RE: Yeo, Pea-brained Imbecile

["Michael Peponis" <peponmc@fe3.rust.net>]

The Economist, 16 March 1996, pp. 42-43.

Asia and the Internet: Not too modern, please

Here is my two cents on the whole subject of countries wanting to recieve the 
technical and economic benifits of the internet, but reject groups they have 
moral or ethical problems with.

Like myself, there are a number of subscribers on this list that maintain 
sites, archives, or have public domain software.

Given the plethera of reports like this, I will start maintaining a list of 
country that will not be given access to my site, no FTP, no HTTP, no nothing,
on top of that, I will hard code into all the new versions of my network aware
 programs to check  for a domain subfix, if it is on of the black
 list, the software will not  function.

Thus until policies I find offencive are not changed, everything I create will 
not be acceptable or functional within those regions.

I am only one person, but if this practice becomes common place, those 
countries will find that their access is limited to their own limited world 
view, and can only obtain goods and services that they create themselves.

They want isolation, let them enjoy the full benifits of that decision.

One thing I would like to see happen rather quickly is to eliminate thier access 
to usenet, or other areas of common knowledge.

It seems they want the benifits of the technical expertise of the western 
"morally defuct" experts, but not the opinions of those ares.  Well it's an all 
or nothing deal.

Filtering works both ways, they filter out the political and sex groups on 
their end, we filter out the technical information on ours, I hope they enjoy 
what is left, which is not much.


Regards,
Michael Peponis
PGP Key Avalible from MIT Key Server