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Censorship should not be looked at as taking away an individuals rights, but rather empowering someone to make appropriate choices while benefiting the masses.

Without censorship affecting the type of programs that can be aired at certain times, parents would have to be hyper-vigilant about allowing their children to watch television. Without this kind of censorship, young children would likely be exposed to sexual and violent content regularly.

If adults wish to watch this kind of content, it is as easy as turning on the TV late at night or renting other titles they want to watch instead. Censoring content at certain times of the day and night protects children while posing only a minor inconvenience to adult viewers.

Censorship is too often looked at in negative light. By limiting explicit material on television, this gives adults more control of the entertainment they or their children are exposed to. It also ensures those who are triggered by questionable content will not accidentally stumble upon something that could have a negative impact on them.

Censorship does not take away peoples freedoms. Film and television ratings provide parents a quick and accessible way to review the type of content they and their kids consume. If parents do not care about the content their children consume, such media is readily available.

Of course, people may argue bleeping out adult language from a movie shown on television ruins its integrity. However, this is untrue because it is relatively easy for adults to still understand the original words that are being bleeped out, and it is beneficial to kids because they may not understand and be exposed to the profanity.

If television was not censored and films were not rated, it could be difficult for families to find suitable content for their children to watch. Mild media censorship is important in helping parents keep their children from being exposed to questionable material.

Censorship in a democratic society should never be tolerated.

Censorship in essence deems one thing as right while another is wrongsomething which is subjective and constantly up for debate. What is deemed obscene or inappropriate by some may be the complete antithesis to another. Laws regulating subjective ideas like obscenity and inappropriateness should not exist.

Excerpt from:
Defending the First Amendment since 1911 | The independent student newspaper of Texas State University

A firm specializing in censorship-evading technology on Wednesday blamed a massive breakdown of China's internet on website address "hijacking" tools used by authorities there.

"In 2002, China started to use DNS hijacking technology to block web sites," said US-based Dynamic Internet Technology, which runs a tool called FreeGate designed to bypass Chinese Internet censors.

"On January 21, 2014, there was a large-scale internet breakdown in China caused by this DNS hijacking system."

Internet users were sent to an IP address operated by Dynamic Internet Technology, which runs FreeGate. The website was registered to a shell company at an address in Wyoming, according to DIT.

The IP address -- 65.49.2.178 -- is linked to dongtaiwang.com, a news portal run by Falun Gong members, Greatfire.org said.

Falun Gong is a Buddhist-inspired religious group that was banned in China in 1999 and branded an "evil cult."

Dynamic Internet Technology lists as clients on its website the Epoch Times -- a publication linked to the spiritual movement -- along with Human Rights in China and other groups.

Cyber-monitoring group Greatfire.org blamed China censors for the fiasco, and DIT backed that contention in a release posted at its website.

The domain name system, or DNS, is essentially an addressing method that lets computers know where to go to find websites on the Internet.

DNS hijacking happens when someone, say, a censor, intercepts transmissions between computers and sends back a wrong address directing an Internet user away from banned online destinations.

Here is the original post:
China internet breakdown blamed on web address hijack tools

Tuesdays Internet outage in China is dividing experts over what caused the networking error, with authorities calling it a hacking attack, and others blaming it on the countrys censorship systems.

The outage briefly crippled the Internet in China, with many local websites inaccessible to users. User traffic was mysteriously redirected to a U.S.-based IP address belonging to a company that has hosted software capable of circumventing Chinas online censorship.

The networking error, which only lasted a few hours, affected at least two-thirds of Chinas websites, according to Qihoo 360, a software security vendor in the country.

On Wednesday, local authorities said a preliminary investigation found that a hacking attack caused the outage. Chinas National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team is continuing to investigate the matter.

On the same day, Chinas state-controlled Xinhua News Agency published a story quoting security experts whodemanded authorities do more to protect the nations Internet infrastructure.

Others experts, however, believe the error may have been caused by a glitch in Chinas notorious censorship systems, also known as The Great Firewall.

China routinely blocks sites with content critical of the nations government, including Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times. Tuesdays Internet outage, however, rerouted traffic to an IP address belonging to Dynamic Internet Technology, a U.S. company whose site is also blocked by authorities.

DIT could not be reached immediately for comment. But the companys clients include The Epoch Times, a publication banned in China. It also hosts Freegate software that can help Chinese Internet users view sites blocked in the country.

Some are speculating that hackers hijacked a root DNS (Domain Name System) server in China to reroute all user traffic, said GreatFire.org, a group that monitors Chinas Internet and opposes the nations censorship.

But in a Wednesday posting, GreatFire.org dismissed such claims, noting that a public DNS server operated by Google had also been affected by the networking error. During the outage, users trying to access the Google DNS server from China were also rerouted to the IP address from Dynamic Internet Technology.

See the rest here:
China blames Internet outage on hacking attack

A mysterious glitch in China led to one of the biggest-ever Internet blackouts on Tuesday, forcing massive volumes of Chinese Web traffic to U.S. servers belonging to a firm with a long history of protesting the government in Beijing and evading its censors.

The disruption, which crippled service for most of Chinas roughly 600 million Internet users, began abount 3 p.m. in Beijing (2a.m. EST) and lasted as long as eight hours, according to Compuware, a Detroit-based firm that monitors Web performance.

The official China Internet Network Information Center said the disruption was probably the result of a hacking attack, but Internet experts said that the cause appears to have been a flawed effort by Chinese Web censors part of what is known as the Great Firewall of China to block sites the government deems subversive.

But instead of censoring, the government appears to have momentarily shut down much of the countrys access to the Internet by mistakenly directing all of that Web traffic to servers controlled by Dynamic Internet Technology, a U.S. software company founded by anti-censorship activist Bill Xia.

Xia said in an e-mail that the disruption, which crashed his servers, was caused by Chinas hijacking system, which is part of Chinas Great Firewall. Xia, who moved to the United States from China in the late 1990s, sells software and services to Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the U.S.-based organization Human Rights in China and Epoch Times, a newspaper published by the Falun Gong religious group.

This incident both communicates the fragility of the Chinese Internet but it also reminds us how robust and resilient their censorship has been, said James Mulvenon, director of Defense Group Inc.s center for intelligence research and analysis.

The Great Firewall works in myriad ways to control what Chinese Internet users can see online, from obstructing searches on sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests to blocking entire Web sites, such as social media sites Facebook and Twitter.

The Chinese government blocks sites by exploiting a weakness in the infrastructure of the Internet. Lets say a user is trying to reach a site by entering the domain name for instance, Facebook.com into a browser. Ordinarily, that request gets sent to whats known as a DNS server, which matches the domain name to an IP address, a series of digits that computers can use to identify each other.

Internet experts say Chinas Great Firewall works by redirecting traffic to erroneous or fake IP addresses. But in the case of Tuesdays glitch, something seemed to go wrong.

A massive amount of traffic was diverted to 65.49.2.178, an IP address affiliated with Xias Dynamic Internet Technology, a group whose work is routinely censored by the Chinese government.

Read this article:
China accuses hackers for Internet disruption; experts suspect censors

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- The future of the Internet will be the focus of a major independent commission announced by officials Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

The group will focus primarily on state censorship of the Internet and the issues of privacy and surveillance, the British newspaper the Guardian reported.

The commission was formed in the wake of disclosures by former U.S. National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden of massive spying efforts by the United States and Britain.

To be headed by Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, the commission will be comprised of 25 people chosen from the fields of politics, academics, and intelligence who will lead a series of public forums around the world.

"The rapid evolution of the net has been made possible by the open and flexible model by which it has evolved and been governed," Bildt said as the commission was announced. "But increasingly this is coming under attack. And this is happening as issues of net freedom, net security and net surveillance are increasingly debated. Net freedom is as fundamental as freedom of information and freedom of speech in our societies."

The two-year inquiry was set up Chatham House, a think tank of Britain's foreign office, and the Center for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI), which is funded in part by Canada.

In a joint statement, Chatham House and CIGI said the Internet was under threat by two sources: states attempting to exert tighter controls over Internet resources and extensive spying on messages and data sent through the Internet.

Chatham House director Robin Niblet said Internet governance "is set to become one of the most pressing global policy issues of our time."

Continued here:
Global commission to study Internet censorship, privacy issues