Re: interesting article on Saudi Arabia's http filtering

[Randy Bush <randy () psg com>]

i was helping get the link up into kacst (their nsf equivalent) in
ryadh back in '94, and a rather grownup friend there, Abdulaziz A.
Al Muammar, who had his phd from the states and all that, explained
it to me something like this way.

    yes, to a westerner, our ways of shielding our society seem silly,
    and sometimes even worse.  but tell me, how do we liberalize and
    open the culture without becoming like the united states [0]?

not an easy problem.  considering the *highly* offensive material
that arrives in my mailbox (and i do not mean clueless nanog
ravings:-), my sympathy for abdulaziz increases monotonically.

so perhaps we should ask, rather than ranting, how do we, the
self-appointed ubergeeks of the net, think we can clean up our own
back yards, before we start talking about how others maintain
theirs?

randy

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[0] - which, americans need to realize is, to much of the civilized
      world, the barbarian hordes, sodom, and gomorrah rolled into
      one