The near future of Internet control... if you're interested.

[Rat]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8329

[Layzie Bone]

control of the internet, thats a joke. There is no control. If China had control and they dont like stuff I have on my site, they wouldn't about it for a while.

A: doesn't generate enough traffic
B: search engines havent spidered it effectively because most of it is on a forum.

Hell they wouldn't even catch cricketmx...

There's no way one can control the internet...period.

It's like a communist regime, i can't keep my eye on you all the time, not when there's over a billion people on the internet.

from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 there's capacity for about 4 billion computers. Yeah, they're not going to find me at random, even if I have content I dont like.

What is the problem with the UN? Look at them. They'll have the oppurtunity to snatch my right of free speech and others over the internet, they're getting in. The US and any other country has a smaller voice, thus the UN can be dangerous, allthough not if you're collecting if you know what I mean.

[Grinch]

Sorry to get off topic but you should check this out wanabe. It is a mod for phpBB that helps with SEO.

[moongirl]

Thanks Rat, I had read of an outcome from the World Summit during the week.
So, I was interested

China's Web Watchers
The Internet was supposed to be immune to censorship, but Beijing has found ways to stifle online dissent
Beijing's control of the Internet is bolstered by its success at enlisting the aid of foreign companies such as Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!, all of which run online operations on the mainland. The fast- growing China market is key to their global strategies, and they are loath to antagonize their host nation. Yahoo!'s China operation was widely criticized last month for turning over information to the police that helped send journalist Shi Tao to prison for 10 years (Shi had posted a list of topics that Chinese newspapers were forbidden to cover, including the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre). Yahoo! officials said they had no choice but to abide by the "laws, regulations and customs" of countries where it does business. It isn't alone in its sensitivity to local customs: Microsoft's MSN portal blocks the Chinese words for "democracy" and "freedom" from the blogs it hosts, while Google omits banned websites from its search results.

Likewise, mainland Internet companies have become virtual appendages of the government censorship apparatus, employing their own human monitors to ensure their sites remain free of banned content. China's leading blog host, Bokee, which just received $10 million in foreign investment, employs 10 full-time inspectors to keep an eye on postings and to delete those that might anger Beijing. "You have to know where the pressure lines are," says a monitor at Xici Hutong, a site where Chinese journalists share ideas. He says he removes pornography, which is illegal in China, as well as personal slander and "political things." One of China's two biggest portals, Sohu.com, routinely talks with government regulators about what topics to add to the forbidden list. "China is undergoing a huge experiment in its transition to a free society," explains Charles Zhang, Sohu's CEO. "We need to be responsible to see that reforms go steady and stable."

Beijing deals harshly with those who test the rules. One site run by students at China's top school, Peking University, was "the epicenter of political sensitivity," says a former manager there. Its name, Yitahutu, meant "a big fat mess," and its 300,000 registered users often posted critiques of China's one-party system. In July 2004, someone posted an article by a Hong Kong researcher claiming that the Communist Party's approval rating was lower than 20%. Officials from the Party's Central Discipline Inspection Commission arrived at the website's office to remove the article. In its place, they substituted dozens of comments written by party propagandists masquerading as ordinary web users critical of Yitahutu. "Without the Communist Party," read one, "the good times would end." Two months later, the site was shut down. The closure order said it had "disseminated political rumors." Since then, cities around China have created teams of Internet propagandists to pose as citizens and post comments supporting the party.

Still, determined Chinese web surfers manage to tunnel through today's firewall with the help of software that guides them to overseas "proxy servers," computers that enable them to fetch and view banned content. Activists smuggle proxy software into China and pass it hand-to-hand on flash memory devices. "It's really cat and mouse," says Bill Xia, president of U.S.-based Dynamic Internet Technology, whose product bounces users among many proxy servers, making it hard to track the surfer's identity.

On a recent afternoon, a Chinese reporter in Beijing used one of these programs to watch a video of the Tiananmen massacre on his IBM ThinkPad. "See that boy facing down a line of tanks?" he says. "I'd heard about that." In most countries, this ability to track down elusive information is now little more than a mundane miracle of modern technology. In China, this unconstrained curiosity remains a perilous threat$#8212;to both the browser and Beijing.
October 2005.

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/ ... 20,00.html

[Rat]

I'm glad it was of benefit to someone.