A thought on censorship
Censorship has been in the news a lot lately from an unlikely source--Internet companies. Both as participants and targets. Some companies, like Google, have cooperated with the Chinese government in blocking certain searches. Some, like Wikipedia, are being completely bocked.
I'd like to point that censorship on the Internet started long before this. Network Solutions, my alma mater, refused to sell 7 domain names based on George Carlin's 7 dirty words that you can't say on television bit (actually there were 2 other racial words that we quietly held onto, also). Auction and merchandising sites like Ebay and Yahoo have long cooperated with the governments of France and Germany in blocking sales of Nazi war memorabailia (illegal in those countries).
I begrudgingly accept that there may be limited justifications for blocking things on the Internet, although as a purist, I would prefer complete free speech, as tough as that might be to personally stomach.
But it's the massive censorship efforts put on by China that really noogies my goat.
So, it occurred to me that they're not blocking it by domain name (Right? I hope that's true), but by IP address.
So what would happen if a group of well-intentioned Internet people provided caching and multiple IP address setups that changed on a random basis? Sort of like the old WWII movies where the Resistance would get new frequencies to listen to Allied Radio, avoiding the old jammed ones.
Posted on February 20, 2006