Is Internet censorship out of control? | Hacker News Reader

Is Internet censorship out of control?

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23 pointsGrape8 comments

"Arab countries including Iran". I hear fact checking helps with the credibility of the discourse...

I think we have this all backwards in a sense. When the internet was new and governments were not involved, hackers claimed sovereignty in the anarchistic universe called cyberspace. Now that controls are being forced upon it, we are up in arms. Well what about the physical world? There are just as many arbitrary rules which only exist to protect the interests of the few at the expense of the many already in place. We should be up in arms about governments, or anybody who thinks that they have a right to decide anything but what they do with their own lives, for that matter, not just freedom on the internet.

Take patents, for example. Are we really so deluded that we think that if medical patents didn't exist then not one person would have the drive to cure diseases? Do we really think that compassion does not exist and that profit is the only reason for doing something for another person?

    Do we really think that compassion does not exist and 
    that profit is the only reason for doing something for 
    another person?

That's a straw man.

The purpose of patents is to encourage companies to publish their research. The purpose of patents is also to discourage pharmaceutical companies to produce yet another variation on acetaminophen and instead spend money on doing research with huge sunken costs.

That this doesn't happen in real life is yet another story, but to appeal to human emotion, as you did in your comment, is shortsighted and wrong too.

The reason for that is that -- yes, most humanitarian efforts have egotistical value, profit being the strongest motive for companies to advance the state of the art. Surely, other than companies, state-sponsored institutions, like the army, have been known to produce valuable research, but most such research was in the context of a war.

>The purpose of patents is to encourage companies to publish their research.

I would agree with you if it wasn't for this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent:

>certain subject areas are excluded from patents, such as business methods, treatment of the human body, and mental acts

And the fact that we have a culture built on the idea that it's every man for himself. What's short sighted isn't an appeal to emotion but the social structures we currently have. Cooperation is a simple and effective way to combat these issues and an appeal to emotion is the mechanism to encourage it.

Now, before you mention it, I understand that there are physical limitations which are hindering this change in paradigm, in particular, Dunbar's number - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number From what I have researched, my current working model is that this has to do with the amount of serotonin in people's brains, hence drugs which raise serotonin levels such as MDMA or stimulate serotonin receptors, such as psychedelics, result in feelings of being connected to humanity and trigger a marked increase in compassion. Meditation also has these effects which suggests that it increases serotonin production. Perhaps when we start to modify our own DNA we can permanently increase the amount of this neurotransmitter for everyone and raise Dunbar's number to something more workable (in the sense of triggering said paradigm shift). Until then, it's up to individuals to do this work.

The bottom line is that the way we are doing things is backwards and can be improved by orders of magnitude, so I firmly believe that patents of all types are a transient effect which will disappear as humanity evolves socially.

Internet Censorship is futile. The internet was designed to treat censorship as system damage, and immediately routes around it.

Trying to censor the internet is like trying to stop birds from migrating north and south by erecting barriers. The birds fly around the barrier.

The Internet is not entirely based on P2P technology.

DNS is maintained by central authorities and a website's domain can be taken down easily.

Of course, you could argue that you could get around this restriction just by using a website's IP (you can still block an IP, but it's harder to do it everywhere on this earth), but then again, how many people will know that IP or even bother searching for it after the fact?

Then you could say that people interested in censored material could very well combat this DNS filtering by using an alternative DNS protocol (using browser plugins, maybe?). But then, that's no central authority anymore and who's to say that you can still trust the content on said websites?

I mean think about it - an evildoer government could very well continue to host the same website, with modified content, with a new (valid) security certificate.

And then, the means for distributing said IP are either (a) commercial companies that have to obey the law of their government, like Google or Twitter or (b) insignificant forums that won't make the news if taken down themselves.

Yes, you cannot block information for the technically inclined, but you can block it for 90% of the population effectively and I think China sets a powerful precedent here. Not only that, but timing is very important. Sometimes censorship is very relevant to the current world affairs, not having the same impact one month later.

I think the Internet is more sensitive to censorship than people care to admit.

What protocol is it that routes around censorship, exactly?

What is the software that automatically prevents a server from being unplugged by a co-location facility? What about TCP/IP prevents a blogger from being beaten unconscious in front of his children, then taken away by plainclothes 'police'?

(I sometimes think that only a totalitarian government's propaganda minister would keep repeating this trope about routing around in the age of China's firewalls, etc.)

What protocol is it that routes around censorship, exactly?

The "global" part. There is always some country in which a certain thing is not censored. The servers can be placed there, the traffic can be routed through there.

This does not prevent anyone from beating anyone else up, that's right, but I don't think anyone ever claimed that the internet would prevent physical violence. Just censorship of information.

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