Luke says Moo!

Well, it seems that yesterday when I glanced at the Digg article/link that said that India was putting sensorship in place for blogs and assumed that they would use a slightly more specific form of filtering rather than just blocking out entire domains and blogging tools - I was wrong.

Bodhi Shop seems to have had problems getting to his site and several others as told in this post. Seems that India just used the Chinese mindset of block it all out and hope no one notices.

Internet censorship is becoming a problem in many, if not all, countries. China seems to be the worst especially when I see that they are giving people jobs with the explicit purpose of finding and blocking sites. Here in the States we’ve decided to outlaw online gambling, except horse racing and state lotteries. Ok, I like horse racing, so I kinda like that idea, but good grief everything else needs to be made illegal online? Bah.

And we of course are having discussions of forcing more filters on schools and libraries to filter out personal things like blogs and the whatnot - just let people look at everything online or nothing online. Stop this meandering about and pick one or the other. Yea, or Nay. It would make things much more equal and the government wouldn’t spend a fortune policing something that only needs some education to fix (i.e. the stupidity of the children who meet people they met online without proper protection in place).

So my rant is basically that everyone needs to leave the internet and its denizens alone. Police only the things that really need policing (i.e. child porn, selling people, other fundamentally bad things that everyone can agree is bad).

Leave the rest of it alone and if you’re concerned with what the children might see then you might want to go to school with them and see what their friends show them…I’m fairly certain it’s more than what they’ll get on the net by accident - of course, if they’re seeking out things you don’t want them to see then no amount of filtering is going to get the job done. Turns out kids who want stuff can find a way to get it…even around the best filters. I assure you of that. There is always someone capable of finding a way around the system. Always.

Anyway, back to India. They’re filtering stuff and filtering is bad. Except for spam filtering because spam is bad. If you’re in India make your voice heard and get your freedom of expression returned to you. The net, if nothing else, is a place for people to have the ability to be anything and say anything they want - even if only for a short time.