interesting article on Saudi Arabia's http filtering

Fri Jan 16 02:14:47 UTC 2004

For the record... I have first hand knowledge that KSA's filtering is
not too effective.

I'll abstain from the ethics/moral discussion.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Vadim Antonov
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 8:35 PM
To: Randy Bush
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: interesting article on Saudi Arabia's http filtering

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