Comments on: Dictatorships catching up with Web 2.0

Reporters Without Borders' Julien Pain warns that ethical blind spots surrounding technology may usher in a world where all our communications are spied on.

[Len Bullard]

And Your Point Is?

Sorry Julien, but the spying on communications has been a fact of the electronic age since the end of WWII. What the witless fielding of the World Wide Web did was to push this ability down from the central governments to the local governments and beyond to employers and even desperate housewives. What you are witnessing is the scaling effect down to the microlevels as the commercial interests of the software and hardware vendors drive the technology from the top to the second and third tiers of their marketplaces.

Tell you what: challenge the self-selected leaders of the web revolution to speak out on this topic and let's hear what they have to say. Take your cause not to the Microsofts and Googles of the world who will only turn you back with pre-written corporate replies, take it to the self-selected thought leaders such as Tim Berners-Lee, Jon Bosak, Tim Bray, James Gosling, Dan Connoly, and Adam Bosworth.

Those who bent the twig should now answer for the shape of the tree. They wanted to lead when the problems were easy and the solutions were many. Let's hear their thoughts now that the problem is hard and the solutions are few.

[Too Old For IT]

Stallman too

I'd be interested in the RMS take on dictatiorships censoring the internet.

Yet another who still demands to lead.

[chash360]

The solution is clear.

Communication should be free, period, end of story. There should be no crime associated with electronic comunication alone, there needs to be a real crime with real evidence before any legal action is taken. Digital evidence can be manufactured flawlessly, so there should be no thing as a purely electronic crime. The solution is this: a completely anonymous access system, a recordless dynamic network addressing scheme, with absolutely no plain text transmission, all cyphered on a session by session basis using encryption keys produced at random, on demand that are absolutely unpredictable (and their true form must not be possible for a human to comprehend or obtain). You will have such security when you can publish every detail of the inner workings of the system and still be ensured that it can not be hacked. Nothing can prevent access using stolen ID's and passwords, but if your traffic is encrypted, your ID and location completely anonymous, they will have to physically spy on you the old fashon way. Much of this is how the Internet used to be, but M$ changed all that, when execution code started being attahced to traffic and automatically run by clients (RPC, etc.). Then they started to track everything you do online in the OS directly. There is an answer, its coming soon......but it will not be on the Internet we know today.

[hackingbear]

Blacklisting "Communist Party"

This is an issue for any website operator in China. When I was in China working on a website which has a forum/blog feature, we have to put in filter to block the sensitive words. As a silent protest, in addition to the usual forbidden words like "Dalai Lama", "Taiwan", "Tiananmen" etc, I decided to enlarge my list to include words that are normally allowed:

- Communist Party
- Hu Jintao (the name of the president of China)
- Jiang Zemin (the former president)
- Li Peng (the former infamous Premier)

Hack, if we can't talk about Tiananmen, maybe we should not talk about the Party, good or bad, either. Any mentioning of these will not be posted.

I almost want to put "China" into the list but its usages may be too wide.

[petexeno]

Internet (lack of) privacy

Good article!

[petexeno]

Internet (lack of) privacy

Good article!

[burbalurba]

Diplomatic policy

I've wondered, why wouldn't the US work to deliver uncensored wireless broadband to dictatorships to undermine their rule, in conjunction with/in place of traditional diplomatic countermeasures?
You'd think that blocking such wireless signals (broadcast from multiple satellites)would be too difficult for a country such as North Korea to swing...

[index2006]

Abuse of Privileges

--Many years ago circa 1998 I wrote a candid critic to the webmaster(now semi-demised varig) about their awfull home page. On the very same day late evening my phone rings and guess who? It was varig's webmaster in person!! I asked him how he learned about my telephone number and he answered proudly that he had contacted my isp and that's it. He also was offensive and intimidating. I was appalled and shocked. I called my isp for explanations and they told me it was ok that practice. Since then i realised that words like privacy and identity meant absolutely the opposite in the internet. Today(ten years after) whenever i post a comment or simply surf the net i bear in mind that i'm doing it in public all out...as if i was in a stadium.
The lesson: Don't do anything i wouldn't do myself!!