Seriously if someone has a problem with a Wikipedia article that has a falsehood in it MAKE A FUSS – it often works. For example, (eventually) I stopped the Economist crowd describing their magazine as a “classical liberal” one in favour of “free markets”.

On Germany – I love German seriousness, although it sometimes leads to madness.

I am sure there is a long and detailed load of stuff about how privacy is good and how it is needed for a criminal who has paid his debt, to have a useful life and ………..

Various other stuff.

In Britian the regulation,”do not state the name of a murderer”, would just be passed on a whim (without any of the “scientific” defence) and there would most likely be another regulation “you must state the name of a muderer” put into “law” at exactly the same time.

A German would say “these regulations are contradictary”, but a British Civil Servant would not care (I know – I was one) and would enforce both regulations (our own form of madness).

I get the impression that if Germans could actually be convinced of the value of freedom they would go for it a strong and capable way.

However, there is that convincing them problem.

Sorry. Just being facetious. I do agree that this is going a bit too far. Keep this up, and Freenet, I2P and Tor will get HUGE infrastructural boosts in the forms of people self-forming their own darknets.

But then, expecting a bunch of Euro-legislators to understand tech is sort of like expecting a puppy to be toilet trained… it can be done, but it would involve a lot of mess at first.

that fact will simply be cited to justify a worldwide internet censorship protocol under the UN.

…which will be promptly circumvented by all those wonderfully talented geeky people who actually know how the internet works.

Censorship on the internet is nigh on impossible as the network works in such a way that it see such censorship as damage and routes around it. The sheer volume of data travelling over the tubes every second is such that no human could ever hope to read it, let alone decide whether it deserves the application of a metaphorical black marker.

The genie is out of the bottle and its never going back. Just as old media is being destroyed by the internet, old government and the control of information that they are used to is going to go that way too (along with ideas like copyright, but thats another debate).

The geeks have inherited the earth, its just that the people they’ve inherited it from don’t realise that the funeral was yesterday.