Did anyone else catch the AP wire story (it ran here in the SF Chronicle on Thursday) about the Singapore government cracking down on "undesirable" (e.g., sex smut, anti-govt. postings etc.) content on web sites, usenet etc. Their basically forcing, by law, Singapore ISPs to use proxy servers that contain the information that the govt. deems fit.
A copy of the regulations is available from http://www.gov.sg/sba/netreg/regrel.htm One of the providers in Singapore (singnet) has the following page up about the proxy server that Singnet customers will be forced to use http://www.singnet.com.sg/cache/sbareg.html Scary stuff. But pretty much everything I hear about Singapore is pretty scary. I'm wondering if they'll implement this by blocking direct connectivity from their customers machines for TCP with the destination ports commonly used by http, ftp, etc. thus allowing people to do things not supported by the proxy and to get around the blocking pretty easily, or if they'll just block all direct IP connectivity between their customers and the rest of the Internet, so people in Singapore will be reduced to viewing the Internet as nothing more than the WWW. -- Mark Henderson -- mch@squirrel.com, henderso@netcom.com, markh@wimsey.bc.ca ViaCrypt PGP Key Fingerprint: 21 F6 AF 2B 6A 8A 0B E1 A1 2A 2A 06 4A D5 92 46 unstrip for Solaris, Wimsey crypto archive, TECO, computer security links, change-sun-hostid, Sun NVRAM/hostid FAQ - http://www.squirrel.com/squirrel/