For the record... I have first hand knowledge that KSA's filtering is not too effective. I'll abstain from the ethics/moral discussion. -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Vadim Antonov Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 8:35 PM To: Randy Bush Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: interesting article on Saudi Arabia's http filtering On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Randy Bush wrote:

i was helping get the link up into kacst (their nsf equivalent) in ryadh back in '94, and a rather grownup friend there, Abdulaziz A. Al Muammar, who had his phd from the states and all that, explained it to me something like this way.

yes, to a westerner, our ways of shielding our society seem silly, and sometimes even worse. but tell me, how do we liberalize and open the culture without becoming like the united states [0]?

not an easy problem. considering the *highly* offensive material that arrives in my mailbox (and i do not mean clueless nanog ravings:-), my sympathy for abdulaziz increases monotonically.

Installing a whitelisting and challenge-response mail filer on my box reduced amount of spam to nearly zero. I mostly get spam through the e2e list nowadays. The solution to "high offensiveness" is to grow up and stop behaving like the sight of some physiological function is going to kill us. It is offensive only because the offended party thinks that the world should be a sterile place, and instead of concluding that the sender of the "offensive" material is a tasteless moron and moving on decides to wage a war against human nature.

so perhaps we should ask, rather than ranting, how do we, the self-appointed ubergeeks of the net, think we can clean up our own back yards, before we start talking about how others maintain theirs?

Maybe we should stop whining when others refuse to accept mail from total unknowns without those unknowns making a small token effort to prove their willingness to hold a civilized conversation? I certainly don't care what they want to read or see. Or send, for that matter. None of my business.

[0] - which, americans need to realize is, to much of the civilized world, the barbarian hordes, sodom, and gomorrah rolled into one

To much of the civilized world (and, besides Europe and Japan, no other places qualify, sorry) Americans look like neurotic prudes who have a peculiar hang-up on sex and deep inferiority complex compelling them to unceasingly seek affirmations of their "superiority". Much of what goes for "offensive" in US won't get an eyebrow raised in Paris or Amsterdam. In fact, the more likely reaction would be "how boringly lame". As for the arabian friend who seeks to control what his compatriots are allowed to see, I'd say that his sensibilities are his own problem, and that if he wished to impose them on _me_ I'd tell him to mind his own business, possibly augmenting my message with appropriate degree of violence. --vadim