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Reading stuff for one of my current classes got me wondering how effective the government is at regulating/censoring/etc. content speech on the Internet.

How effective are the legislative efforts to regulate speech on the web?

There should be ZERO regulation to begin with in regards to speech on the internet. Other things - debatable.

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ps. Love your sig, one of my favourite movies of all time.
Also, is the quote below your signature from Chuck Palahniuk's book Choke?

Originally posted by SnakeEyes
Reading stuff for one of my current classes got me wondering how effective the government is at regulating/censoring/etc. content speech on the Internet.

depends, the best example is probably the "great fire-wall of China", where the communist government blocks incomming internet signals, blocking sites they deem as being subversive or whatever.

They do a good job blocking them, but anyone who wants to get to the blocked sites knows how to.

The only good American examples might come from either the RIAA pressing police organizations to look investigate p2p sharing (with varying degrees of success) or the child porn investigations (which I've heard are working?).

Originally posted by SnakeEyes
How effective are the legislative efforts to regulate speech on the web?

which legislative efforts? The only "speech" that is regulated, in America/Europe/etc, is child pornography afaik... I guess intellectual property, but that isn't a speech issue...

Depends on what country you're in. In Saudi Arabia, all pornographic websites are blocked. A few years ago one of my then-employees went on the Hajj to Mecca. He told me that one night he was bored in his hotel room, and decided to check out some porn from his laptop. Instead, he was automatically redirected to a patriotic Saudi propaganda site. He tried other porn sites, and the same thing kept happening.

Heard North Korea is like China, but far more strict/controlling when it comes to internet censorship.

In Burma they just cut the fiber optic cables leading into certain parts of the country.

Search Websense...they're a bunch of Nazis use by corporations...most likely they will be use by governments in the future.

well if cyber bullying and arresting ppl is any indication i would say its very intrusive and not very constitutional

The problem with censorship is (among other things) that any earnest attempt must stand against the collective ingenuity of a bajillion teenagers looking for porn and another half-bajillion (wanna be) hackers looking to get into stuff. Any attempt has to be really well managed or it will be made a mockery of in less time than is worth the censorer's effort.

Also, the evil.

Originally posted by Quiero Mota
Depends on what country you're in. In Saudi Arabia, all pornographic websites are blocked. A few years ago one of my then-employees went on the Hajj to Mecca. He told me that one night he was bored in his hotel room, and decided to check out some porn from his laptop. Instead, he was automatically redirected to a patriotic Saudi propaganda site. He tried other porn sites, and the same thing kept happening.
So easy to get around that stuff: Proxy server.


Find a proxy server that is not blocked and pass traffic through that proxy.

It won't work for dynamic filtering or filtering for specific words (I'll let your imagination figure out things on that last one.)

There's also encryption and remote access options, as well. You could remotely access a terminal in another location (a location that is, preferrably, not blocking what you are looking for) and use the internet freely from that remote computer.

There is also P2P sharing that could help one avoid censorship. Actually, P2P is probably the easiest way around the blocking. There are also FTP, SFTP, and TFTP options as they most likely wouldn't block most protocols.

The most hilarious option is hiding images or data with steganography.




Almost all of my ideas are sh*t if they block almost all traffic that leaves and comes into the country.

I don't think that they should have anything to do with the internet.

like to point out they set up and arrested the two girls one cop guy.. lame.

Originally posted by dadudemon
So easy to get around that stuff: Proxy server.


Find a proxy server that is not blocked and pass traffic through that proxy.

It won't work for dynamic filtering or filtering for specific words (I'll let your imagination figure out things on that last one.)

There's also encryption and remote access options, as well. You could remotely access a terminal in another location (a location that is, preferrably, not blocking what you are looking for) and use the internet freely from that remote computer.

There is also P2P sharing that could help one avoid censorship. Actually, P2P is probably the easiest way around the blocking. There are also FTP, SFTP, and TFTP options as they most likely wouldn't block most protocols.

The most hilarious option is hiding images or data with steganography.




Almost all of my ideas are sh*t if they block almost all traffic that leaves and comes into the country.


You seem to have that down to a fine art; do you often go to countries where the net is banned and try to look up porn?

And I don't think that would work in SA. I'm pretty sure the best computer experts in the Kingdom are dedicated to blocking internet porn and non-Muslim religous websites (I'm serious).