US is set to censor internet

[unity100]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/11/16/195258

This practice is present in turkey as of now. and it is easily and extensively abused by any private interest, and governing party.

basically its censorship veiled behind copyright/antiterror excuses.

[Aaron]

If they start blocking out this internet, we'll just build a new one!

[Brittany]

Start keeping pen pals again? :-)

I just can't get worked up about this stuff anymore. A few bumps in the road aren't going to keep the shift from happening, and it's so close I can taste it. Pretty soon, maybe we won't even need the internet. Maybe we'll all just learn telepathy!

[unity100]

this is not related to 'off topic' though. it is an important aspect of the life on this planet. when this comes, private interests and their men in government will be able to block any website they deem dangerous to their interests. these may include conspiracy sites, truth sites, leak sites, and even sites that endanger the established controlling religions, like this one.

a similar misplacement was done with another thread, 'central logos of this universe' too. its not related to science and technology. there IS a central logos of this universe, and it is the origin of everything in this universe. its the information we get directly from Ra material.

[Ali Quadir]

There's one tiny problem for them though.. No one has been able to police the web so far. Even enormous and suppressive nations like Iran and China have not been able to do this. When Iran tried this they effectively turned of the internet and still the students that were protesting came through to the outside. The internet was actually designed to not be vulnerable to centralized control. Theres all kinds of crypto systems and crypto tunnels in place. And if the US blocks access you can make a safe bet that that will be circumvented in minutes. In Holland they're trying to block a popular pirating site, you know, the one with the boat. It was actually scheduled to be taken offline months ago.. And since that time it indeed had a few hours downtime.

To me it falls back to an ancient hacker idea, information wants to be free. You don't lock up the data. Partly because of the ethics, but mostly because in the end you just can't.

What will happen though if these plans are pursued is that we will see more and more civil injustice taking place... Attempts to whip the people into submission and this will for 99% only hurt the innocent.

And there are alternatives but they require techies and visionaries more than politicians can offer. As popular news sites are showing you just can't stop the mob mind. The round routes around censorship are already fully in place and tested by the warez groups, which incidentally includes groups which existed before the internet.

Switching from warez to news and propaganda is already happening. Wikileaks uses those channels too and once it's out there it's everywhere.

It needs a new approach, openness and the implications that this brings. But openness brings tremendous power with it.

[unity100]

Turkish government has been able to very well suppress internet to great extent, and still appear democratic and pro freedoms.

The youth in iran was heavily prosecuted.

the pirating site with the boat, thepiratebay, is a swedish website. u.s. lobbies have been able to pressurize their cronies in sweden to render site inoperable and twisted swedish justice to hamper the site. they had to move away.

technologies exist to thwart proxy usage to access prohibited sites, it can be done by deep packet inspection.

............

negatives will control you as much as you let them. there is no end to it.

[Questioner]

u100, I think this is a valuable topic. Thanks for introducing it.

Based on my research about software and network engineering, I am more optimistic than you. You may already be familiar with all these engineering points - if so, let's discuss them - but I'm including them for full context. This is directly at the heart of my professional expertise.

In my career developing and supporting online systems, I have read many of the fundamental technical papers about Internet technologies from the 60's to the present day, along with memoirs by those involved and reports by analysts and journalists who have studied the history.

The original design goals for what became the Internet were well defined in a research paper from the RAND Institute. As with all that I mention here, I can look up the original reference if you're not able to find it for yourself.

The original end: make a communications system that could survive even in a nuclear attack, even if many communication lines and switching stations were destroyed. The original means: replace circuit switching (requiring a switch to hold a line open for a call) with packet switching, dynamically routing each chunk of a message through whatever route happens to be open.

Even if some links or switches are up and down in a war, each individual packet uses whatever means are available, moment to moment, to get one hop closer to their destination. At the receiving end, requests are made for any missed packets to be sent again.

This design is still used in today's Internet. The packets are anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand bytes.

From an engineering point of view, Ali is right that there is no difference between a node that disappears because it was hit by a bomb, and a node that disappears because the government censored it. All remaining available nodes automatically participate in rerouting the traffic.

Dynamically routed peer to peer packet switching has overtaken circuit switching in so many applications.

Inside computers, memory and peripheral interconnect busses inside computers use interleaved packet transactions, often with no central controller - as, for instance, in PCI Express having no single authority on the bus after autoconfiguration at boot time.

Between computers, Ethernet has no central authority on the wire or in the air, but uses collision detection: everyone may talk at any time, and if there's interference, everyone waits a random amount of time and tries again.

Between networks, the Internet's TCP/IP protocol stack, originally a lowest common denominator between networks, is now widely used inside networks.

VOIP is destroying the economics of circuit-switched telephone networks. Linux development uses distributed version control. Downloads are optimized with content distribution networks and peer to peer torrent software. With protocols such as ZFS over iSCSI to multiple storage nodes, content could be securely copied worldwide, automatically.

You're right that deep packet inspection can be used against proxies. That approach is only useful for packets that are in cleartext. In the next year to few years, we will see more widespread use of encryption in routine traffic.

The faster Javascript runtimes will allow downloading code to the browser that dynamically encrypts and decrypts traffic on the fly, inside the user's session, leaving no trace in the operating system after the session ends.

Dynamic languages like Smalltalk and Lisp are now available with Javascript back-ends, as for example with the Lively Kernel, Clamato, and Parenscript; and with the most common already available browser plug-ins, such as Vista Smalltalk for Silverlight/Mono Moonlight, and OpenLaszlo for Flash. With a dynamic language and mobile runtime engine, objects, functions and code can migrate between client and server automatically. The flexibility of these systems makes for faster time to market, reduced maintenance and improved modularity. A side effect is that it is impossible to statically inspect code and be certain exactly what it will do at runtime, or even which functions will be executed let alone where they will run.

The weak centralized point is the domain name system, but if any proxy can be reached outside the firewall, then the true identity and content of any server can be obtained. The new Web Sockets protocols will allow routine cross-domain proxy use for popular services like Google and Facebook.

The current sticking point on the encrypt-everything world is runtime performance of the necessary math code in the browser. Through Google's now-in-development Native Code browser plugin sandbox, plus OpenCL's use of graphics chips as general-purpose massively parallel number crunchers, encryption and steganography can be made realtime.

This all means that a user's text can be scrambled, hidden inside slightly noise image and sound files, rerouted through Youtube, Google, and Facebook, all inside the same encrypted channels that governments will soon urge everyone to use to avoid identity theft.

This puts authoritarian regimes in a bind. If they block the technology used by the most popular services worldwide, their economies and people will obviously notice the disappearance of these services, and identity theft crimes will increase. In a world of redirectable web sockets carrying encrypted, embedded traffic that may or may not include runtime objects that create new code and forward it, an attempt at a national firewall may even lock the leaders out of their own offshore bank accounts!

I see these technological trends as unstoppable. Within five years, it will be technically impossible for a government to effectively block, filter, or censor portions of the Internet. Any attempt to do so will be seen by the people, and more importantly by the governments themselves, as futile attempts to cut off their nose to spite their face.

The human desire for interpersonal communication and personal growth is ultimately more powerful and resourceful than the manipulations of the dark cabal. I believe we will really see this tide turning in the next few years.

[Ali Quadir]

technologies exist to thwart proxy usage to access prohibited sites, it can be done by deep packet inspection.

Deep packet inspection is extremely expensive to be applied on a large scale and it is unable to deal with encryption or polymorphism. In effect it's absolutely pointless as long as encryption exists... Which is why in some countries encryption is illegal.. But that would mean everyone could sniff company secrets which might cut into the countries income. Also there are methods to embed information into for example a family photo, you simply can't detect if there is embedded and encrypted information in regular media files.

I agree, they'll try and just like in Iran and China people will get in trouble for it. But it's the attempt to control with heavy handed techniques more than actually being able to do it that causes the problem. You'll get idiotic responses like as soon as they figure out youtube had a video with embedded messages they'll block the whole of youtube which of course is completely pointless and extremely annoying to everyone else.

We already see those responses.

[unity100]

u100, I think this is a valuable topic. Thanks for introducing it.

Based on my research about software and network engineering, I am more optimistic than you. You may already be familiar with all these engineering points - if so, let's discuss them - but I'm including them for full context. This is directly at the heart of my professional expertise.

In my career developing and supporting online systems, I have read many of the fundamental technical papers about Internet technologies from the 60's to the present day, along with memoirs by those involved and reports by analysts and journalists who have studied the history.

The original design goals for what became the Internet were well defined in a research paper from the RAND Institute. As with all that I mention here, I can look up the original reference if you're not able to find it for yourself.

im well aware what was internet designed for. routing around nuclear war damage and all that.

however :

technologies exist to thwart proxy usage to access prohibited sites, it can be done by deep packet inspection.

Deep packet inspection is extremely expensive to be applied on a large scale and it is unable to deal with encryption or polymorphism. In effect it's absolutely pointless as long as encryption exists... Which is why in some countries encryption is illegal.. But that would mean everyone could sniff company secrets which might cut into the countries income. Also there are methods to embed information into for example a family photo, you simply can't detect if there is embedded and encrypted information in regular media files.

I agree, they'll try and just like in Iran and China people will get in trouble for it. But it's the attempt to control with heavy handed techniques more than actually being able to do it that causes the problem. You'll get idiotic responses like as soon as they figure out youtube had a video with embedded messages they'll block the whole of youtube which of course is completely pointless and extremely annoying to everyone else.

We already see those responses.

numerous countries are implementing these, even though they are expensive. there is private interest money behind it after all. for example in turkey, the filter has been working for a long while. if the site ip is banned, the only way for people to reach them becomes proxies. and, majority of population do not have the technical aptitude to do that. they can learn from each other.

however, the other end is covered too :

they are wanting to implement 3 strikes laws like the hadopi in france. kicking people off the internet for copyright infringement. moreover, they are trying to hold service providers liable for any websites and content on their network.

even with that, the websites still can move to a country which do not employ these practices, and have sufficient freedom of expression, and users may use proxies and still continue.

but,

there is acta now. they are trying to push usa's dmca and various other copyright/patent practices to all the world except russia and china. if acta is ratified, even if a website is operating in a country with freedom of expression after escaping usa censorship, can still be pressurized legally and easily by usa private interests to shut down, through acta treaty.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/11/16/2132214

usa had trouble trying to get wikileaks, which escaped to sweden, to shut down. it wasnt able to succeed, and resorted to assaulting the character of its founder probably through their proxies in sweden, in order to discredit it and to prosecute it.

if acta comes up, they will be much more at ease to do that. actually, it goes for any private interest, in any country.

this is generally being veiled behind copyright and counterfeiting excuses. but, if you look at what can be claimed an infringement in usa, judging from the court cases, copyright is already being used as an excuse to shut down competitors, whistleblowers, dissent, opposition, any source undesirable.

basically, they are trying to control the internet. this is what's happening here. 'being expensive' is not a problem - despite defense was the most expensive spending on the face of the planet, private interests had no problem having governments spend whopping budgets on defense, to maintain world dominance for their profits.

[Ali Quadir]

We're not contradicting each other. I'm saying they won't succeed but will put pressure on people and reduce civil rights. You're saying that they're attempting to do it and in the process are reducing civil rights.

This European Union thing is getting more uncomfortable by the minute. That's for sure. Can I ask you a slightly off topic question Unity? What do you perceive the attitude of the average Turk to be on this? Do your people on the streets actually want to be a member? And why? Or why not?

[AnthroHeart]

Interesting perspectives everyone.
I'm glad that redundancy is built into the web.

[unity100]

We're not contradicting each other. I'm saying they won't succeed but will put pressure on people and reduce civil rights. You're saying that they're attempting to do it and in the process are reducing civil rights.

they may succeed if it is not opposed.

This European Union thing is getting more uncomfortable by the minute.

european union ?

european parliament (legislative body of european union) was the one which told eu negotiators to basically reject all the important points of acta, in a resolution. the resolution was taken because parliament members have decided that acta infringed upon freedom.

http://votewatch.eu/cx_vote_details.php?...56&lang=en

eu has basically been defending people's rights so far.

That's for sure. Can I ask you a slightly off topic question Unity? What do you perceive the attitude of the average Turk to be on this? Do your people on the streets actually want to be a member? And why? Or why not?

its complicated. they generally see eu membership a good thing. a lot has been rather turned off by how eu applied double standards to turkey. (much harder than what they required from romania etc).

however, the majority of people are still way too conservative, and want eu to accept turkey as it is, with all its shortcomings, radicalism, heavy handedness, religious hardlinerism, all faults.

they are not realistic. in this state, turkey has no place in eu.

[turtledude23]

Let's do something. The internet is my life, I'd fight to the death to keep it open, neutral, free, decentralized.

[unity100]

www.eff.org
www.savetheinternet.com

[unity100]

more gems out of u.s. :

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/11/19/1316215

they want dhs to be able to control 'critical' private networks.

this will probably not only encompass icann, ip names and numbers, but also many other important private services that a lot of the internet uses.

[Richard]

Its far less likely to happen in the US than many other places. There is a strong rebellious streak in americans when it comes to freedom on the internet. The courts have held up freedom of speech cases...even if they somehow seemed wrong...in order to conform to the letter of the law with regards to freedom of speech.

The problem, as I see it, is the plethora of websites proclaiming doom and gloom and one conspiracy after another. At what point does the search for truth become paranoia?

My rule of thumb is that 90% of what you read on the internet is absolute BS...the other 10% requires some thought. Our task is seperating the wheat from the chaff.

But isn't that exactly what life on this ball is all about in any case?

Richard

[unity100]

Its far less likely to happen in the US than many other places. There is a strong rebellious streak in americans when it comes to freedom on the internet. The courts have held up freedom of speech cases...even if they somehow seemed wrong...in order to conform to the letter of the law with regards to freedom of speech.

the earlier bill about censoring websites to ensure security and copyright already passed senate committee with 16-0. noone voted against it.

the only thing that is preventing it from being passed entirely may be little time being left before the vacation.

there isnt any opposition to it from the houses so far.

The problem, as I see it, is the plethora of websites proclaiming doom and gloom and one conspiracy after another. At what point does the search for truth become paranoia?

My rule of thumb is that 90% of what you read on the internet is absolute BS...the other 10% requires some thought. Our task is seperating the wheat from the chaff.

But isn't that exactly what life on this ball is all about in any case?

Richard

this is not any random website. this is slashdot.

[Ali Quadir]

This is indeed happening, the information about this isn't from the doom and gloom sites, they tend to not even recognize this as a problem... I don't really think they'll be able to pull it off. There's too much opposing them. But yeah. They are trying.

Slashdot is like the new york times for nerds. And often comments there are more informative and informed than the original articles.

[unity100]

There's too much opposing them.

who is opposing them ?

nothing in senate, congress. these are the places this will pass from.

[Richard]

There's too much opposing them.

who is opposing them ?

nothing in senate, congress. these are the places this will pass from.

Nothing except a newly elected majority in the house of Representatives. Plus 6 new Senate seats...not a majority, but neither does it give the current regime a majority either. If they don't pass this bill in the current lame duck session, it will never get out of committee in the next session.

Will this help or hinder?...I don't know. But the last election changes everything. Especially since many of these newly elected representatives ran on the platform of limited big govt.

I have hope that the limited govt electees will see this bill for what it is...a governmental power grab.

You might also note the status of this bill on the site you listed...it is still in committee....not even out for a vote....things can stay in comittee for years

Richard

[Ali Quadir]

They have made many attempts to get this rolling Unity, but they've failed on numerous occasions already. This is not a battle about to begin, in fact one could say it began in France in the 18th century.

[unity100]

Nothing except a newly elected majority in the house of Representatives. Plus 6 new Senate seats...not a majority, but neither does it give the current regime a majority either. If they don't pass this bill in the current lame duck session, it will never get out of committee in the next session.

Will this help or hinder?...I don't know. But the last election changes everything. Especially since many of these newly elected representatives ran on the platform of limited big govt.

I have hope that the limited govt electees will see this bill for what it is...a governmental power grab.

reelection will probably end up with republican majority, which will mean that things will be at the hands of the group which actually started the filth that is ACTA :

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/6/24/acta-le...il-within/

acta is an international treaty, it is seeking to enforce u.s. copyright and patent rules, bring 3 strikes and you are banned from internet laws without no court order (a committee of trade interests, copyright holders are going to issue warnings through isps), and many more stuff.

they cooked it, started pushing it around before 2006.

had sources within European Union, and later European parliament didnt step in, and first started leaking the agreement, and then outright demanding that the treaty text be disclosed to entire world without any conditions, usa would be still trying to push it to every country in the world without letting the public know. it had been approx 6 months, that a vote of european parliament with a whopping 600 or so out of 660 members, had forced the negotiators participating in the process to disclose the treaty text. even still after that there were 4-5 countries, namely usa, japan, korea and a few others, who were resisting the disclosure of the terms to public.

basically, they were totally creating laws, without participation of any parliament, and without the knowledge of their public.

only ones who had easy and unlimited access to the text, were the usa lobbyists who prepared it with republicans.

even a comment of u.s. trade representative, ensuring a lobbyist that 'the participation of consumer groups would be kept to a minimum', had leaked into internet.

imagine the level filth has reached.

You might also note the status of this bill on the site you listed...it is still in committee....not even out for a vote....things can stay in comittee for years

Richard

democrats are in the pocket of big media. which wants to make a cable tv out of internet. republicans ARE the ones who prepared acta to push it to everyone. even if, suddenly another group get majority, like a miracle, private interests still have too much money to lobby.

all it boils down to capitalism inadvertently affecting politics again.

the true miracle would be greens to win majority in upper and lower houses in usa.

They have made many attempts to get this rolling Unity, but they've failed on numerous occasions already. This is not a battle about to begin, in fact one could say it began in France in the 18th century.

these are probably being pushed around, because ACTA is almost dead now.

Eu banned its most important terms from being applied anywhere within eu. and it is binding. no 3 strikes, no isp liability, no takedown of sites without court order. no dmca pushing.

mexican parliament also called total rejection of acta. india is also against its terms. russia , china arent even in. the treaty is way gimped down now, but still carries dangerous things like dmca.

so, seeing that this thing is probably dead, (Eu Parl wont let it go active nomatter what in eu) they are trying to do it through other means, like this 'security&copyright censorship bill' (coica) and giving dhs the right to govern networks.

European parliament, practically saved entire world from acta, more or less.

but, now americans need to save america from coica, and other similar filth..

[turtledude23]

Google has a strong interest in net neutrality because the more information they gather the more accurate their search algorithm is, that's one of the reasons why their goal is organizing all the worlds information. The more central reason, in my opinion, is that they have a genuine love of knowledge and believe all people are entitled to all knowledge. Alot of people like calling Google a privacy threat and big brother and stuff but honestly I haven't seen anything to indicate that, quite the opposite: the Chinese government demanded Google give them access to a dissidents gmail account and they refused (so China hired hackers to hack them, "Project Aurora", also see GhostNet). Google was a large contributor to Obama's campaign and Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) is on some kind of technology advisory committee to the president. They could stop this.

Vint Cerf, one of the creators of TCP/IP says government control of the internet is impossible: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1420...14?sp=true

With encryption tools like Off the Record Messaging plugin for Pidgin, VPNs, HTTPS, it becomes very hard to decrypt messages if the sending and receiving system is well implemented. The only threat to our current systems of encryption is quantum computing, which won't be viable for 15 years by some estimates.

From an engineering point of view, Ali is right that there is no difference between a node that disappears because it was hit by a bomb, and a node that disappears because the government censored it. All remaining available nodes automatically participate in rerouting the traffic.

While this is true governments will want to take down specific web sites/servers, not routing nodes, which there's usually only one copy of, unless you have a smart system like WikiLeaks does. That's the weakpoint of the internet, not so much DNS. But there are ways around that: anonymous P2P and darknets like Freenet and GNUnet are decentralized, P2P-based alternative to HTTP.

There are ways around blocked website like proxies, VPNs, Tor, I2P and Psiphon.

In other words: even if the governments of "developed" countries started censoring websites (like Australia is doing), we'd find ways around it. The worst case scenario is that the mainstream doesn't have access to real news and only the tech savvy underground would, but most people don't really care about how corrupt their government is, or at least, they don't care enough to do something about it.

edit: the only absolute weakness I see is that internet access is in the hands of ISPs, who could - if laws permit - charge insane amounts of money, with slower speeds, thereby discouraging non-essential internet activites. the solution would be creating a new global data exchange network, a task that becomes more feasible over time as technology advances and becomes cheaper. where there's a will there's a way.

edit2: this article in Wired summarizes the issue well http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/c...ship-bill/

[Ali Quadir]

edit: the only absolute weakness I see is that internet access is in the hands of ISPs, who could - if laws permit - charge insane amounts of money, with slower speeds, thereby discouraging non-essential internet activites. the solution would be creating a new global data exchange network, a task that becomes more feasible over time as technology advances and becomes cheaper. where there's a will there's a way.

That's an idea indeed... Before the internet there was already something like global mail...

You'd have a mail client running on your local system. And it would push it's mail to a peer over a modem to modem phone line connection. Receiving what the other side has queued up for him. It took a week as most systems only had daily synchronizations to reduce costs, but e-mail did arrive on the other side of the world through this relatively low tech civilian network.

But more importantly if prices per megabyte were to skyrocket on the regular web this would bankrupt many businesses who are today totally dependent on the web. And even totalitarian fascist regimes are sensitive to that. Since any kind of connection would theoretically enable the transfer of encrypted data it becomes impossible to exclude this without shutting down the entire web. This is why they have no effective anti worm technology apart from shielding every client computer.

So what they're doing essentially only hurts business and individuals who are not that tech savvy. And that's a possibility since the politicians are often not savvy enough to realize this. But at least it means many businesses will lobby to keep the lines open.

[unity100]

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/11/20/1437259

Thankfully, someone stopped the bill for now.

"Senator Wyden of Oregon has objected to a bill in committee that if passed would have given the government the ability to censor the Internet. His objection effectively stop its current passing forcing it to be introduced again if the bill is continue. Which it may not. Oregonians please send pats on the back to this man."

With encryption tools like Off the Record Messaging plugin for Pidgin, VPNs, HTTPS, it becomes very hard to decrypt messages if the sending and receiving system is well implemented. The only threat to our current systems of encryption is quantum computing, which won't be viable for 15 years by some estimates.

you are underestimating the dedication of private interests, and any effect they can have on government. echelon has been decrypting any radio wave communication out of new zealand all throughout the cold war. and it had a worldwide network. granted this was a military effort for a defense issue. however, it signifies how much money can be spent on these. if the see the need, they could spend trillions on server farms to decrypt data.

---

An important reason why private interests are trying to reduce internet or censor it is this :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_governance

direct democracy initiatives had been taking off very fast. green party of canada, for example, got a huge boost with theirs. (even if it was derailed by the party leader when he realized it was threat to his party boss position later).

yet, apparently this has become a trend now :

http://www.metagovernment.org/ An umbrella group of numerous open source governance projects; now using the term collaborative governance
http://aktivdemokrati.se/ Aktivdemokrati (Swedish) — Direct democratic party, running for the parliament of Sweden
http://www.openpolitics.es/ Spanish Open Politics
http://zelea.com/project/votorola/home.xht Software for building consensus and reaching decisions on local, national and global levels.

the only society i would continue to live in, would be one with a direct democracy, and sufficient education/intellectual levels.

[turtledude23]

you are underestimating the dedication of private interests, and any effect they can have on government. echelon has been decrypting any radio wave communication out of new zealand all throughout the cold war. and it had a worldwide network. granted this was a military effort for a defense issue. however, it signifies how much money can be spent on these. if the see the need, they could spend trillions on server farms to decrypt data.

Yes, Echelon, the NSA, and equivelant agencies in other countries do have the resources to decrypt selected messages with even the strongest encryption, but not even all the super computers in the world combined would have the power to decrypt communications on a mass scale, even if everyone was only using modestly good encryption like AES-128, let alone higher bit(rates? forgot the term). Encryption on a mass scale is something money can not solve with the current state of technology. Alot is being invested into quantum computing, possibly by the organizations you are concerned about, but it's a long ways away in the future. And I think there currently are encryption algorithms that are theorized to be resistant to quantum decryption because they're based on elliptic curves instead of factoring large numbers.

I appreciate your concern about private interests but if you look at the history of the Internet it has been very fragile throughout its decades of development, private interests could have stepped in at any time to destroy it and they didn't. The free, open world wide web was created in 1993, before that were private centralized networks you had to pay to add content to like AOL and CompuServe. Despite being there first and having more financial resource, they lost to the apparent underdog. Alot of good people fought to keep the internet free and open, and they won, but the other factor involved is that - other than STS adepts - most "half STS" people [nowhere near 95% and not enough self discipline to get there, but still huge jerks] (e.g. corrupt politicians and businessmen) do not have good knowledge of technology and have no intention to learn about it because in their little world anything they want comes from verbal orders, they can't fathom the possibility that machines in every household that were put there by geeks are beyond their control. And the few that try to learn about technology find that it keeps accelerating in its progress. You would have to be very self disciplined to spend your precious time reading about silly machines when you'd rather be at a strip club or great gatsby party.

The very nature of the internet makes it more likely that STO will win this battle of technology.

[Richard]

Unity, what all this really boils down to is worldview. If it makes you happy to see conspiracy around every corner, then by all means have at it. If pessimism is a coat that fits you well…then wear it….its your path.

For myself, I am an optimist. I have great hopes for the future of the internet…and humanity in general. And I refuse to live my life in fear of what…”might”…. happen. Your entire scenario is a progression of “ if this happens”…then this will happen”…”and if that happens….then watch out for this”…..

Perhaps a return to the “now” might be in order…..or not…as you prefer.

Richard

[seejay21]

The Internet is the most powerful weapon ever divised by the United States. It is more powerful than a nuclear bomb, biological or chemical warfare, or Imperial expansion. The constant flow of free information that is imposible to block by ruthless dictatorships is the goal. The only ones that are trying to censor the Interent are the governments that feel that allowing their citizens and subjects access will undermind their rule.

There is no need to censor the Interent in Amercica. There is always oposition to each point of view. I could see the goverment in the US as offering thier own version of diss-information to counter the beliefs of others, but not censor it. Why censor when you can use it as a tool to advance your own agenda?

The Interent is an American weapon, a genie strategically let out of a bottle, to advance the ideals of American freedom. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all. The idea that the US would need to censor the Interenet is counter intuitive. The whole point in "releasing" the Internet was that it would be imposible to bring down, block, destroy or censor. That is the point of the weapon. You can't stop it.

[turtledude23]

The Internet is the most powerful weapon ever divised by the United States. It is more powerful than a nuclear bomb, biological or chemical warfare, or Imperial expansion. The constant flow of free information that is imposible to block by ruthless dictatorships is the goal. The only ones that are trying to censor the Interent are the governments that feel that allowing their citizens and subjects access will undermind their rule.

There is no need to censor the Interent in Amercica. There is always oposition to each point of view. I could see the goverment in the US as offering thier own version of diss-information to counter the beliefs of others, but not censor it. Why censor when you can use it as a tool to advance your own agenda?

The Interent is an American weapon, a genie strategically let out of a bottle, to advance the ideals of American freedom. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all. The idea that the US would need to censor the Interenet is counter intuitive. The whole point in "releasing" the Internet was that it would be imposible to bring down, block, destroy or censor. That is the point of the weapon. You can't stop it.

That's an interesting theory, it might be true, but we still need to fight for the internet's openness, we can't depend on large organizations to do it for us. As we have seen with this bill in the senate, one senator with campaign contributions from hollywood has the power to censor what should be uncensorable if his fellow senators don't stop him.

[unity100]

Unity, what all this really boils down to is worldview. If it makes you happy to see conspiracy around every corner, then by all means have at it. If pessimism is a coat that fits you well…then wear it….its your path.

For myself, I am an optimist. I have great hopes for the future of the internet…and humanity in general. And I refuse to live my life in fear of what…”might”…. happen. Your entire scenario is a progression of “ if this happens”…then this will happen”…”and if that happens….then watch out for this”…..

Perhaps a return to the “now” might be in order…..or not…as you prefer.

Richard

private interests funding lobbyists over 10 years to create various laws to that end, does not classify as 'conspiracy theory'. its a true attempt at control.

............

this is not something related to optimism/pessimism . its not something that is not known, like, how the weather will be next year.

there is someone, saying 'i am going to do this', and spending power and effort to that end. at this point, it is a practical matter. whether the resources the person has, is enough to achieve his/her end or not.

The Interent is an American weapon, a genie strategically let out of a bottle, to advance the ideals of American freedom. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all. The idea that the US would need to censor the Interenet is counter intuitive. The whole point in "releasing" the Internet was that it would be imposible to bring down, block, destroy or censor. That is the point of the weapon. You can't stop it.

life, liberty and pursuit of happiness to all have little meaning for private interests. they have been actively grinding down those liberties for the last 2 decades.