Making Small Steps Against Censorship 188
JD writes "BBC News has an article about online censorship, blogs in particular. It points out that 'perhaps we need to accept that small gains and slight shifts in direction can make a difference to people's lives, and work for them instead of trying to blast down the walls of repression with a single blow.' Whittling away may be the only realistic way to see change happen."
Schools... (Score:1, Interesting)
Those who built it (Score:5, Interesting)
So what's in it for them? How do they feel about what they do? Anyone have a link to any information about them?
The Feedback Loop (Score:2, Interesting)
In the cases where the blogger is a hardcore fanatic of something (Linux, Democrat, Christian, etc.) there will likely always be a few people who will take this persons word, regardless of how ridiculous it is. Since these people would hold this belief anyway and are merely reading the blog for reinforcement of their ideas, it doesn't hurt anyone.
The simple fact is, that bloggers who want to serve as reporters to a wide audience, will try to report the news as truthfully and with as little bias as possible. If a company were to make a good product and then switch to making a worthless one, would people continue to buy from said company? Eventually the problem corrects itself.
In the end, there's no need for censorship, only good, common-sense from the readers.
The times they are a changing (Score:5, Interesting)
Even today, look around you - most people simply do not care about what is happening, or how their rights are being trampled on, or even that they have any rights at all. The republic is not of the people anymore, it belongs to our corrupt politicians trying to remake things in the way that benefits them.
Really, really unfortunate.
small steps (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone else feel that these are OUR RIGHTS to begin with and we should not let them be touched at all? I mean you see someone messing with your new car, you step up and sort it right away, you don't wait till the car is stolen and have the police bring you back one piece at a time from the chop shop.
Slashdot itself is doing censoring (Score:3, Interesting)
Anonymous posts are limited to 10 posts now (ok we can live with that) but this new 'enter text shown in this image' is beating the hell out of me. Sometimes the chars are so hard to read that it's impossible to enter the right letters. Now if it's hard for me sometimes to read the letters how do disabled people or people with heavy eye problems feel, they are totally excluded from commenting on Slashdot because they barely are able to enter correct letters. Then there is another problem with anonymous posts a bug in the script or so. When you enter something and press submit too fast you get a message telling you that your last comment was not long ago and that you at least need to wait 2 minutes.. Unfortunately due to the bug you can easily wait 5 mins, 6 mins, 10 mins, 20 mins (which get shown too) and nothing much happens. That pretty much sucks.
If China was smart... (Score:4, Interesting)
By the time the abusers - the anonymous stalkers, defamers and trolls - got done with the system - no one would believe anything that comes from the masses anyway.
Recently, there was an article about how the American press is less apt to use anonymous sources for their stories now, especially after the whole Quran-gate incident. There's a lesson to be learned in this if you're a totalitarian government trying to hold onto power while transitioning to democracy.
In short, the truth could hide in plain sight among the static. The dissidents would be silenced, nonviolently, by the very system they rely on.
There were no "sleeper cells". (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Abotu blogs and censorship... (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other side is government controlled censorship, where governments make writing certain things illegal, amd use the force of law to assure that certain types of speech are stifled.
kick the liars out... (Score:2, Interesting)
telling the truth has that effect all on its own.
when the mainstream media lies, distorts, and decieves it's viewers, then by definition, THEY will not be taken seriously.
it has nothing to do with bias. it has everything to do with being an arm of the government. if you didn't realize what that "Debacle" was a while ago; the mainstream liars trying to shout BIAS every 5 seconds... it was because people were starting to wake up to how much of an arm of the government they really were. they were trying to shout bias to confuse people who don't critically analyze the mainstream liars, into making them believe that iraq war wasn't illegal from the get go. that being just one example.
they DON'T want for people to have a voice. if that were to happen they would lose their control. they couldn't influence public ideas and conciousness. they couldn't make you send your children off to wars to benefit the rich and israel. they couldn't protect those war mongers who sit in washington every 4 years from public scrutiny.
btw, taxpayers don't have to pay for illegal wars. it's in the constitution, you know, that document that if you mention it, the FBI considers you a terrorist/extremist.
every one of the points i've raised (which isn't even remotely addressing the numerous issues the world and americans face today), can be verified through a search of the net. the net... the only place where truth has even the smallest hope of surviving in this day and age.
Distributed Blogging (Score:5, Interesting)
All it would take is a simple little client app that connects to other peers around the world. A checkbox saying "Connect me directly to xxx.blogservers.com" could be turned on for users in the USA / Canada where freedom of speech isn't a problem and everyone. Give the client app the ability to read blogs (as well as having them web accessable) and I don't see why this wouldn't succeed. It certainly would be far safer than ranting about your government on an non-ssl'ed connection.
colonial newspapers vs blogs (Score:5, Interesting)
Those colonial newspapers were few in number but reached almost 100% of a community (either directly or by word of mouth). It was a major form of entertainment, and could enact major social change.
The difference is today we have thousands of entertainment outlets as compared to a few dozen in colonial times. It may be easier now to reach millions around the globe, but it's harder to get anoyone to read in the first place. It's also harder to get a group of individuals with enough in common and close enough proximity to actually affect changes in government or whatever social cause you have. There's just too much noise out there on the internet.
Re:Letting them build walls while u take out brick (Score:3, Interesting)
"Woe to those who wake the sleeping giant."
I believe the giant may soon be awakened as it was partially awakened during the Rodney King trial (and especially after it). All it takes is one incident to spark the event. When Osama Bin Laudin (spelling?) stated that they did what they did to awaken the people of America - this is what he was talking about.
And no - this does not mean I condone what was done. And no - this does not mean that I want an uprising. And no - it doesn't mean anything other than just want I've said. All other statements are owned by their respective posters, please don't try to put words into my mouth I haven't said.
I like to play around with statistics and my whacko numbers are just as good as the next kook out there. The only difference is that I seem to hit things right on the head a bit more than some (and a bit less than others). Don't call me a Silvia Brown person because I'm not. But in the 1970s I did predict the dotcom bubble burst (because every 100 years the US has gone through a similar problem). Look back at the turn of the century from 1899 to 1900. What happened? Wild stock market rise followed by the biggest depression ever recorded. Not to mention two world wars. What happened when the US went from 1799 to 1800? Wild stock market (land speculation) rise followed by burst bubble and the civil war. What's happening from 1999 to 2000? Wild stock market rise (computers) followed by a burst bubble and a small war (so far). Doesn't take a psychic to predict what's going to happen next. Either another civil war or another world war. After all, the wars don't get smaller each time - they just get bigger. It could even mean the end of the US as we have known it. (And don't even get me started on the hoopla surrounding the coming of Christ every 100 years. People even went so far as to kill themselves before the turn of the century because they knew they had done something evil and didn't want to suffer the tortures of living on earth during the end times. Happens every 100 years.) Want to know what's coming? Another depression. Maybe not on the order of the Great Depression, but then there are a lot more regulations in place now than then. But it will happen (and is already beginning to happen - just look at all of the layoffs, government closings of bases, and how many more people do you see standing on the corners asking for money? In the 1970s I saw maybe one or two people. Now there are two or three people on a corner along the freeway - and no - not every freaking corner - just a lot more corners than I remember seeing in the 1970s.).
But don't forget, the scale has grown. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Those who built it (Score:5, Interesting)
> >
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> > AFAIK, a lot of this gets done by a variety of American companies, who are quite happy providing and customizing their filtering software for anyone willing to pay up. Unlike cryptographic software, there aren't any restrictions on the export of filtering software, and the continual efforts of users to get around the software provide a steady revenue stream.
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> Well, if that's true, it's kind of evil, maybe even racist, isn't it? It's one (fairly bad) thing if China decides to exclude themselves from the global dialog. It's another (really bad) thing if we actually help them to do it.
What's racist about it? Developers code bits. Bits don't care where they're used.
There's a word for China: beta site.
The USSR and former Socialist Republics were the alpha site. The implementation collapsed under the weight of its own bureaurcacy. You're doing it with paper, not computers, so you're reliant on humans. The fundamental scaling limitation is that because humans can be bought - can betray you - so, for every layer of Secret Police you implement, you have to add another layer of S00per-S33kr1t Police on top of it. East Germany's STASI was the canonical example; an economy imploded because 30% of the population were paid informants on each other.
China, as the beta site, is doing something new: an industrialized society with totalitarian controls over information. The system is automated - avoiding the risk of implosion. The system works much like the standard USSR/DDR model, however, in that prohibited information is blocked from the population.
Full implementation of the production version will be even slicker. Unlike the Chinese model, where citizens know they've've crossed the line (because the request for that "interesting" URL was blocked, or because the email to that "interesting" person never got delivered), the live system will simply log the data for future reference and cross-archiving - it'll be done automatically, avoiding the problem that crashed the alpha site under heavy load.
Give a subversive enough rope, and he'll hang himself. And unlike the beta site, the production version will enable society to track its unreliable elements until they've exposed all of their secrets and, by extension, all of their friends' secrets.
Absolute social control, with minimal loss of economic productivity, and (unlike China), practically no diminishment of civilian morale, because everyone thinks they're still free-as-in-speech. Quite clever, really, and the Chinese (as one of the few societies that doesn't really have the morale problem that the beta version might induce in the target market) still manage to benefit by testing the beta version for a free-as-in-beer cost.
Everybody involved with the project - on both sides of the Pacific - wins.
Re:The times they are a changing (Score:3, Interesting)