Academics Take On Government Net Censorship 274
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'."
American technology is helping repress the Chinese (Score:5, Interesting)
As a side note, I knew a lad working near me from China who had been at Tianamen Square the day before and then the day after the massacre happened. When he saw what the army had done to their own people he went home, packed and left for Hong Kong and then to the US.
Censorship is only one way the Communists will use to stay in power and shooting another bunch of college kids can happen again.
Re:Canadian TV censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stupidest ./ comment I have read all week (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is there a difference? (Score:2, Interesting)
I fail to follow your logic, care to elaborate?
Banned channels (Score:3, Interesting)
The most popular US news channel is banned in Canada. I'm pretty sure that SciFi channel is also banned; there are others.
Re:Banned channels (Score:3, Interesting)
We have a Canadian sci-fi channel called Space, which picks up a lot of Sci-fi's programming. I actually think it's a better chanel.. they broadcast ST:TOS, ST:TNG, ST:DS9 and ST:VOY.
They are NOT banned -- they just need to provide the required amount of Canadian programming if they want to broadcast in Canada.
Re:Canadian TV censorship (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm aware of these guidelines, I'm just saying that they don't really have significant impact on what I end up seeing.
But the original issue was one of Canadian TV censorship -- which to me is still pretty funny. For example, our uber-popular comedy Trailer Park Boys [trailerparkboys.com] is coming to the US, except they're going to have to censor the show for American viewers [www.cbc.ca]. (There's lots of drug use and swearing on the show). There's obviously more censorship in the US than in Canada. Superbowl boobies?Point of view from the UAE (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Freenet? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the same everywhere, really. The first people who bought hybrid cars didn't get machines that worked as well, were as fast and efficient as those we have today (have you seen the 2004 Prius? or the 2004 Civic Hybrid? And soon there'll be Accords and Camrys) and they had to pay a higher price/deal with more problems, uglier designs, etc.
Same with the people who buy version/revision 1.0 of video cards, motherboards, etc. More bugs, higher priced, etc.
But without the early versions, we wouldn't get the killer apps later on.
I'm sure that better routing/whatever will be developped for freenet, and with bandwidth and storage becoming cheaper all the time, the network will be more efficient than it is now at equal number of nodes. It just takes time to get there... Of course there could be some theorical bottlenecks to the project that can't be easily solved without changing some of the fondamentals, but maybe that's possible too without compromising the goals too much.
My 2 cents (canadian).
Re:Stupidest ./ comment I have read all week (Score:3, Interesting)
On the contrary, western culture has not prevented our governments from actively supporting oppression in other countries in many cases.
Re:Is there a difference? (Score:3, Interesting)
I am not sure why people are modding your post down. The post did a nice job of being an entry point into discussing the article without being flaimbait.
I think the article is touching on something slightly larger than American culture v. the world. They are touching on the fact that if you have a system where people have access to a global media, then you will end up losing a great deal of what you consider to be your own local culture. To prevent this from happening (i.e., to preserve your culture...) you have to curtail human rights. This is not quite an "our army is bigger than your army" issue. It is a little bit more of whether or not the "world culture" should dominate your local culture.
Accepting human rights pretty much takes the ability to completely define culture out of the hands of any given authority. If your belief system demands a general authority then the global culture will always be a horrible shock.
Re:Is there a difference? (Score:3, Interesting)
People from Iran, for example, don't necessarily feel that first world countries are better. In many cases they long to go home. People usually go to first world countries for education, money, or to flee political turmoil. They frequently feel that their home countries are more virtuous, stable and sensible and have better food.
Our western recipe for success doesn't really work. It requires turning all the housewives into realtors or project managers or something, and leaving TV and the streets to raise the kids. It requires importing women from traditional cultures to play Mom for kids of the affluent. It requires poor and repressive countries to make our stuff. We're phenomenally good at inventing, colonizing, owning, conquering; but not at much else.
Second, these third world countries are not as hellish as you're portraying. People generally aren't shot in the back of the head. The middle east isn't a hellhole for the people that live there, although it might be for a transplanted American. Many Palestinians have houses, cars, refrigerators and olive groves, a fact I only discovered when reading how the Israelis destroy these things.
I think that most people in the world do not want or approve this kind of freedom. People are generally very happy to see dissidents with bizarre politics punished. Ask any Chinese person about Falun Gong. If the US rounded up all the Scientologists and shot them, I think it would gain more popularity than any tax cut.
Personally, I'm a product of the West and wouldn't be happy in a traditional regime. But I realize that people raised in them may feel differently.