Thousands Marched Against Censorship 131
funfail writes "Thousands of Turkish demonstrators poured into central Istanbul yesterday to protest against the government's Internet censorship. New regulations from Turkey's Internet Technologies and Communications Authority set to come into effect on Aug. 22 will require Internet service providers to offer a choice of four filtering options: family, child, domestic or standard. Many websites are expected to be blocked as a result of the filtering measures."
Who Cares?? Its None Of Our Business (Score:3, Insightful)
I love how slashdot runs these "oh no! evil censorship" stories as if people around the world have the same values or customs as it relates to free speech or censorship.
The fact is that our Western norms doesn't make it the right one and people in more conservative or traditional countries in the world have a right to decide for themselves what is appropriate or not. Who knows if the Turkish demonstrators represent the majority or whether its just a small section of the population?
The fact is this should be none of the readers concern here. Leave these internal domestic matters to the Turks or whoever else.
Re:Who Cares?? Its None Of Our Business (Score:4, Insightful)
I love how slashdot runs these "oh no! evil censorship" stories as if people around the world have the same values or customs as it relates to free speech or censorship.
The fact is that our Western norms doesn't make it the right one and people in more conservative or traditional countries in the world have a right to decide for themselves what is appropriate or not. Who knows if the Turkish demonstrators represent the majority or whether its just a small section of the population?
The fact is this should be none of the readers concern here. Leave these internal domestic matters to the Turks or whoever else.
Bull crap.
The freedom we enjoy in the US means nothing in the end if we ignore oppression elsewhere.
I'm tired of religious despots. I'm fed up with tribes who circumcise infant girls. I'm real fucking annoyed with honor killings. I have come to the conclusion that there are some traditions and cultures that need to die out sooner rather than later, and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
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And I'm fucking tired with the death penalty in your country, you're DMCA notices to the whole world, your human-violation rights in your outside US prisons, your pseudo-freedom-of-speech, and a lot of other bulshit.
So fucking what?!!!
Re:Who Cares?? Its None Of Our Business (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'm fucking tired with the death penalty in your country, you're DMCA notices to the whole world, your human-violation rights in your outside US prisons, your pseudo-freedom-of-speech, and a lot of other bulshit.
And the way they double tax their own citizens when they try to better themselves by working outside their borders. And the way they get involved and mess around in every international and many national disputes everywhere. And the crazy way they try to force their export regulations on companies all over the world. And don't even get me started on their excessive eating whilst large amounts of the world are starving.
The US is about as messed up as the rest of the world. Paiute is an ignorant xenophobe.
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Especially when they hate such things as what Paiute was describing.... wait, what?
Id rather be an xenophobe than someone that condones bullying, mutilation, and sanctioned slaughter.
Do the world a favor, act like a jackass and throw yourself off a bridge.
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If you mean male genital mutilation, that is still quite common in the USA.
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Id rather be an xenophobe than someone that condones bullying, mutilation, and sanctioned slaughter.
You don't see the point i'm trying to make. I'm not saying the rest of the world isn't messed up, just that the US is messed up as well. You have got so used to your type of messed up that you don't even see it anymore.
Bullying - Ever tried talking to a US border official? Or a US policeman? Regardless of the situation it comes down to threats pretty quickly.
Sanctioned slaughter - What's the death penalty? What about all the people the police have shot in slightly dodgy circumstances?
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That's always the problem with all the "america is as evil as islam" arguments : they have to equate unhealthy eating (which is what americans do) to child-molesting, slavery, forced prostitution (a part of islam), trade and sale of human beings, stonings, racist laws, and worse.
You are missing the point. The problem with American's eating to much is that large chunks of the world have not enough food and are actually starving. If you eat rice that you don't need and that could be shipped cheaply to someone who will die without it you are commeting some kind of indirect murder.
Sure American's are fat, that really doesn't matter.
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It's funny ... he's talking about systemic oppression and discrimination of the kind that the 1st world nations haven't seen in a hundred years ... and idiots like you are comparing it to the icky habits of those uncouth NASCAR-loving Americans. I know that your large intestine is stopping you from seeing things in perspective, but c'mon, really ...
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So you want Superman to swoop down and impose 'Truth, justice, and the American Way' it seems.
How isn't that you just manifesting a variant of American Exceptional-ism. [realclearpolitics.com]
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Personally, I'm with GP. I don't care who you are or what your reasons are, but something like amputating a child's clitoris* against their will is never cool. We may disagree on what is in the set of Never Allowed actions, and I certainly don't pretend to know everything that should or shoul
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Given that you felt the need to ask, guessing you didn't expect me to feel that way?
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I have come to the conclusion that there are some traditions and cultures that need to die out sooner rather than later, and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
Some fundies from other cultures/religions have the same thinking like you...and some even put those words into action...something we can all agree that results in despicable actions.
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Tell me, what proportion of infant boys have their genitals mutilated in the US?
Thread starter = fine troll, btw.
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You mean "how many infant boys have their genitals mutilated to prevent them from ever having pleasurable sex?"
None.
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So nonconsenting nonmedical mutilation is acceptable providing you think it doesn't interfere with someone else's enjoyment of their own body?
Weird.
Also, I think you can function well enough without your tongue.
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curse your parents for not circumcising you.
Yeah! How dare they let you decide for yourself whether or not you want to be circumcised!
Wait, what?
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You mean "how many infant boys have their genitals mutilated to prevent them from ever having pleasurable sex?"
No, American boys have their genitals mutilated because of a myth that cutting off the foreskin somehow prevents infections, when the purpose of the foreskin is to prevent infections. That cutting off the foreskin reduces the pleasure gained from sex is just a side effect. http://www.homiegfunk.com/RIC2.htm [homiegfunk.com]
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Actually, I wasn't aware that infant boys were capable of having pleasurable sex. Do you mean pleasurable for them, or for someone else?
If you reread the sentence, you'd realize that the person said the word 'ever', meaning throughout their lives, not just through infancy.
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and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
So then go do it instead of threatening to do so. Oh right, you're another armchair soldier who in the end is nothing but a basement-dwelling pussy.
Re:Who Cares?? Its None Of Our Business (Score:5, Insightful)
. I have come to the conclusion that there are some traditions and cultures that need to die out sooner rather than later, and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
Ah! So it's okay for Americans to force their beliefs on people, but not for others. What god gave you that divine right?
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I should think that there is a clear difference between forcing our belief on others that people should not be oppressed, injured, or even killed, versus forcing the spread of beliefs that support such ugliness.
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not be oppressed, injured, or even killed
Capital punishment looks like killing people to me. Should I as citizen of EU enforce it to you?
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In Western culture, capital punishment is the answer to the actions performed by the individual which are equally if not more distasteful. Save the prison space for those who can be redeemed for their misdeeds.
Yes and wikipedia lists those "Western culture countries" for you (Capital punishment [wikipedia.org])
China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, United States, Yemen, Sudan, Vietnam, Syria, Japan, Egypt, Libya, Bangladesh, Thailand, Singapore, Botswana, Malaysia, North Korea
So "Don't judge and you won't be judged". Maybe even for some amputation may help to redeem their misdeeds much faster than imprisonment. Where is the red line you draw? Where the media or church tels you?
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Re:Who Cares?? Its None Of Our Business (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm tired of religious despots. I'm fed up with tribes who circumcise infant girls. I'm real fucking annoyed with honor killings. I have come to the conclusion that there are some traditions and cultures that need to die out sooner rather than later, and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
I'm not willing to try to solve those problems with explosives when there are far better ways available. Compare, for instance, the conditions in Iraq (where heavy explosives were employed to oust a despot) to the conditions in Egypt (where a popular uprising ousted a despot): Things aren't perfect in Egypt, but you don't have thousands of people getting shot regularly. Similarly, if you want to go after female circumcision and honor killings, the best way to do that is to empower women to organize themselves and stand up against the men of their culture.
The basic method here is:
1. Give the people the knowledge that they're oppressed. That means getting Al Jazeera in there (because they regularly do investigative pieces on the leadership in that area), it means giving them the best Internet access you can, it means creating Radio Free Middle East, and it means Wikileaks.
2. Give the people a viable alternative to tolerating the oppression. There are lots of ways of doing that, but so far the most successful ones seem to be mass protests. It's far from a 100% success rate, but if they succeed they have the advantage of reducing the chance that the evil despot is replaced by another evil despot.
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Bull crap.
The freedom we enjoy in the US means nothing in the end if we ignore oppression elsewhere.
I'm tired of religious despots. I'm fed up with tribes who circumcise infant girls. I'm real fucking annoyed with honor killings. I have come to the conclusion that there are some traditions and cultures that need to die out sooner rather than later, and I'm willing to apply the necessary explosives to make it happen.
And I'm tired of abortion restrictions, universal health care paranoia, intelligent design in schools, absurd restrictions on pain killers, worship of the rich and famous, government representatives owned by big business, an out of control military killing people by the thousands, etc. etc. Someone really needs to step in and erase the American culture and replace it with something sane.
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"Bullcrap" is all yours.
"The freedom we enjoy in the US means nothing in the end if we ignore oppression elsewhere." this is absurd.
Obviously the high moderation status of your comment is the result of political views of moderators, not it's actual value.
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I'm fed up with tribes who circumcise infant girls.
Funny, isn't the US one of the main countries the practice penis mutilation [circumstitions.com] on infant boys ?!?
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Slashdot is not an America-only site, you know. Turks come here too.
I think you're missing the point of the story ... "Turks come here too" ... "not for long!"
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people ... have a right to decide for themselves what is appropriate or not
Best ultra short summary of censorship I've seen in years, is censorship takes away that right.
Thanks for helping, although that's not what you intended.
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I agree, people do have a right to decide for themselves what is appropriate or not. Unfortunately for the rest of your post, that means there can be no censorship at the government level, because then people are not given any choice in the matter. The fact they are demonstrating shows that the people want to
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I am not allowing other people to decide what I should *know.* Turkish culture does not value intellectual freedoms as much as westerners do and the government might be acting to people's will (IMHO they don't. Those do not have a problem with current internet censorship are basically not interested in the issue. There is a very small minority pushing for less freedom, a much bigger minority pushing for more freedom while the real majority does not care) but that is beside the point. I don't care if I am in
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So what you're saying is, much like the reason that Constantinople got "the works", this is nobody's business but the Turks?
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The fact is this should be none of the readers concern here. Leave these internal domestic matters to the Turks or whoever else.
We don't all live in the same 'here'.
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more conservative or traditional countries in the world have a right to decide for themselves what is appropriate or not.
Well, the *men* do, at least.
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Actually, the "it's their values which are different from ours" argument, as often as it is spouted is wrong. If censorship is some people's culture, if it's their choice then it wouldn't exist. There would be no need. Nobody would be saying anything they would need to censor. Censorship is just one group, majority or not oppressing another. Attempts to redefine it around a different cu
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It's ironic how you posted anonymously, obviously expected down moderation from polically biased /. crowd.
That's what censorship actually is: when somebody's opinion is suppressed for political reasons.
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"The fact is that our Western norms doesn't make it the right one and people in more conservative or traditional countries in the world have a right to decide for themselves what is appropriate or not. Who knows if the Turkish demonstrators represent the majority or whether its just a small section of the population?"
Exactly, people not the govt.
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Did you miss the part about those thousands protesting in Turkey being Turkish? Did you think they were Americans for some reason?
Don't you think it's reasonably fair to presume if people are protesting against something, their value hold that the thing is bad?
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Who knows if the Turkish demonstrators represent the majority or whether its just a small section of the population?
I do. People who care about something, especially if it is technical, are minority in any country.
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Who knows if the Turkish demonstrators represent the majority or whether its just a small section of the population?
So tyranny is fine, as long as the majority supports it.
You, sir, are an asshole.
First on the censorship list (all levels) (Score:3)
"Turkey's prime minister is threatening to sue over the recently released diplomatic cables on the website WikiLeaks. A cable written by former U.S. Ambassador Eric Edelman that alleged Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had eight Swiss bank accounts, struck a deep nerve."
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/europe/Turkish-PM-Threatens-to-Sue-Over-Wikileaks-Claims-111388889.html [voanews.com]
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However I also want to keep the current option as well (no filtering - show me everything).
Only criminals want to opt out of filtering!
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I can think of a few recent marches in London involving thousands or tens of thousands of people which have made no difference whatever. Some of them barely received a small article in the national press.
Speech and demonstration are important, but if you really want to make your country listen you have to refuse to work.
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Folks, wanna see how to really change the world? Follow the example of the brave men and women who are literally putting their bodies on the line to oppose tyranny and injustice in the Middle East
Nice ideal, but that change is still only happening when The Powers That Be in the West actually support the uprising. Witness the difference in fortunes between the West-supported Libyan rebels and the those in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria.
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Unfortunately, you have to be alive to continue the fight.
Remember that guy that flew his plane into the IRS building?
Yeah... that protest went far... ppffttttt.
At least they're up-front about it (Score:5, Insightful)
At least the Turkish government is taking responsibility for the censorship. Here in the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation basically has a free hand to censor the internet; the IWF has the blessing of the government, but it's not a government agency, so there's no parliamentary oversight, they're not required to answer to anybody as to what they blacklist, and unless they fuck up spectacularly [guardian.co.uk], nobody actually knows what they're censoring. We just have to hope it's only actually nasty kiddie porn, but as the aforementioned fuck up illustrates, their judgement is open to question. Our government likes it this way because technically the government isn't censoring anything.
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Actually, it currently works in a similar way here. The Information and Communications Technologies Authority(BTK) orders ISPs to block lots of websites without declaring any reason. The fact that the "Law regarding crimes committed on the Internet" (indirectly) requires the websites to prove their innocence, while they can be taken down without notice.
They screwed up big two weeks ago when they tried to take down a list of websites including the most popular domestic social portal, which has enough cashflo
Re:At least they're up-front about it (Score:5, Informative)
ISPs aren't required to implement the IWF blacklist unless they want to provide services to the government. Individuals are free to use an ISP that doesn't implement the blacklist, such as AAISP [aaisp.net.uk].
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The whole point of a censors office is that no-one should know anything about what, why, or how the are censoring anything.
A good censors office is unelected, unaccountable, opaque, and their decisions must not be subject to appeal. A good censors office is the exact opposite of an open court, a short circuiting of the rule of law.
The 3 packages are optional. (Score:2)
The guy pushing this, there is also some disagreement over if it is constitutional is doing on the basis that the free market has failed in this and the government needs to make sure that the filter options are provided and followed.
Re:The 3 packages are optional. (Score:5, Informative)
There used to be a very primitive way of enforcing blocking of sites: ttnet DNS's were not correctly resolving names. This lead to public aphaty on censorship issue, as anyone and their dog knew how to use alternate DNSes or if all else fails, TOR. The prime minister himself said "I can access the banned sites, you can too." The blocked site list (which must be constructed by internet users, as there is no transparency about the process at all) is absurdly long but most didn't care - they didn't even notice. Most sites are banned without a court order (not that those banned on court orders are more sensible) and on grounds of "obscenity" defined by middle aged religious conservative bureaucrat men. Now that the institutions, mechanisms and laws are in place, they are making the next step: trying to bypass filters becomes a crime. Moreover ISP passwords will be tied to RW ID, so you will use the same login if you are the same guy. No, thanks. Current situation is less than ideal, but the proposed one is a disaster.
How and what? (Score:2)
will require Internet service providers to offer a choice of four filtering options
First, horrible word choice, such a nice green eco-policy of filtering clean spring water into crystal clear bottled water, or filtering sewage before pouring it into the noble savage wilderness. Instead of what it really is, which is top down totalitarian thought-crime enforcement.
Second, how? From a technical standpoint, I'm thinking segregate by mac address into certain ip pools, which then are censored by customized BGP feeds? Coming from an ISP background, I'm momentarily mystified about how I'd do
ISP now stands for... (Score:3)
Watch what you say, or they will be calling you a radical, a liberal, fanatical a CRIMINAL.
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Oh, let's all be sensible, logical, responsible, practical!
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Censored (Score:2)
"Thousands of Turkish demonstrators poured into central Istanbul yesterday to protest against the government's Internet censorship.
They did? I didn't hear anything about it.
Seriously, the BBC (in the UK) were very quiet about this happening, almost as if the BBC were censoring the news to show us populist garbage of football (soccer) results.
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Not just upcoming filters but existing censorship (Score:2)
Already there are estimates of 80000 websites censored - estimated because the list is not made public, nor the reason for censoring. Typically, the targetted sites are around : porn (ALL porn, though they like to wave around child porn as an excuse), atheism (dawkins banned), communism,
Coming Soon (Score:1)
Thousands Marched Against Censorship (Score:2)
Fu..d up government (Score:1)
And their names? Censored. (Score:1)
Hmmm. Drat. That sounded better in my head.
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That's what you get with democracy. People vote for things you don't agree with. If you don't like it, too bad. You still have to give them your tax money anyway.
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Well, in my opinion (take what that is worth) once monarchy started getting too much resistance, the rich got together and decided to create a government that was almost as easy to game, yet still gave the people an illusion their voice was important. Even if it meant sometimes letting a few commoners get into their club, that was a compromise the wealthy were willing to accept. So as long as the right representatives get elected, things like censorship happen and it is just accepted it as the "will of the
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So were the rights of the poor western Pennsylvania farmers being protected when Hamilton enacted his excise tax on whiskey in 1791? Or how about those wonderful Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798? Seems to me like the Constitution never really did what was expected of it...
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Seems the Constitution usually did what was expected of it by those who read the document.
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Unfortunately, that's not how democracy works. If 90% of the US voters decided it was legal to kill someone for whatever reason and then congress had a 90% vote to change the law to make it legal, then nothing would stop them from making it so. Because "Murder" is not listed in the constitution as something that must be prevented. It's assumed, but not stated.
Even if it was stated, with a 90% of the population, an amendment could be made to make it allowable.
In a democracy, a sufficiently large majority wil
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Turkish Goverment declared that filtering will be an OPTION!, it will not be a must for everyone.
It's not the optional filters we're protesting, it's the censorship.
This is what every parent will need to protect their children for porn, fundamental, and terrorism related sites. If you want unfiltered service you'll connect to site of ISP and set to unfiltered. For example if your child is on the internet, connect and set to child profile. That is it!
Please look at http://www.guvenliweb.org.tr/index_eng.php [guvenliweb.org.tr] for information.
WHAT information? Have you /seen/ that site? I can read both English and Turkish and there's no relevant information there, unless you mean the SOP along the lines of "we're here to protect the children and the teenages." Also, how do you know how the filtering is going to be implemented, maintained and used?
I smell something along the lines of "Oh look, they're saying something about us on Slashdot. Hey, you know English. Go defend us bef