Re: Chinese/Indian censorship of alt.sex.* etc. (Was: China)

["Robert A. Rosenberg" <hal9001@panix.com>]

At 20:03 2/10/96, lmccarth@cs.umass.edu wrote:

>The CompuServe incident caused a big ruckus because it involved a conflict
>between the German govt. and many U.S. users, and (like it or not) users
>in the U.S. seem to be the most vocal group on the net.

The ruckus was also due to CIS's ignoring the need to be able to suppress
access to newsgroups based on the user's Gateway node. If this ability had
been designed into the code before it was released, then the German users
could have been isolated [without affecting non-German Users] just as fast
as the newsgroups were flagged as "Invisible" for display to German
Gateways (the current CIS support requires the user to select from a CIS
Generated and Supplied list so the list could not display certain NG's
names [given the support for this capability]). This need to suppress
access to German Users did not suddenly become a requirement with this
incident since CIS was on notice for at least 2 years that the German
Government felt they were entitled to censor what was supplied by CIS to
German Users (that time it was due to a game that used the Swastika). Given
this precedence, it would seem to be obvious that there would be the need
to tailor the listings based on "Community Standards" (since the German
Government is touchy about access to certain types of material such as
Revisionism and the Holocaust). In fact, given their laws and mindset, I
find it odd that neither of the following were on their list of newsgroups
that wanted blocked (I'm sure that I could find more if I scanned the list
of newsgroups <g>):

alt.revisionism
soc.culture.jewish.holocaust