Sunday, December 03, 2006

Fighting Internet censorship

One of my biggest fears is that one day, the U.S. government, or worse, the United Nations, will take control of the Internet and regulate it into the ground. There are totalitarian countries all over the world that are already engaging in this practice of censoring the Internet; the most notorious case being China. What really makes China's situation bad is that Google has aided and abetted China in that effort. Wanna see? Here is a screenshot of what came up when I went to regular American version of Google Images and typed in Tiananmen Square:

Seems logical enough; the massacre of June 4, 1989 is what I think about whenever I hear the words "Tiananmen Square." Now, if you go to the China version of Google - the only one people in China can access - and do the same thing I did above, here is what you see:

Hey! What happened to the guy standing in front of the tanks? What happened to the Goddess of Democracy? This is what happens when you let governments regulate things - especially totalitarian governments.

I was interested to see this post from Michelle Malkin where she wrote about a new software program called Psiphon (sigh-fawn) that allows one to bypass the censors. If you read the updates to her post, you will find that there might be a few snags regarding this software, but just the fact that the possibility of beating the censors exists at all is a step in the right direction. Rather than my re-explaining everything about Psiphon, just go to Malkin's post and she will tell all.

Good Day to You, Sir

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