Guyana Lifts Internet Filters

There is a story on the AP Wire today that talks about how the South American country of Guyana has decided to lift restrictions on free speech on the Internet. The article states "Programmers will begin removing software filters as early as Monday, Information Minister Moses Nagamootoo was quoted as saying in Sunday newspapers." It seems that once again, the ideals of freedom have defeated the ideas of censorship. Read more below..

It turns out that the filters were, of course, blocking unintended information.. The government had gotten complaints from end users that "the filters also prevented them from viewing sites about AIDS, anti-racism efforts and even Kenneth Starr's report urging the impeachment of President Clinton.

Duh..

[Da Unicorn]

And thats another reason web content filters suck. Bad to start with plus inaccurate filtering. Heh.

Guyanna=South America, what world are you from?

[Lalo Martins]

Are you drunk or what? Ok, history/geography lesson. The Guyannas are a region of the Amazon basin that was colonized by France, England and Holland, right to the north of Brazil. Before independence, they were known as "French Guyanna", "English Guyanna" and... whatever you call things from Holland in English :-)

The English Guyanna, when independence was declared, took the name "Guyanna". The Hollandese one took "Suriname" (yeah sure). And the French one, of course, is French Guyanna.

They're in the order you see in the previous sentence, from west to east.

Nice Job!

[Brian Ristuccia]

Glad to see some people have finally come to their senses.

For those still trapped, there's always Internet Censorship Repair Tools [978.org].

From Someone In Guyana

[THotze]

I currently live in Guyana, and work at the US Embassy here. We've been putting pressure on the government to ease restrictions for some time now, there'd been a recent push for the proxy to be removed. The main reason wasn't censorship, it was speed, as Guyana has a 256K connection split into 4 64K lines: 3 for private ISP's, and one for the US Embassy.

guyanna!=africa

[Zagadka]

I think you're thinking of "Guinea" or something. Guyana (only one 'n') is on the northern coast of South America. It's just to the west of the other two Guyanas (French and Dutch, aka "Suriname"), and to the east of Venezuela.

I think Guyana is the only South American country that has English as its official language.

Guyana

[fernando]

I personally have been to Guyana. It is in south
america(just to the left of suriname).
www.guyana.com for more information.

The interesting thing is that most of Guyana's
revenue is generated by GT&T (Guyana Telephone and
Telegraph) Most of thier money is generated from
Audiotext systems(aka phone sex systems) Ever
seen an ad for international number phone sex
lines that start with 011 592? That's Guyana.

I think it's funny that a country that gets most
of it's money from phone sex lines filters thier
Internet feed.