Turks take to the streets against web filters Thousands of people in Turkey took to the streets yesterday to protest government plans for compulsory internet filtering. All connections in the country will have to choose between four different levels of interference in their internet access. There were demonstrations in Istanbul and 40 cities around the country. Thousands …
... once you accept that censoring anything at all is a good idea.
Why? Because it puts /some/ use of that filter back into the people's hands, like, oh, have the government nanny your connection so that your children don't need to see "badness".
Personally, this is the sort of thing I'd argue would be swell for ISPs to offer though my choice would invariably be "no filtering at all, thank you". The point is that I can see the use in filtering and indeed there is a commercial market for such, say for schools and enterprises that feel the urge to police their employees' "surfing habits".
But the problem is that there's censorship at all, and so it's curious that the Turks are only now protesting, now that they get _more_ choice, not less. Of course, they have also had their noses rubbed in the fact that they are (and were already) being censored. Ungrateful bunch.
On a meta note: Various media reported that euroland was against censorship and all that. Well, no, it isn't. It is itself contemplating a euroland-wide censorship against the usual badness. And of course the UK already has such in wide deployment, without user choice.
Who's getting the wider choice here, eh?
Where's the riots here then, eh?
So, Turkey has "intermittent and somewhat random internet censorship with about 7,000 websites currently blocked", so are they "protected" from Internet evil by the same wonderful IWF as we in the UK enjoy then?
Did Mary Whitehouse, Jacqui Smug and the prurient minority also go to Turkey to inflict their eighteenth century puritan view of public morality?
Perhaps we could have them ban the truly dangerous things that corrupt and rot the minds of our young people, dailymail.co.uk and big brother spring to mind...
The vertical member in the icon almost looks like a thumb if you squint.
JAP was compromised, deliberately, by the authors, under the demands of a court injunction, back in the early 2000s. It should never be trusted again.
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.privacy.anon-server/browse_thread/thread/795124c8d031bd22/b1899d9b0a7e5dd6?hl=en&q=getCrimeRegExps#b1899d9b0a7e5dd6
Even before they did that, JAP always suffered from design flaws: you can't protect against even elementary traffic analysis if you only use 2 hops instead of 3 in your mix, and you have no security at all when both ends of the tunnel are explicitly controlled by the same organisation under the same legal jurisdiction.
Do not use JAP; use TOR, which is JAP done right.
I think it was who (allegedly) proposed that the EU citizen should only be allowed access to a couple of petabyte IMAGE of yesterday's internet ,<i>after all the dodgy stuff had been taken out!</i> The real live intertubes being too dangerous and wild for safe citizenship use. Franco was then recalled back to serve as MoJo-Hague in the Italian government but probably not for reasons related to his great/bad idea.
(I include a reference link to show the then thinking to avoid 'una superingiunzione' http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/10/us-eu-bombs-internet-idUSL1055133420070910)
http://register.consilium.europa.eu/pdf/en/11/st07/st07181.en11.pdf
Section 8. 'Cybercrime' has this little gem:
"The Presidency of the LEWP presented its intention to propose concrete measures towards creating a single secure European cyberspace with a certain "virtual Schengen border" and "virtual access points" whereby the Internet Service Providers (ISP) would block illicit contents on the basis of the EU "black-list". Delegations were also informed that a conference on cyber-crime would be held in Budapest on 12-13 April 2011."
Turkey has never struck me as being the sort of country that would be into heavy internet censorship. This is an insidious disease that seems to be putting ideas into governments' heads the whole world over. At this rate, we won't actually have an open internet in the near future. I am quite capable of deciding for myself what and what not to see on the net. This needs to be stopped - but how?
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