From a government point of view, it is dangerous to give people too much information. The less information people have, the more likely they are going to do what they are told in times of a national emergency, when our elected officials decide that they need to take away the guns for people's safety, and declare martial law suspending all elections and other civil rights. This is for the safety of the people, mind you, and that is and always will be the first priority of government. When people don't have to think, they can just do what they are told, and they feel safer too.
very sincere and sarcastic at the same time. study the history of the US government, the CIA in particular. they want the people in this country to be powerless so they can carry out their agenda without resistance.
I downvoted you because it's not that easy. There are a lot of people in the CIA and they all have a different idea of what "keep the US safe" means; some of their ideas are contrasting the ideas that I have, but this is not an agenda. So, when somebody speaks using the terms that you do, I see it not as something factual and enlightening but as something that's oversimplifying an institution that's the work of a lot of individuals, all well-meaning, all probably a bit misguided, that collectively turns into a system with admitted mess-ups.
Or c) realizes comments phrased that way are poison to discussion threads.
I'm going to kill this whole subthread. I suppose what I need for these ruined threads is a way to freeze them without killing them, but I'm too busy reading applications now to write and release that.
But to me it is far more interesting to have a dialog with actual information than just comments. commenting is so totally meaningless and a waste of time. Like "Oh yeah, it really sucks" for example. Why even waste your time and mine by writing that? It's small talk. Small talk is so interwoven into American social discourse it's become a virus. I'll admit I'm not a very good writer. Putting thoughts into words is a very alien task to me. Words are too limiting for most of the thoughts I have. Here I am commenting and you can see how boring it is...
You don't have to write, you know. I don't read people who talk about things that suck in boring ways either, and while I occasionally have those thought I don't write them down.
Hacker News still for me signifies the power of signal over noise. Part of that is not saying things unless you have something worth saying.
I'm not sure if blocking a specific URL is the solution... it seems trivial to mirror content on the internet, and so any attempt to block specific content can't be accomplished via black-listing specific URL's... but even if real filtering of data were technologically feasible, it's completely defeated by end-to-end encryption like SSL, which could easily become standard if ISP's start inspecting your packets for "black-listed material".
So moral issues aside, this is a huge waste of effort no matter which way you turn it.
Good luck mirroring youtube, or all of the thousands of pages on the list. And you're out of luck if mirroring defeats the purpose of your site (eg gambling sites & that dentist site).
It's a sickening feeling that we ever have to consider this possibility.
I'm in Australia. I tried to look at wikileaks last night, it was "down" - the first thing that came to mind was being blocked. It was only after I asked some overseas friends on IM that I knew it was actually down down.
It's just like a free trip to China! I loved playing the "will this web site load" game there too - now I can play it at home!
This just sounds to me like the next step in a game of cat-and-mouse. What innovative technology can we geeks develop to circumvent these censorship systems?
We don't have to innovate anything, we already have VPNs. As long as the content exists on the Internet, one can asume that you will be able to access it from somewhere so the only action you need to take is route your traffic to that place before accessing the content.
With Tor it is so easy to go around these things that you install a program and push a button to have your trafic bypass any and all national filters, if only more people dared to put up servers so Tor wasn't so extremely slow.
> You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem
- Edward's law
The problem, I think, is precisely the one you highlight:
> If only more people dared to put up servers
"Society" can make it so that it's "dangerous" (for given values) and, more importantly, uninteresting (for the masses) to use the new tech, and thus it remains a non-solved problem, which could herald a bleaker future.
Secure Computing (a DARPA-funded network "security" company, not to be confused with the Trusted Computing chip), can identify and block Tor traffic. Have tried.
No need to develop them, they already exist. See Freenet, for example.
The problem with them is that they work a little too well. I'm probably in the 99th percentile (globally) in what I will defend as "free speech" and even I can't stomach the idea of running a Freenet node, between the content I'm not willing to defend as free speech, and the content that I may be willing to defend as free speech but have no desire to subsidize monetarily. It's going to be challenging getting much critical mass out of a system that can carry wikileaks-type info.
Well, without wanting to throw myself into sarcasm, because my english skills won't be good enough, i found that really scary to say the least. Maybe someone can provide us some historical background about censorship ?
One side of me feels like, it seems OBVIOUS that this kind of things (censorship) have been going on since a very long time, and that we may not be living the worse moment of human history concerning that matter.
But on the other hand, i can't help but feel like the power to punish people trying to circumvent censorship has never been so great and ubiquitous.
To the best of my knowledge I am not behind some censoring scheme, here in the UK my ISP is very liberal (did not block Wikipedia in the child pornography scandal) however I am unable to access wikileaks.org or mirrors they all time-out. I am slightly worried by this... please tell me wikileaks.org is down?
31 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 66.2 ms ] threada) 12 years old -or- b) hasn't read any books on the history of the US government
or simply living in some sort of dreamworld where the USA has never done anything to suppress the supposed "freedom" that the country was founded on.
EDIT: Fixed for vitriol.
I'm going to kill this whole subthread. I suppose what I need for these ruined threads is a way to freeze them without killing them, but I'm too busy reading applications now to write and release that.
Please?
I like to think that people in here aren't QUITE that retarded.
That said: irony is really annoying on this site, where people are expected to speak sensibly and clearly about what they think.
Hacker News still for me signifies the power of signal over noise. Part of that is not saying things unless you have something worth saying.
So moral issues aside, this is a huge waste of effort no matter which way you turn it.
I'm in Australia. I tried to look at wikileaks last night, it was "down" - the first thing that came to mind was being blocked. It was only after I asked some overseas friends on IM that I knew it was actually down down.
It's just like a free trip to China! I loved playing the "will this web site load" game there too - now I can play it at home!
With Tor it is so easy to go around these things that you install a program and push a button to have your trafic bypass any and all national filters, if only more people dared to put up servers so Tor wasn't so extremely slow.
- Edward's law
The problem, I think, is precisely the one you highlight:
> If only more people dared to put up servers
"Society" can make it so that it's "dangerous" (for given values) and, more importantly, uninteresting (for the masses) to use the new tech, and thus it remains a non-solved problem, which could herald a bleaker future.
http://nielsolson.us/Haversian/2008/06/fascist_bias_in_censo...
The problem with them is that they work a little too well. I'm probably in the 99th percentile (globally) in what I will defend as "free speech" and even I can't stomach the idea of running a Freenet node, between the content I'm not willing to defend as free speech, and the content that I may be willing to defend as free speech but have no desire to subsidize monetarily. It's going to be challenging getting much critical mass out of a system that can carry wikileaks-type info.
One side of me feels like, it seems OBVIOUS that this kind of things (censorship) have been going on since a very long time, and that we may not be living the worse moment of human history concerning that matter.
But on the other hand, i can't help but feel like the power to punish people trying to circumvent censorship has never been so great and ubiquitous.