falk@sun.UUCP (05/12/86)
The subject of censorship of net postings has come up in several newsgroups lately. In particular, the issue of net users censoring each other (by complaining to system administrators) has been discussed. I would be interested in the extent that "official" censorship takes place. For instance, I have heard that there was once a rabid Nazi type on the net who wouldn't shut up and whose views were illegal in some countries (less freedom of speach there than here) and this person's ravings had to be censored from the net before they reached Europe. Another example would be net.crypt. I have the distinct feeling that detailed discussions of DES or RSA are not allowed out of the country. Or for that matter, what if someone tried to post atomic secrets on the net? On the other hand, there is SO MUCH information on the net, that it would be a nightmare to filter the entire thing. How do they do it? I suspect that they have a computer that searches for key words (this is already done with other information traffic in and out of the U.S.). My question is, who are "they", where do they filter the net, how do they do it and how much gets erased? Also, I would like to conduct an experiment. Anybody outside of the U.S. who sees this posting, please send me e-mail so I can get a feel as to how widely this sort of discussion is disseminated. (Note that I've used two keywords, DES & RSA. (oops, I did it again!)). -- -ed falk, sun microsystems
sjl@ukc.ac.uk (S.J.Leviseur) (05/14/86)
We are the UK <-> world feed, and we certainly don't censor anything. The normal reason for dropping a group is cost. Each UK site pays about $54 a month for news, and for a lot of sites this causes problem with accountants. The quickest way for a UK site to get the DES crypt code, if they have a source license, is to approach an old site who have pre-embargo copy of Unix. This is perfectly legal since the license DES crypt was issued on is way below System 5.n (my V6 manual thinks it had DES crypt). Source licensed sites are allowed to exchange code provided the code given is from a prior release to the level of the recipients license. This means that it is rather late to start worrying about DES leaking out with Unix now. Why don't the DOD or whoever stop messing around and remove the embargo from the DES crypt, and while they are at it they could release BSD4.3 from embargo as well. Climbs off soapbox, but it's something I feel very strongly about. sean sjl@ukc.ac.uk sjl@ukc.uucp
rt@nott-cs.UUCP (05/15/86)
In article <3660@sun.uucp>: > >Also, I would like to conduct an experiment. Anybody outside of the U.S. >who sees this posting, please send me e-mail so I can get a feel as to how >widely this sort of discussion is disseminated. (Note that I've used two >keywords, DES & RSA. (oops, I did it again!)). >-- [Apologies for putting this on net, but mail system wasn't playing] Hi. Well, it managed to get as far as here (Nottingham, UK). Anyway, if they are using keywords to find suspect articles, surely they'd let ones like youre's through? (Assuming they look at anything before they junk it) Roy (Note keywords still in) [There are no opinions in this posting, therefore they cannot coincide with those of my employers]