interesting article on Saudi Arabia's http filtering
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/01/12/2147220 RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Eyas S. Al-Hejery, PhD, may be the only computer geek in Saudi Arabia to have had the eyes of the world focus on his work. That's because he's head of the country's Internet Service Unit, which runs the country's infamous Web-censoring system that is supposed to defend Saudi citizens from "those pages of an offensive or harmful nature to the society, and which violate the tenants [sic] of the Islamic religion or societal norms." ...... And if he fails, what with the fact that sending all Internet traffic in the whole country through a single chokepoint obviously creates a single point of failure, all Net traffic in Saudi Arabia stops.
On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 17:11, Eric Kuhnke wrote:
And if he fails, what with the fact that sending all Internet traffic in the whole country through a single chokepoint obviously creates a single point of failure, all Net traffic in Saudi Arabia stops.
Not sure if its still the same setup, but up till 2 years ago this consisted of 6 HTTP proxies sitting on the same class C. Best part was they were _open_ proxies, so it was not uncommon to have a .net or .uk attacker bounce through them on the way to attacking your site. Oh joy... C
Chris Brenton wrote:
On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 17:11, Eric Kuhnke wrote:
And if he fails, what with the fact that sending all Internet traffic in the whole country through a single chokepoint obviously creates a single point of failure, all Net traffic in Saudi Arabia stops.
Not sure if its still the same setup, but up till 2 years ago this consisted of 6 HTTP proxies sitting on the same class C. Best part was they were _open_ proxies, so it was not uncommon to have a .net or .uk attacker bounce through them on the way to attacking your site.
Not open anymore (took some persuading with SORBS, but they got closed - doubt it was just SORBS, but I know he complained many times because they were running a lot of mail through the same subnet as well) / Mat
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. 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? randy --- [0] - which, americans need to realize is, to much of the civilized world, the barbarian hordes, sodom, and gomorrah rolled into one
There is a price to pay for freedom. I would prefer to receive (or have to personally control) all the nastiness that appears in my inbox than give up any of my Internet freedoms. But that is my opinion of what is right for me. That, however, does not answer your question. My answer is that we do not force our version of what is right or wrong on others. The 'net is not an entity that has ethics nor are 'ubergeeks' the right people to determine what is and is not ethical for other users of the 'net. That is determined for us by the respective laws of the land in which we operate. -Steve * Randy Bush said:
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.
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?
randy
---
[0] - which, americans need to realize is, to much of the civilized world, the barbarian hordes, sodom, and gomorrah rolled into one
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
On 2004-01-16, Vadim Antonov <avg@kotovnik.com> wrote:
Installing a whitelisting and challenge-response mail filer on my box
[my rant about c/r elided as offtopic and beaten to death here]
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
You might find a series of excellent papers by Prof Jon Zittrain and Ben Edelman of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School quite interesting. For example, this one, delivered at APRICOT 2003 in Taipei titled "Internet Filtering: Technologies & Best Practices" http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/pubs/APRICOT-filtering --srs -- srs (postmaster|suresh)@outblaze.com // gpg : EDEDEFB9 manager, outblaze.com security and antispam operations ps: Extract from that presentation: nice list, I must say ...
Filtering Today: Who? China Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Vietnam Pennsylvania, USA Singapore Talking about it: Australia, Germany, Spain
participants (7)
-
Chris Brenton -
Eric Kuhnke -
Matthew Sullivan -
Randy Bush -
Steve Carter -
sureshï¼ outblaze.com -
Vadim Antonov