(I tried subscribing a while back... I never got the flood of cypherpunk mail messages, so I guess it didn't work. Well, netscape is working tolerably well for reading the archives, and I wanted to comment on the following: Begin excerpt from alex@proust.suba.com: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've seen a couple of pointers to information about China's ambitious attempt to build their own censorable net, but not a lot of discussion. The Chineese net strikes me as a very signifiant (and very negative) development. In a worst case scenario, I could see them shopping their net around the world as an alternative to the Internet. China's size might make it possible for them to put together something that might be in the Internet's ballpark as an information resource, especially for technical and commercial applications. This would make it attractive to other countries -- Islamic, for example -- who want to use networking to stay competitive economically with the West, but who are unwilling to allow information to flow freely. <<End of excerpt. I'm suprised noone else has commented on this. For starters, there's a very real risk to anyone buying into InterHan that they're not going to get a "culturally neutral anti-open-Western-society controlled-by-the-dictators" version of the internet all set to construct the Chinese/Arab version of Linux. They're going to be getting a heavy-handed propaganda tool for the use of the current People's Republic's elite. I doubt there's going to be much appeal elsewhere. Phil