Geography, Laws, and the Internet 217
Sara Chan writes: "This week's edition of The Economist has the cover story and lead editorial devoted to how geography affects the Internet after all. The whole of China is basically firewalled. In France, Yahoo! is appealing the court ruling that banned its selling Nazi memorabilia. In Iran, ISPs are required to block immoral sites. Each country wants to impose its own laws on others, of course without reciprocation. The editorial concludes thus: "The likely outcome is that, like shipping and aviation, the Internet will be subject to a patchwork of overlapping regulations, with local laws that respect local sensibilities, supplemented by higher-level rules governing cross-border transactions and international standards." Not all new, but worth pondering."
People get upset about THIS?! (Score:3, Interesting)
What, now that someone in China may not be able to bid on your collection of Playboys on eBay, it is time to stand up?
Puh-lease. Rape, spy, kill, cheat, lie, steal, oppress - but don't limit our internet access! I know, the internet should be free, but a lot of things "should" be. Let's get everyone some food, shelter, and safe living conditions before we worry about whether they can ride the information superhighway. (haven't heard that term in a LONG time) :-)
www.poundingsand.com [poundingsand.com] - Tshirt designs - check out Micropoly!
Geographic Routing (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now, our notion of the "destination" of a packet is based on IP addresses, which are somewhat arbitrarily chosen and have little relationship with the physical location of the target machine. To make this work, we've needed to employ complex routing tables and algortihms with relatively large upkeep and administration requirements.
As the 'net becomes more strongly connected, there will be even more paths for packets to take, and it seems logical to try and simplify routing. If the "address" of a machine were derived from its physical geographic location, then packets could be routed simply by "sending them in that general direction". Instead of complex routing tables, routers would only need to know their relative geographic location in order to send packets toward the target. Conventional routing methods could be used on a local scale to calculate the final hop or two for the packet.
Needless to say, this method would trivialize the problems posed in the article as well.
China is NOT firewalled (Score:3, Interesting)
This company gets it's international bandwidth from a global supplier, and this also provides internet and e-mail access.
This means Chinese employees in the firm can surf the Intranet using the corporate intranet connection, and thus completely bypass any state-controls governing usage.
And for the paranoid out there, the bandwidth is provided over a cable laid from Shanghai by MCI WorldCOM. I have used the link extensively, and I found no evidence it is either tapped, filtered, or monitored.
I also used various alleged-illegal crypto products over it, and I never got a knock on my hotel-room door at 3am to tell me to stop.
You CANNOT firewall a country. There are always ways and means, and in practical terms the effort to do so is too high. Just because Chinese cyber-cafe's are monitored does not emply everything else actually is.
_Not_ the same as shipping and aviation (Score:3, Interesting)
For an example I don't have to look very far; my site has a .uk domain, but it's actually hosted in Norway (even though I'm actually based in the U.K.). Now suppose I slander someone from China on my site - which legislation does it fall under? It's time to face up to the fact that the internet is a global system, and is difficult to regulate nationally.
Along those same lines (Score:0, Interesting)
Reynolds was among the 176 criminals excused in President Clinton's last-minute forgiveness spree. Reynolds received a commutation of his six-and-a-half-year federal sentence for 15 convictions of wire fraud, bank fraud & lies to the Federal Election Commission.
He is more notorious; however, for concurrently serving five years for sleeping with an underage campaign volunteer.
This is a first in American politics: An ex-congressman who had sex with a subordinate won clemency from a president who had sex with a subordinate, then was hired by a clergyman who had sex with a subordinate.
His new job?
Youth counselor.
Re:Two Words: Mobile Computing (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Every mobile machine must be associated with a "home agent" machine, which cannot move (and therefore has a fixed IP adddress). All outgoing packets are tagged with the home agent's IP address, and return packets are sent there first using traditional routing methods. The home agent then forwards the packets to the mobile machine. To be able to do this, the mobile machine must continaully update the home agent on its current location. As the mobile machine changes location, it also changes IP addresses, and sends notifications to the home agent containing the new mobile IP address.
The advantage of this approach is that it is transparent to the upper application layers AND to the other end of the connection (it appears that the home agent is the final destination).
2. The other approach is more advanced, and requires the participation of both ends of the connection. The mobile machine, when it changes locations, sends a notification directly to the remote machine with its new IP address. This way, further packets can be sent directly to the new location, without the need of a home agent machine.
In short, mobile IP will always require somewhat of a "hack", and you already do change IP addresses when you change locations. Having those addresses correspond directly to the geographic location would simply eliminate some of the complications of routing.
Geography and Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always wondered just how they seem to think this is enforcable .. I guess the cuban tld is firewalled over at Redmond? :)
Re:All of China is not firewalled. (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't seem to stop .cn domains from spamming the fuck out of me, though.
(Paranoid thought: Red China takes a permissive stance towards their open relays and clueless admins because they want the rest of the world's to firewall them too. If they can't completely stop their people from talking to our people, they'll make us do it for them...)
(Evil countermeasure: When you block mail from a .cn host, make sure the bounce message contains randomly-generated text blocks. The string "I think it's so cool you left the relay open for us to use to send messages through" wouldn't hurt either. If enough admins did this, China's open relay policy might be, uh, reconsidered... ;-)
Re:All of China is not firewalled. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What did youi expect? (Score:4, Interesting)
DMCA "aims" (completely unsuccessfully) to ensure copyright can still function profitably (a noble aim, not everybody is motivated to create without an incentive), and Carnivore aims (with more success, but with many more undesirable side effects) to negate the effects of terrorism, the activities of child pornographers, etc etc. There are valid motives behind these things, but somewhere along the line, they got hijacked by combinations of big bizness(TM), stupid senators, and fascistic neo-mccarthyists.
And as for the US setting an example for freedom, well. I don't think we (non-USians) need to be taught, actually. Freedom is one of those rather instinctive things, and I'm not going to enhance my knowledge of it by reading USA Today (yes, slightly trollish, but I'm pissy about that comment).
Re:Companies vs Governments (Score:2, Interesting)
(...)Outside the US, where speech is not so free, governments(...)
I know that /. is basically US-centric, and that we foreings are just foreings. But if you say something like this it sounds like you are including all other countries, and this is not good (as well it's not true). And to tell the truth, I always see things like this in /.
I prefer to believe that you didn't mean that, and I'd like to hear that for you americans I am misunderstanding the whole thing. But, please, this phrase sounds very offensive to me, and I'm sure it sound offensive for every non-americans.
The point is, here we have full free-speech, of course that we need to respect children and ladies, and the good manners, but we can basically speak whatever we want. Of course everbody also have the right to dislike it (it sounds pretty like US and many other countries)
But we don't have DMCA or Napster-like process. But we also have problems with big corporations trying to change the laws in a way that they can make more and more profit.
IMHO, world is not ruled by people and/or presidents. World is ruled by money, wherever you go, monarchy or not, democratic or not, with or without free-speech, the money will rule the world.
Sad but TRUE
offtopic: have anybody put this kind of poll? something like: "Where are you from?"
We need to respect local customs (Score:4, Interesting)
Americans think porn is OK, in the Middle East you can get hanged for it.
Re:Maginot Line (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:All of China is not firewalled. (Score:2, Interesting)
Sierra Leone.
As far as I and appendix C of "DNS & Bind" are aware SeaLand does not have a ccTLD yet. I can't see that it really needs one and they don't seem to think so either since their official website is at http://www.sealandgov.com [sealandgov.com] and HavenCo. [havenco.com] has their own seperate .COM website. That aside, .ccTLD != server in whatever "cc" represents, but WHOIS should give the correct info. If is wasn't so easy to lie on WHOIS anyway...
So we've established that ccTLDs are useless in this respect and that WHOIS is unreliable, which rules out the Internet regulating itself as it stands. So the Econmist has hit the nail right on the head; because the global legislative bodies can't agree on anything we are going to end up with a patch work of laws and ugly France/Nazi memorabilia type law suits.
In that light, countries like China and Afghanistan that take on the responsibility of policing their own laws at their borders suddenly seem more friendly to the Internet's way of doing things. It's just highly unfortunate that their populace didn't get a say in the matter, which more than cancels that out.