From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 1996 12:18:44 +0800
To: declan@well.com (Declan McCullagh)
Subject: Re: China joins Singapore, Germany, ....
Message-ID: <2.2.32.19960911220537.00b17214@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 07:43 PM 9/10/96 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>I respectfully disagree. I spend most of my time going through sites like
>cnn.com, hotwired.com, news.com, altavista.digital.com, yahoo.com,
>lycos.com, hotbot.com, eff.org, well.com, mit.edu, whitehouse.gov, and so
>on. Search engines and directories, in particular, are good chokepoints to
>block.
>
>Blocking 100 sites would certainly be significant to me -- as long as
>they're the right ones. Before the technical fixes, that is.

But aren't you, the Nazis, Lee Kwan Yew, and the Heathen Chinee all
committing the "Web Fallacy" -- the belief that the Web = The Net?  Have you
seen *any* examples of mailing list censorship?  Even the mild newsgroup
censorship attempts are easily dodged by picking up your news from a distant
server (which is not a *technological* fix but an ordinary part of reading
news since many ISPs don't carry all 30K of groups in any case).

If almost all sites are ignored, if news is available from thousands of
servers, and if mailing lists, IRC, telnet, ftp, gopher, etc are ignored;
can we say that there is much actual net censorship going on?

DCF

"The Net -- where any 12 year old can defeat the governments of the world
with 15 minutes work."