The Economist, 16 March 1996, pp. 42-43. Asia and the Internet: Not too modern, please Here is my two cents on the whole subject of countries wanting to recieve the technical and economic benifits of the internet, but reject groups they have moral or ethical problems with. Like myself, there are a number of subscribers on this list that maintain sites, archives, or have public domain software. Given the plethera of reports like this, I will start maintaining a list of country that will not be given access to my site, no FTP, no HTTP, no nothing, on top of that, I will hard code into all the new versions of my network aware programs to check for a domain subfix, if it is on of the black list, the software will not function. Thus until policies I find offencive are not changed, everything I create will not be acceptable or functional within those regions. I am only one person, but if this practice becomes common place, those countries will find that their access is limited to their own limited world view, and can only obtain goods and services that they create themselves. They want isolation, let them enjoy the full benifits of that decision. One thing I would like to see happen rather quickly is to eliminate thier access to usenet, or other areas of common knowledge. It seems they want the benifits of the technical expertise of the western "morally defuct" experts, but not the opinions of those ares. Well it's an all or nothing deal. Filtering works both ways, they filter out the political and sex groups on their end, we filter out the technical information on ours, I hope they enjoy what is left, which is not much. Regards, Michael Peponis PGP Key Avalible from MIT Key Server