Censoring the Internet
May 4th, 2006It was very surprising to learn, from this BBC News article on internet censorship, that web e-mail systems such as Hotmail and Yahoo mail are banned in Burma. Moreover, in what may be termed a murder of privacy, screen grabs are taken (every five minutes) of what people are looking at in net cafes. Almost everyone has heard about The Great Firewall of China, but I didn’t know online censorship is being so keenly implemented even closer to home. Burma, or Myanmar as I should learn to call it, does this for political reasons. The nation runs a large intranet called the Myanmar Wide Web (how quaint), that is a portal of websites that are pre-selected by official military censors. Even worse, all this activity has lead to high subscription rates for internet access , with only about 25,000 people (out of 47.3 million) being able to afford it. This is an inconvenient setting for non-profit technology ventures, such as the (Nicholas Negroponte’s) OLPC initiative.
