• As all the powers that belongs to the "visible hand", the fatal problem of government controlled Internet censorship is the lack of proper self-regulation and high probability of abuse. In rather authoritarian countries it's more clearly exhibited, such as DPRK (Huh, basically no Internet), Burma ('The internet is regulated by the Electronic Act which bans the importing and use of a modem without official permission, and the penalty for violating this is a 15 year prison sentence, as it is considered "damaging state security, national unity, culture, the national economy and law and order."'), South Korea (...'maintains a wide-ranging approach toward the regulation of specific online content and imposes a substantial level of censorship on elections-related discourse and on a large number of Web sites that the government deems subversive or socially harmful'...), China (hundred of thousands of sites blocked, including Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, BBC, VOA, and some Google services, thousands of people monitored or arrested for saying "improper" words on the Internet), and Cuba, yet it also happens in democratic countries, like India and Russia.
  
• Even if the government itself does not abuse the censoring system, that the content to censor are decided democratically, there are still chances that the freedom of some individuals or groups of individuals been violated. There's a bad point in human nature, that we are inclined to attack or even eliminate anybody who holds an idea deviating from what we believe, or have different behaviors that we consider abnormal, even though they don't affect our live at all. Surely with ever-heightening level of education, the masses have become much wiser, and the machine of democracy is more effective then ever, yet it is not perfect yet, and it's well possible that the pursue to what people consider "justice" would step personal freedom under his feet. Socrates was trailed and executed in the democratic Athens, for "corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens", and another more recent exhibition of the tendency was the raise of McCarthyism after World War II. (Hmm, sorry, I know quite little about the western history, so I cannot offer more examples.) Today we still have discriminations, towards different groups of the people, the black, the homosexuals, the Jews, or towards some special behaviors that are not particularly unreasonable, but "we just hate it". (In the more religious countries, especially the Islamic ones, the problem is horribly severe.) When these discriminations get reflected on the policy of censoring contents of the Internet... Well, you know what will happen.
  
• Censorship is in no sense a cure of piracy. Whatever is needed by the masses, there will be somebody supplying it. When PirateBay is banned, people will create PirateGulf; when PirateGulf is banned, people will create PirateStrait, then someday PirateOcean. And what makes it even worse is, Internet is a space where all kinds of information can be easily copied and losslessly & anonymously distributed -- a bless for most of us, and a curse for software/game/movie/music producers. Miserable software/game/movie/music producers develop thousands of DRM techniques, and people ultimately find a way to deal with most of them. The final result is governments and the corporations throws billions of dollars into it, but get trapped in an infinite race game, and they never actually win. (Actually, there is indeed one way to stop piracy: Dramatically increase the cost of piracy, and hang every person using pirated software, but hmm, will anybody ever agree on that? I think the the solution of pirate is to make most content freely available, and create profits with special support services and related physical products instead. )
  
• A quite minor issue is, all sorts of censorships affect speed in a certain degree, and they cost money from taxpayers. Seems the Internet censorship here (in China) add 100-200 ms ping latency. Disaster if you like to play online games.
  

(08-01-2011, 12:58 PM)RichardGv Wrote: It also makes sense to prevent extremist/terrorism content from appearing publicly on the Internet, such as, an extension tutorial for making bombs and fire it in front of a school building, since it's way beyond the extent of freedom and tolerance one deserves.

(08-01-2011, 08:10 PM)HiddenKnowledge Wrote: I disagree, I think it's quite interesting to learn how to make it, but that doesn't mean I will actually use it. It's upto people how they handle information.
Offcourse, if the information in question is deemed illegal, that's a different story.

(08-01-2011, 10:51 PM)RichardGv Wrote:

(08-01-2011, 08:10 PM)HiddenKnowledge Wrote: I disagree, I think it's quite interesting to learn how to make it, but that doesn't mean I will actually use it. It's upto people how they handle information.
Offcourse, if the information in question is deemed illegal, that's a different story.

It's indeed up to reader to decide how to use the information about how to make a bomb and fire it in front of a school building, HK, yet allowing such directly implementable plan to appear publicly on the Internet would significantly increase the possibility of a real implementation of the plan. Your sister might be learning right in the school, or my sister, and you dad, or mine, could be teaching there. We cannot put the lives of thousands of people, including children, in risks, just in exchange of a little part of freedom of speech that seems quite unnecessary. We cannot afford that.

And this is not related to the law. It's just a moral judgment. We are humans, not gods. We deserves freedom, but we never deserved unlimited/uncontrolled freedom.

(08-01-2011, 12:58 PM)RichardGv Wrote: It also makes sense to prevent extremist/terrorism content from appearing publicly on the Internet, such as, an extension tutorial for making bombs and fire it in front of a school building, since it's way beyond the extent of freedom and tolerance one deserves.

(08-02-2011, 06:59 AM)ErrorCode Wrote: I don't think they should be allowed to block anything. That seem to me as if it is an infringement on our rights to free speech. It doesn't matter what the website says, people have the right to say what they want, no matter who doesn't agree with it. Thats my personal opinion, though; call me extreme if you want.

(08-02-2011, 05:54 AM)HiddenKnowledge Wrote: True, but if it doesn't explicitly say how to fire it in the school (or even mention the possibility) I think it should be allowed.

(08-02-2011, 07:02 AM)Zack Wrote: I don't think that's extreme at all, in fact, I feel the same way.

(08-01-2011, 12:58 PM)RichardGv Wrote: It also makes sense to prevent extremist/terrorism content from appearing publicly on the Internet, such as, an extension tutorial for making bombs and fire it in front of a school building, since it's way beyond the extent of freedom and tolerance one deserves.

That's what I would call a grey area. It would be horrible for a website to instruct people to blow up schools, however, I think that if a person wished to blow up innocent children they would have done it already. Crazy people will do crazy things if they want to do crazy things, that's the way of the world...

(08-02-2011, 11:32 AM)Zack Wrote: You know what? You do have a point there, Richard. However, how could a censor differentiate between a person reading instructions for bombs so they can make makeshift fireworks and a person reading bomb instructions so they can kill innocents? There is really no way to do that, so the information would have to be blocked from everybody, whether they intended to use it for good or bad. And that is what you agreed should be avoided: the total blocking of material.

• I did not agree on the total blocking of some particularly dangerous kind of materials should be avoided. I just mean for most kinds of materials.
  
• The problem with explosive materials is they are not really need for most people, unlike handguns, knives, or hammers, which are dangerous, too, yet useful for everybody. Do you make fireworks everyday? Or are you trying to dig a coal mine in your garden? Or you plan to build a 10-meter high tunnel under your house? Explosive materials are mostly used for destructive purposes, as what I have indicated in the previous reply, yet for normal people it serves no use.
  Moreover, most people lack the knowledge to use explosive materials safely, even when they plan to use it for something good.
  
• Let's analyze the pros and cons of blocking contents about producing explosive materials.
  Pros:
  • Save lives of innocents from some terrorism attacks. I presume some 20-50 people per year. At least we could have probably save some people died in the explosion in Oslo.
    
  • Since most people lack the knowledge about how to produce explosive materials, the chances of explosions caused by in storing/utilizing improperly explosive materials are reduced. This saves... Perhaps two or three lives per year. There are always some silly guys on this planet.
    
  Cons:
  • People can produce fireworks themselves. Well, have you done this kind of dangerous thing once in your life?
    
  • Some people will feel they have more freedom of speech.
    
  • Governments may abuse the right. Well, whether a piece of information belongs to terrorism or not could usually be easily defined, so as far as the government is under control of its people, it's not really a big issue. (If the government is authoritarian, we cannot stop it from censoring contents, anyway.)
    
  So, you exchange 22-53 lives (per year) with some feelings of freedom, basically. Which one do you think is heavier?
  
• If every country forbids posting such content on the servers within the country (this basically is the case) there's no need to set up special censoring national gateway, therefore no penalty in speed of Internet connections.