At 10:35 31/08/96 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:

If discussions of Lee Kwan Yew's dynasty are considered illegal, then Singaporans will have to choose not to carry the various newsgroups into which *I* post such messages!

How long do you propose to carry on doing that? Soon, the others in the newsgroups will be asking you very impolitely to stop, just as you would if someone kept on and on posting such stuff to cypherpunks.

At 6:35 AM 8/31/96, Arun Mehta wrote:

...

Then again, inappropriate postings are the bane of the Internet: the consensus on which the Net functions relies heavily on people not posting inappropriately.

This works imperfectly, as all long-time surfers of the Usenet will attest!

True, but Usenet only functions because it works most of the time. To the extent we subvert this consensus, we damage Usenet, make it less useful. It shouldn't happen that in trying to save or spread Usenet, we have to destroy it...

And _never_ has it involved determinations of "inappropriate" by _governments_!

There I'm with you -- I'm merely suggesting that you find a way to protest Singapore's actions in a manner that would be less objectionable to most Internet users, in Singapore and outside.

The point of being sometimes "impolite" (*) is to "force their hand."

I never said anything about politeness -- the appropriateness I was talking about was in the context of what the people posting to a discussion group consider proper material for them to receive, not what the government of Singapore thinks. In any case, I think we may be slightly going off track as far as the current Singapore problem is concerned. They are blocking access to certain web sites from mid September -- Usenet isn't part of the current discussion, far as I know. Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/ finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key