On Feb 3, 2007, at 11:47 AM, Vince Hoang wrote:
On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 05:43:47PM -1000, 808blogger wrote:
sorta wonder how the city and county can actually get away
with this? this is not very in the spirit of OSS , especially
publiclly funded access. For this exact reason the government
should stay out of brokering any level access for public
facilities.......
I think it would be fair to say that when compared to the members
of this list, the general public would prefer more perceived
safety at the cost of information freedom.
p0rn is not bombs.
Would it have been better to be uncompromising on the filtering
issue and have the community say no to free wireless access?
Lets see whats going on in the big world (outside Hawaii):
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/029956a0-a72a-11db-83e4-0000779e2340.html
Financial Times Internet groups respond to China critics
By Jonathan Birchall in New York and Richard Waters in San Francisco
Published: January 18 2007 20:00 | Last updated: January 18 2007 20:00
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Vodafone have announced an agreement
with human rights groups, internet freedom activists and others to
establish a set of principles covering how they deal with censorship
and other restrictions that could harm human rights in China and
elsewhere.
The move comes in the wake of public criticism of big US online
companies last year over their activities in China. It echoes other
voluntary "multi-stakeholder" initiatives that have emerged in recent
years in response to public protest, covering issues such as the use
of local security forces by oil and mining companies, and conditions
in the clothing and footwear supply chains.
The four companies have agreed to work with non-governmental
organisations to "seek solutions to the free expression and privacy
challenges faced by technology and communications companies doing
business internationally", according to a statement on Thursday.
A senior executive at one of the companies warned that a voluntary
code of practice was unlikely to have much practical effect.
"The fantasy is, we're all going to say we're going to stop
censorship," the executive said. "The issue is not whether we're
doing this in good faith, the question is, what's the leverage?"
However, an official at one of the human rights groups involved said
that by adopting a common front and making issues such as censorship
a subject of their broader negotiations with foreign governments, the
companies might succeed in rolling back some censorship of their web
search engines.
The response of the US companies involved also comes against the
background of an effort to promote online freedom regulations in
Congress. Chris Smith, a Democratic member of the House of
Representatives, held hearings in Washington on such freedom issues
last year.
This month he reintroduced his Global Online Freedom Act, which would
set minimum standards for internet companies, including that search
engines should not be located in "internet restricting" countries and
that search engines cannot alter or filter the results of their
searches at the behest of governments.
The initiative follows criticism of Google over its decision last
year to set up a separate Chinese-language search engine that
censored results for sensitive topics such as human rights and Tibet.
Yahoo has also been criticised by human rights groups including
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch over its decision to
hand over e-mail account data to the Chinese government that has led
to the imprisonment of "cyber dissidents".
Microsoft has also faced criticism over censoring social sites in China.
Cisco, which joined Google, Yahoo and Microsoft before Congress last
year over its record in China, has not joined the initiative.
Vodafone, the European telecommunications company, is actively
involved in a range of corporate social responsibility issues, and
has not faced criticism over internet freedom issues.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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