On Fri, 2 May 1997, tank wrote:
"A few years ago, we would have been portrayed as a band of dangerous anarchists, bent on disrupting society," Rodriquez told the Dutch daily Trouw. "But now they have come to see that we are nice and quiet people really."
The only "nice people" are dangerous anarchists bent on destroying governments and buggering poloticians to death. (last part a personal preference of course, the author is totally straight but would nonetheless be distinctly amused to see any government official butt-raped to death)
The company was instrumental in the creation of the Amsterdam Digital The hotline is run by Internet users and providers. Unlike Britain's Internet Watch Foundation, the Dutch hotline doesn't censor any information nor does it ask the provider to do so. Hotline operators contact the author of the information and ask him to remove the offending content. "If the author does not comply, we report him to the police, and he'll be prosecuted," said Rodriquez, who also is chairman of the Dutch Providers Association.
How very benevolent. Its nice to know that instead of censoring your pages they send in the jackbooted thugs to do it for them, then throw you in a nice 6x9 cell for the henious crime of displaying some .gifs or similar.
"The Internet Watch Foundation forces the provider to remove the illegal content," he added. "This is a fundamentally different approach to responsibilities on the Internet. We think the author of the information is responsible for his own actions, not the provider."
And if he chooses not to remove the content you happen to find offensive? If you truly believed in the rights of the author and publisher of the information you would think about it before sending in your own particular brand of thugs to "crush the mutiny".
Yet when violation of the law is flagrant, XS4ALL doesn't hesitate to comply, as it did a few weeks ago when it shut down a customer's home page called Neuroroom, which sold marijuana and other soft drugs in Holland and abroad.
Sometimes one really wonders why we bother to set up mirrors to allow freedom of information to users, when the owners of these servers, supposedly in favour of free speech, do not even have the strength of character or conviction to decide for themselves what they will allow on their servers rather than bending over for the long cock of the law...
The company's commitment to support free expression and democratization of the Internet doesn't stop here.
As far as I can see it hasn`t even started yet.
Last fall when the Serbian government censored radio station B-92, XS4ALL helped design an Internet campaign and started to carry news broadcasts (in RealAudio format) that kept the rare opposition voice alive and the international public informed through independent accounts of the events occurring during the mass demonstrations in Belgrade.
I presume B-92 fell into line and matched the "requirements under law for obtaining a free-speech permit" before XS4ALL allowed this/
"Basically any project we like gets free resources from XS4ALL," Rodriquez commented.
And anyone who guarantees to publicly lick the boots of the benevolent owners in thanks for their support gets as much free space as they like? Of course I believe in the right to free expression of anyone and if these thugs choose not to allow material they don`t like on their servers they have every right to remove it. I just don`t see that setting up mirrors to defeat blocks on sites that refuse to carry certain content is of any value in the fight for free speech. Sure, create a mirror of Radikal, but giving any credit or attribution to XS4ALL seems to be a poor choice. Paul "Still messing with mail apps so totally .sig-less" Bradley