Malaysian Government Offers Free E-mail To All Citizens 189
jfruhlinger writes "Attempts to move governments to electronic communications often hit a serious snag: Governments must serve all citizens, and not all citizens have email addresses. Malaysia's solution to the problem: offer free email to every Malaysian adult. Citizens will be able to get their @myemail.my address by inserting a smartcard into a reader or presenting it in person." Would you trust your government to be your mail provider?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
"Would you trust your government?" (Score:5, Insightful)
The question "Would you trust your government to be your mail provider?" is pretty irrelevant: if they government can subpoena your mail account for any reason, without notification, you know, to prevent any sort of "terrorism" (against the state, content providers, the prevailing political ideology)... then they already are your de facto mail provider.
Would you trust your government to be your mail pr (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't really think that is the correct question. Perhaps we should be asking the question "Do we want to continue to pay for governments sending us physical mail rather than using more efficient technology?"
There is nothing going on here that requires you to use this email address for your own personal communications.
Re:What difference .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, there are plenty of republicans who feel the government should only do two things, kill brown people, and keep them out of the country.
There are sane people, but for some reason many of them refuse to take a stand against the bat shit crazies. The crazies on the far right (including teabaggers) wont be happy until every single piece of the government is chopped up and sold off piece meal to a for profit corp that will require a profit margin to do the same job that the government did without the profit margin.
That what I never understood about "fiscal conservatives" how can we save money if we have a new cost, namely profit margin. Until I hear a reasonable answer anyone who wants to offload government duties to a corporation will be just plain stupid in my book.