From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 1996 21:01:13 +0800
To: "Michael Peponis" <peponmc@fe3.rust.net>
Subject: RE: Yeo, Pea-brained Imbecile
Message-ID: <199603210305.TAA26073@ix6.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 09:15 PM 3/18/96 +0000, "Michael Peponis" <peponmc@fe3.rust.net> wrote:
>Here is my two cents on the whole subject of countries wanting to recieve the 
>technical and economic benifits of the internet, but reject groups they have 
>moral or ethical problems with.
...
>Given the plethera of reports like this, I will start maintaining a list of 
>country that will not be given access to my site, no FTP, no HTTP, no nothing,
>on top of that, I will hard code into all the new versions of my network aware
> programs to check  for a domain subfix, if it is on of the black
> list, the software will not  function.
....
>They want isolation, let them enjoy the full benifits of that decision.

I've got the opposite view - I think it's worth making access to widespread
parts of the Internet _easier_ for people from countries whose governments
don't want their subjects\\\\\\\\citizens to access them.  Aside from any
good that can be accomplished by building, say, a Singapore Banned
Religion/Politics
web index (since Singapore's recently announced policy is to censor
Usenet access but not http access, so auto-indexing newsgroups would work),
any technology that makes it easier to work around censorship will be useful
for Yankees who want to access controversial groups after Buchanan's elected
(:-)
One part of the problem is building convenient mirrors in free countries;
another is building packet/mail/http/etc. laundries that can be easily ported
to make it difficult to block access to _them_.  Some of the Andrew File System
approaches for the Zundelsite project were interesting, since it's harder
to block access to widely supported back channels, and since it provides
people with non-subversive reasons to support a relay site, they're more likely
to be widespread and supported at sites that censors don't want to totally
block.

Now, building a blacklist of censorious _government_ sites, like *.gov.sg
(or whatever) and blocking them is more interesting.
#--
#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281
# "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened
# to halt the growth of Internet use.  [...] Government control of news media 
# generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and
# social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who
# exceed the permissable."  - US government statement on China...