You have probably heard about Pakistan Telecom and what they did to YouTube last week. Computerworld calls it, rightly, Sabotage.

Sabotage. That’s the right word for what Pakistan Telecom did to YouTube on the last Sunday in February. It was intended to be censorship — blocking Pakistanis from seeing a video that their government found offensive. But it resulted in all of YouTube vanishing from the Internet for up to two hours.

If you think that’s merely another silly noncrisis that doesn’t mean anything to your IT shop or business, think again.

What happened? Pakistan Telecom (PT) got instructions from a government agency to block a specific YouTube video, which reportedly included the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that have sparked periodic riots since they were first published in Denmark in September 2005.

So it looks like the target was not really YouTube, but YouTube customers in Pakistan. If Pakistan wants to censor its citizens then that is between the Pakistani government and its citizens.

It does, however, bring even a bigger question as to why YouTube caved in on this issue. This from Investor’s Business Daily:

YouTube has agreed to scrub material critical of radical Islam after Pakistan’s religious police crashed the popular site in protest. Score another one for the Islamofascists.

[…]

Meantime, YouTube is giving in to its blackmailers in Pakistan by removing “highly profane and sacrilegious footage” that was offensive to Islam, including cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

Pakistan’s religious police, in turn, issued instructions to all local ISPs to unblock YouTube, “as the specific content has been removed by the Web site.”

Islamabad pontificated that the offending material “absolutely stands against the values of religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence.” This from a state that crucifies Muslim apostates and Christian “blasphemers” and refuses to peacefully coexist with Hindus in Kashmir.

We recall how Islamabad reacted with equal fulmination after the pope, in a 2006 speech, linked Islam to violence. “Anyone who describes Islam as intolerant encourages violence,” Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman Tasnim Aslam said.

So Islam is so tolerant it will attack anyone who says it is not? Something is wrong with this picture. YouTube has bowed to the demands of terrorists and emboldened those who attack the west.

I have looked to find a copy of the video which was blocked - if I find it on another service I will be sure to post it here.

**Update** The video which caused all this grief is a trailer to the upcoming moving Fitna. The 1389 Blog puts all the pieces together.

Also reporting:
Stop The ACLU

Cross Posted from Revealing The ACLU.

From the ACLU website:

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, three library users and a nonprofit organization today brought a lawsuit to ensure that patrons of a library system in Eastern Washington have access to useful and lawful information on the Internet.

The lawsuit challenges the library system’s policy of using a restrictive Internet filter to bar access by adults to information on its computers and of refusing to honor requests by adult patrons to temporarily disable the filter for sessions of uncensored reading and research.

No surprise here – the ACLU has been a regular proponent of unfettered access to Internet computers in public libraries. The contention is that the very fact that libraries are tax funded, they have an obligation to provide access to all information without passing judgment upon the appropriateness of the information. The only major case I can find on this topic is United States v American Library Association which left the filtering question mostly open – stating only that the congress can force public libraries to install blocking software.

Lets remember that the ACLU has fought hard against Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which requires schools and libraries to block obscene content which are pornographic or otherwise harmful to miners.

This case is somewhat different, in that it is not specifically with regards to obscene internet content.

From the ACLU ComplaintText:

NCRL has configured its SmartFilter software to block Web sites in the following categories, or in categories equivalent to the following categories: Alcohol, Anonymizers, Chat, Criminal Skills, Dating/Social, Drugs, Extreme, Gambling, Game/Cartoon Violence, Gruesome Content, Hacking, Hate Speech, Malicious Sites, Nudity, P2P/File Sharing, Personal Pages, Phishing, Pornography, Profanity, School Cheating Information, Sexual Materials, Spyware, Tobacco, Violence, Visual Search Engine and Weapons.

Some of these items, such as the Nudity, Violence, Gruesom Content, Pornography, Profanity, and Sexual Materials would be areas covered by CIPA. However, to get around this, the ACLU focuses in on other areas in there suit.

Plaintiff Sarah Bradburn has attempted to use computers maintained by the NCRL to conduct Internet research -– particularly regarding alcohol and drug-addiction topics -– in connection with academic assignments.

[…]

Plaintiff Pearl Cherrington is a professional photographer, her work consisting mostly of landscapes and outdoor scenes. She has attempted to use computers maintained by the NCRL to conduct Internet research and obtain information regarding art topics – including art galleries that might be interested in displaying her work. She has also attempted to use NCRL computers to conduct Internet research and obtain information about health topics.

[…]

Plaintiff Charles Heinlen has attempted to use computers maintained by the NCRL to conduct Internet research and obtain information on topics relating to firearms. His ability to conduct research and access information related to firearms has been restricted by the Internet filters that the NCRL has installed on its computers.

So what is the ACLU trying to do here? I believe that the ACLU is trying to set up a chain of precedent which it can use to erode CIPA, or at least loosen the general restrictions upon internet access in American’s libraries. Note the broad categories in the first quote, some of which are directly address by CIPA, and then the examples in the second quote which are areas outside of CIPA and which can be argued as unfair blocking of information.

This matter can be quickly addressed by the FCC and American Library Association providing some very specific guidance for the implementation for CIPA. This will have the simultaneous effect of removing these libraries as targets for the ACLU, and to removing ambiguity on what should or should not be blocked.

We can expect the ACLU to push back on CIPA and similar legislation in any way they can. They are possessed of a mistaken belief that free speech covers obscenity – or perhaps that obscenity itself is a concept open to wide interpretation.

I found the following very interesting article on ABC News Online. The core of the article is the results of an Associated Press, AOL poll.

The number of people who go online for political news is rising, with more than one-third saying they check the Internet for such information.

This group is more likely to be younger, better educated and male than the population in general, an Associated Press-AOL News poll found.

While 35 percent say they check the Internet for political updates about campaigns and candidates, that number grows to 43 percent of likely voters and they tend to be more liberal than conservative.

Think about that a minuet – the implications are staggering. Just under 50 percent of likely voters use the Internet to educate themselves about politics, political campaigns, and candidates. Less shocking, especially for anyone maintaining a conservative presence on the Internet, is that the Internet is more liberal than conservative – though there are no numbers provided to tell us how much more.

If, as the poll suggests that 43% of likely voters are in a mostly liberal category – dose that point to the fact that the likely voters are no representative of the US population as a whole? I tackled the whole right and left statistics previously in this post, which is made more interesting by the ABC article.

More interesting information from the poll:

four in 10 men search the Web for political news, compared with three in 10 women.

about four in 10 of those under age 50 search the Web for political news, compared with fewer than two in 10 of those 65 and over.

more than half of those with college degrees look to the Web for politics, compared with one-third of those who have some college, and fewer than one in six with a high school education or less.

Here is something the chew on:

Seven in 10 said such sites run by news organizations are the most trustworthy

Even the news outlets can admit they are biased, to bad the vast majority of the people don’t realize this fact. That means that 70% of the population takes the man stream media as honest and complete its portrayal of the news. Scary, that.

Another interesting tidbit for my fell members of the blogosphere:

For all the noise made by the political bloggers, a relatively small slice of the population is contributing to the blogs, an online journal or newsletter, and chats.

Only one in 10 of those who browse online for politics participate in the blogs though more than twice that many check them out.

Interesting read, you can find the entire article here.

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam – to barrow a line from a great Monty Python skit. Though I am not as enthused about it as where Terry, Eric, and Graham. In fact, we are not even talking about the same Spam.I, of course, am referring to that bombardment of bandwidth consuming, storage draining, unsolicited e-mail which seems intent in clogging my mail box, or at least my mail server.

The Spam problem was given quite a bit of news coverage for a while, with politicians scrambling over each other to pass one ineffectual ant-spam law after another. While these sorts of stories have taken a back seat, and justly so, to the instability in the Middle East and the War on Terror, I do have to wonder if it has made any difference.I am currently getting between 40 & 60 thousand (yes, thousand) spam e-mails a month. Of those messages I actually see only about 10 – 20 a month, as they are filter out at the server before I even need to look at them.

Look back through my old log files; I see that around 2 years ago I was receiving less that ½ of the spam I receive today. Back 2 more years I was receiving about 20% of what I receive now.

Net effect: the problem is getting worse. While our filtering is getting better and better it is serving only to mask the core problem. How many millions of terabytes where sucked up last year storing spam mail? How much bandwidth was consumed by this bombardment? With all our efforts and the intervention of even our government – we have accomplished very little.

figure1: flanigan.net spam stats

So what is the solution? Is there one? Or do we just sharpen up our filters, upgrade our pipes, and treat the symptoms?

No answers, just question.

So what is the solution? Is there one? Or do we just sharpen up our filters, upgrade our pipes, and treat the symptoms?No answers, just question.