How effective is government regulation on the Internet?
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?
Re: How effective is government regulation 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?).
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...
Re: How effective is government regulation on the Internet?
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.
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.
Re: Re: How effective is government regulation on the Internet?
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.
Re: Re: Re: How effective is government regulation on the Internet?
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).
KMC Community Forums
Jun 14th, 2010 06:43 PM
