Re: Content blocking - Singapore seems to manage??

[Edward Choh <da5id () singnet com sg>]

At 10:59 PM 6/20/99 -0400, Marcus J. Ranum wrote:
> > Have been looking at Singapore's SBA pages - and they don't report any
> > trouble at all.  They say they've not charged ANYONE, cost hasn't risen,
> > efficiency hasn't been lost, and business is booming.
> > Is it naieve to believe this?
First things first, I'm Singaporean so I think I should at least be
entitled to join in this conversation at a more _real_ level, since I have
to live with censorship everyday of my life. As far as it goes the SBA
enforces that all ISPs in the nation (of which there are 3) must firewall
off port 80 and use the clients must use proxies. It is as simple as that,
some sites eg. www.sex.com, www.playboy.com &c get their DNS pointed to
SBA"s default no-you-can't-see-this-page page. But what nobody told you was
that there's only a couple of hundred sites which is blocked by this
scheme. And maybe someone who has done a recent count can tell me how many
porn/nazi sites are there in the web, a lot of sites do not get blocked off.
        What I feel is the philosophy behind this is to block off _casual_
browsing to such sites, it is not meant to be a totalitarian road block on
things. No one can stop the Internet and especially in the age of high
technology, trying to stop information will simply drive people to find
other ways to get to it and I guess the government and the people (ie. me)
understand that. It's something like a really good tradeoff, the government
saves face by having controls on adult/undesirable content and the people
can save ourselves from adult/undesirable content _if_ we want to. I don't
think that this scheme is any worse than say US libraries having to install
software like SurfWatch or NetNanny on their internet machines.

> One of the problems with content blocking is handling violations.
> I suspect the easiest way to handle them is never to see them in
> the first place. ;) 
Which is true, the whole concept of solving crime is so that it doesn't
happen at all, if the government were to arrest everyone who exceeds the
speed limit by 5kmph or jaywalks, imagine the logistical problems the
courts and society will have to face. 

> which is kind of ridiculous. But then the whole idea of preventing
> communication over a communication channel is kind of ridiculous.
> The whole problem is basically unsolvable, so throwing technology
> at it just makes it complicated and basically unsolvable.
I feel that what the government is using (firewall and proxies) are not
overly complicated pieces of machinery/software (well, at least to geeks
who speak to each other in TCP/IP packets). And the government has not put
any other more complicated technologies to block traffic. Like I said, it
is not meant to block off everything. And if you use proxies enough, you
know that proxies ain't that bad a thing.

> for. You need something to point at when you decide to shut
> someone down because they've finally irritated someone enough
> to warrant it. My impression of Singapore is that a lot of the
> laws work that way: they are there to throw at you if you become
> a pest. 
Yeah, I think that you are right. The government or anyone who wants to be
Mr. Plantiff gets a powerup because of the way our society is organised,
everybody breaks the law but almost no one gets screwed for it, unless they
themselves tried to screw with the system. Take another rampant thing in
Singapore, all those data havens stuff in South East Asia you read in Snow
Crash were pretty much true, piracy is a major major problem here, but
everybody does it here. Pirated "Austin Powers II" was here a couple of
weeks back, even before it was actually screened in the US let alone
overseas, it could be gotten for less than US$5 if you were lucky.
Software, movies, music cds are all like that, and sure the police raids
the shops every other week, it has became a national pasttime to see the
police play cat and mouse with the pirates. But prosecution is always
brought to the distributors/sellers, never to the guy who buys them. And
everybody has them, I'm serious. The government reserves the right to sue
but almost never uses that right.

> For example, publishing magazines, etc, is regulated. But
> there's no regulation of ownership of high-output laser printers
> or copiers. The laws exists so you can "grease" the occasional
> "squeaky wheel." It actually makes _sense_ to run a country or a
> company in this manner. It fails when the people running the
> country or the company lack sense. Which argues for a benevolent
> dictatorship / benevolent totalitarian regime.
I think that a lot of people have misconceptions about Singapore that it is
a dictatorship or whatever other weird stuff you can think of. But I think
that I am pretty confident of the government of making real use of
technology to both regulate and improve society. As far as it goes for me,
until our society can judge and understand for itself what is good and bad
then maybe things like censorship will go away. Censorship has been a way
of life for us and it is not something that we are uncomfortable with,
Singapore is still primarily an Asian society, though we speak better
English than our respective Asian languages Singaporeans are still
uncomfortable with zero censorship. I think that when people talk about
censoring the Internet or whatever, one still has to deal with the facts
that not everyone is American, our society still prefer censorship because
it has worked for us so far and given us a really good sense of security.
And it's not really that bad after you learn how to punch through the firewall.

---
email: da5id () singnet com sg
i'm beautiphul and she's butterfly, but she's dead.
... until a christian emperor takes mass in the hagia sophia
http://www.serve.com/byzance - What it meant to be Byzantine.