OT: national control of internet

From: James B. DiGriz <jbdigriz_at_dragonsweb.org>
Date: Thu Mar 7 15:01:26 2002

Mark Tapley wrote:
> Sellam said:
>
>
>>...governments want to try to control the
>>content, for various political and social reasons (political dissent,
>>porn, etc.) As we all know, try as they might, they won't be able to
>>control it, ....
>>
>
> There is a scary article in last week's Weekly Standard that makes
> this a more shaky proposition. Basically the contention in the article is
> that the internet in China effectively *has* been placed under the control
> of the Chinese government. The key technology there has been developed by
> Cisco, AT&T, and other telecom giants given suitable financial inducement
> by the chinese government, and as I understood the article, it involves
> putting firewalls around the entire country, with enough power to sniff
> packets for subversive terms to effectively render the internet unusable to
> elements unfriendly to the government.
> The article does hold out hope, based on cryptography, "pirate"
> links from Hong Kong, etc.
> Anyway, I'm not currently convinced that internet access is
> currently synonomous with freedom of information exchange.
> - Mark
>
>
>
>

Yes, I saw that article, too. Oddly enough, the internal firewalls that
  the running-dog corporate, capitalist lackeys of the evil, repressive
Chinese government have installed, while great for surveilling the
populace and shutting down hotbeds of sedition like internet cafes or
Falun Gong websites, appears to have done nothing to stem the tidal wave
of spam, worms, and DDOS attacks coming from Chinese servers, leading to
selfless, concerned, civic-minded sysadmins around the world to
basically netblock China. An external firewall as well. Funny how that
wasn't mentioned.

Topicality: Maybe we can punish them by refusing to ship our old
computers to them?

jbdigriz
Received on Thu Mar 07 2002 - 15:01:26 GMT