[66555] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: interesting article on Saudi Arabia's http filtering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Randy Bush)
Thu Jan 15 19:11:47 2004
From: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
To: Eric Kuhnke <eric@fnordsystems.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 16:11:10 -0800
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
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.
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?
randy
---
[0] - which, americans need to realize is, to much of the civilized
world, the barbarian hordes, sodom, and gomorrah rolled into
one
