will go to hell for awhile.

Yes, you'll get some key lookup failures, but it's a lot better with the above. More problematic, I think, is the type of content that's available on Freenet. Anonymous and unblockable publishing and retrieval means anything and everything can appear, no matter how illegal or reprehensible. That's the price you pay for totally free speech. I'm still not entirely comfortable with that, and a lot of people think that price is way too high.

Re:American technology is helping repress the Chin

[espo812]

said we were helping the same Communist government that gave us Tianamen Square and would continue to repress the Chinese people using this technology

Some people argue we shouldn't trade with china, because it assists them in government repression. Others say we should trade with them, because they will then see how good western capitalist culture is and have to change. See also: Cuba, N. Korea.

Re:call me a cynical pri*k

[bVork]

Canada is the most repressive developed nation in the world, from the perspective of free speech.

Does the DMCA mean anything to you? Guess what! We don't have an equivalent. (Yet...)

Their citizens haven't legal access to foreign media sources

I doubt you've ever been here. I get CNN, Al-Jazeera, Fox, PBS, and many more. In fact, most television stations here are not Canadian. I challenge you to find ANYTHING that would back up your statement.

...and they're subject to some of the most onerous speech restriction in the western world.

Actually, we do have more speech restrictions than Americans. I'd hardly call them onerous, though. At least, when it comes to hate speech. As I mentioned earlier, we don't have a DMCA to mess with other forms of speech. Here's [justice.gc.ca] the section of our Criminal Code that deals with the subject of hate speech.

Bill C-250 [parl.gc.ca], which some people on here have been wailing about, makes a single change to the Criminal Code: it adds "or sexual orientation." to subsection 4 of section 318.

Contrary to the beliefs of tinfoil hate (sic) people, this does not muzzle religion, because subsection 3 of section 319 states that "no person shall be convicted of an offence if, ... in good faith, he expressed or attempted to establish by argument an opinion on a religious subject." It also does not prevent public debate over gay rights, because "no person shall be convicted of an offence if ... the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds he believed them to be true." The only stipulation in there that might prevent opposing arguments is that a person's statements must be true.