At 20:03 2/10/96, lmccarth@cs.umass.edu wrote:

The CompuServe incident caused a big ruckus because it involved a conflict between the German govt. and many U.S. users, and (like it or not) users in the U.S. seem to be the most vocal group on the net.

The ruckus was also due to CIS's ignoring the need to be able to suppress access to newsgroups based on the user's Gateway node. If this ability had been designed into the code before it was released, then the German users could have been isolated [without affecting non-German Users] just as fast as the newsgroups were flagged as "Invisible" for display to German Gateways (the current CIS support requires the user to select from a CIS Generated and Supplied list so the list could not display certain NG's names [given the support for this capability]). This need to suppress access to German Users did not suddenly become a requirement with this incident since CIS was on notice for at least 2 years that the German Government felt they were entitled to censor what was supplied by CIS to German Users (that time it was due to a game that used the Swastika). Given this precedence, it would seem to be obvious that there would be the need to tailor the listings based on "Community Standards" (since the German Government is touchy about access to certain types of material such as Revisionism and the Holocaust). In fact, given their laws and mindset, I find it odd that neither of the following were on their list of newsgroups that wanted blocked (I'm sure that I could find more if I scanned the list of newsgroups <g>): alt.revisionism soc.culture.jewish.holocaust