Yesterday’s revelation that China blocks access to YouTube should not have come as any surprise, but did you know that other countries censor the Internet in their own special ways? (Happy families are all alike!) For example, did you know that India’s Computer Emergency Response Team’s has the power to block Web sites wily nilly? Ostensibly it was set up to help eliminate terrorist-realted sites, but it has also blocked “Hindu nationalists and other radical groups on social networking sites such as Orkut.” Or, that in Argentina a search for “diego maradona” will be tampered with because of a terrible court ruling?
Yeah, so Foreign Policy compiled a list of little known Internet censors. The list includes, as mentioned, Indian and Argentina, but also France (see its draconian file-sharing laws), South Korea (it regularly blocks North Korean propaganda) and Australia (ostensibly it blocks child pornography and terror-related content, but it could well broaden). The point of the brief little round-up, I guess, was to show that Internet censorship isn’t merely something that happens Over There; nope, it happens to more familiar countries, too.
Never mind the nonsense that Americans have to put up with in the name of “protecting” this or that group or entity or institution.
Also, embedded for the hell of it, the Hand of God goal. Fact: Maradona > Pelé.
As for the huge black rectangle—get it, black, censorship, etc. We’re so deep and meaningful!
Turkey has been blocking youtube access for over a year now. No not only certain videos, the whole site.
Oh, yeah. When I was in Portugal about a month ago I kept getting “site forbidden” messages in Turkish for some reason when trying to visit YouTube. I still have no idea why that happened. See here for the scary screenshot: http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/02/19/now-you-can-play-that-new-prince-of-persia-on-your-mac-plus-unrelated-censorship-anecdote/
nice, a broken image.. fail again
Maradona Argentina
That is why my country has the most successful national football team in the history of the World Cup, with five championships. Soccer: The English invented it, the Brazilians perfected it. haha
Patriotism is good sometimes lol :P
:(
It should say that Pelé is better than Maradona and Brazil is better than Argentina
Something happened to my comment! o/
Erm… FYI, the English “invented” modern FOOTBALL (we never call it soccer here, unless in a joke related context) and it was the Chinese who invented football.
Well , I didn’t know that :)
And in Brazil we call it Football too (Futebol in Portuguese). I got used to call it soccer because I used to live in Canada, and football there is a deferent sport (:
Censorship is a cowardly fraud. It prevents public disclosure of various crime more than it prevents anything else. The worst is self-censorship. And the worst in it is that public never knows what was censored. I decided to make one such case known to public. See http://ca.geocities.com/uoftfraud/nature.html
Honest reporters risk their lives to bring the truth to the world. Where does censorship stand in the world?
Turkey is infamous for blocking not only YouTube, but also the whole Blogspot because of ONE blog containing CLIPS from football games licensed to some satellite provider. Also, because of some fundementalist bullshit cult leader who is in bed with the also fundementalist mofo government, websites on evolution theory and any Turkish or foreign website that talks against his fucking sham is unaccessible from Turkey.
No way Maradona > Pelé, all he ever did was cheat. he gave brazilians water with tranquilizer in a game, he used his hand there… and then acknowledged it all later.
not my favorite kind of rolemodel