daemon@decwrl.UUCP (02/08/84)
From: castor::covert (John Covert) Piet Beertema of the CWI (Center for Math. & Comp. Science), Amsterdam proposes putting the SU on the net to permit the free interchange of ideas. I greatly applaud this idea. I only wish it would work. There's always been a joke that if the U.S. dropped 200 million copies of the Sears & Roebuck catalog on the SU, the people of the SU would fix the problem with their government within two weeks. This would, unfortunately, be just as hard to do as it would be to put the SU on the net. It would be great for mcvax to act as the gateway to the SU, but I think you're going to find it difficult for your autodialers to reach telephone numbers inside the SU. Unless the Netherlands enjoys a special privilege that has been removed from all other countries I've checked (the U.S., the U.K., Switzerland, Austria, the Federal Republic of Germany), direct calls into the SU are no longer possible. The SU is so paranoid about counter-revolutionary ideas reaching their people that they disconnected the incoming direct dial links several years ago. It appears (from my point of view) that they went in to service the needs of the 1980 Olympic Games and were then disconnected as soon as that need no longer existed. The number of circuits into the Soviet Union has been so drastically reduced from that time that the remaining circuits are too few to handle the traffic load of incoming, subscriber dialed calls. For example, when attempting to call from the Federal Republic of Germany, you get the recording: "Der Selbstwaehlferndienst in die Sowjetunion ist zur Zeit nicht moeglich. Bitte melden Sie Ihr Gespraech ueber das Auslandsfernamt 0010 an." For those who don't read German, this is roughly the same as the recording obtained in the U.S.: "International Direct Dial Service is no longer available to the U.S.S.R. Your local operator must connect you to the International Operating Center." Several telephone administrations complained to the SU about this a few years ago, and received the response from the SU that the telephone exchange handling incoming calls was undergoing repair. It seems strange that a new exchange installed only a few years ago is in need of repair which is taking so long. Even if it were possible to set up the net dialogue with citizens of the SU, under current Soviet law, the participants in many of the discussions we carry on over the net would quickly find themselves in hot water for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda/hysteria. We certainly wouldn't be able to send them net.politics or net.religion! A country which doesn't let a tourist bring in more than one bible, which must be in the tourist's native language, is certainly not going to permit the free incoming flow of information we are used to in the west. Oh, how I wish we could freely exchange ideas with the Soviet people, to convince them that we don't want to blow them off the face of the earth. Unfortunately it is their government, not the western governments, that prevents this interchange. John Covert ...{ucbvax,decvax,allegra}!decwrl!rhea!castor!covert