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On Thu, 2 Nov 1995, Rich Graves wrote:
In Hong Kong, the Internet wasn't quite strangled, but the British authorities who control that colony managed to throttle free electronic speech with the rest of the world until everything was bottlenecked into a few little-known satellite links.
Hmm, few specifics here. I wonder if they would care to elaborate. Nah.
Don't waste your time with that idiot, he doesn't know what he's talking about. The 1-week partial black-out here in Hong Kong happened because some providers had ignored some licencing requirements, and has been quickly solved once they agreed to comply.
That's one way to look at it. Of course since the "license requirements" had to do with some obscure administrivia that nobody thought would apply to ISP's, none of the 6 or so ISP's in Hong Kong had thought to apply for it. One has to wonder why the gov't pulled the plug on 5 of them without so much as a warning, much less a chance to comply. Did I say 5? Oh yes. The largest HK ISP-- and the one with closest ties to the government-- had gone ahead and applied for the license just a couple of weeks before the blackout. Corruption is the modus operandi in HK, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if that one ISP got a special favor by being warned of the impending black-out, or even if it had a hand in instigating it. I'm sure you'll correct me if I've got any of my facts wrong. (c'punks relevance: (parts of) the Net is still vulnerable to governmental blackout. Is this relevant? Well, hardly, but perhaps interesting. And at least I flagged it.) Regards, Bryce signatures follow "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield." <a href="http://ugrad-www.cs.colorado.edu/~wilcoxb/Niche.html"> bryce@colorado.edu </a> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.01 iQCVAwUBMJmy8PWZSllhfG25AQHUygP/QKCwtGlzRRaJtCANUgiJgt+noq0RJKWe zpthAqKRJEa0kP1/zZBkk0Qkj/+HJWAJZ1+i/9R887cDkyD8JZSu2XJ4pXB4mpsv 9rgxH4ffj8oxvy9e313/Z7C2zm7x1O3dwvnkKDojg8LuUBCTvHxZo5iwKXNqExYv w/B0Fxbv0V8= =BPjm -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----