From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 19:12:55 +0800
To: Arun Mehta <amehta@doe.ernet.in>
Subject: Re: China
Message-ID: <199602111021.CAA21477@ix2.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 07:18 PM 2/10/96 +0530, you wrote:
> Remember that starting this year, satellites of Iridium and other 
>LEO satellite projects will start to go up, spreading bandwidth around 
>the world. How will the Chinese government build a firewall against 
>satellites? Say, for instance orbiting anonymous remailers with pgp? Will 
>happen some day.

Remember that much of censorship, as with cryptography, is economics.
With Iridium satellite time at $3/minute, charged to the recipient,
it's well within the financial means of a Banned Pharmaceutical Wholesaler,
and well outside the financial means of an average Chinese university student,
partly because the Chinese economy has much lower price and wage structures
than the major Western economies do.

On the other hand, renting a few gigabytes per day of satellite broadcast time
to broadcast isn't out of the question, or at least renting a few tens of
megabytes per day wasn't out of the question a couple years ago :-)

On the other hand, as you say, if the Chinese government tries a Tien-an-men
in cyberspace, the students _will_ have better tanks.

#--
#				Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com / billstewart@attmail.com +1-415-442-2215
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs     Pager +1-408-787-1281