My View on Internet Filtration by M’sia’s Government

I must say that the recent bashing our dear YB Rais Yatim is getting from the Internet community is surely giving his old body a few bruises here and there. If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the Internet filtration that the Government is mulling over. Yes, it’s similar to China’s abandoned “Green Dam” project, but then, we also have to look at it in the bigger picture.

Am I siding his decision? I would say no, what for? You can’t get into your favorite porn sites? Go through one of those proxy sites you could access to (I’ll post several links at the bottom of this post for you to use). You can’t access your favorite anti-establishment websites like RPK’s Malaysia-Today site/blog/portal because it’s bashing the government left right and center? Go ahead, use the proxy servers. After all, the government forgot that they even pen down the thing about No Censorship to the Internet, so why not, we as Internet users also go about working around the censorship?

For me, I feel that before our dear New Information, Communication and Culture Minister go about thinking about all this “Oh-Holier-Than-Thou” ways of controlling what we read, write or do online. They should first look at what they can to fix our ever so amazing 3rd World Technology based Broadband connection and bring it up to par with the rest of the world. No doubt it’s two dfferent thing and the broadband speed falls under the jurisdiction of another minister and his ministry but heck, why not deal with the problem rather than just telling us that maintenance is being done (call them 9 out of 10 times and that’s the answer they are giving you these days). Am I right?

Anyway, back to what I intend to write in the first place, I must say that at the end of the day, Rais Yatim is a business man that wants to help our local economy. Why do I say that? Look at it this way, with the presence of the Internet, how many of you ever go about buying newspapers irregardless of whether it’s The Star or Harakah, pirated dvds/porns or any other form of materials like books? Even our home grown games (gasing, wau, congkak, chess) has been placed in the back of the closet by the very people who used to love playing them.

You get the idea right? With the Internet, you have access to almost everything, with a population of 27 million, of these, even if 20% of these people spend more time on the Internet surfing for news on news portal or blogs, downloading TV shows, Movies, porns or even playing games online. The sales of all these old school products would have dropped by a lot too. Don’t you think? Newspaper readership rather than increasing, would have gone mostly to the net. TV stations get less viewers cause we can get the most up-to-date episodes of our favorite sitcoms, dramas, movies and so forth even before it touches our shores. Books? You can download PDFs of all the latest magazines, books and so forth online for FREE, do you still need to go buy them? Gaming, you can do them online, you don’t need interaction with the neighborhood punks anymore, especially if you can’t stand the sight of their face.

All these are lost incomes that our dear Rais Yatim is trying to help bring back. So we should, rather than bashing him, say “Well done sir, for putting an effort in trying to bring our people back to the real world, where they have to use their money to buy things and physically meet people for interaction rather than the mumbo jumbo everyone knows as Facebook. In a way, he’s also discouraging advertisers to advertise to the Malaysian market for Free all the way from the USA via GOOGLE. You want to advertise, please do like all the other advertisers in Malaysia, apply for approval and pay the necessary fees to the government before you pollute the Malaysian reader’s mind.

You are earning money from Google I hear you say? So what? You are not helping the economy of Malaysia by using money made in Malaysia! So what? None of the cut goes to our Malaysian government!

So yes, we should applaud our dear Minister for putting in an effort, no doubt that with the good comes the bad through the broadband over the Internet. But we have to look at the bigger picture, businesses isn’t making anymore money by us using the Internet more than going out to buy things. When that happens, less tax get collected. When that happened, guess what? Our Federal Government would have to start doing what Pakatan Rakyat government is doing in Selangor, buying up everything they could get their hands on and raise the amount for that product be it water, electricity and so forth. After all, they need the money right?

Conclusion? We’ll just have to deal with it at the end of the day, right? No matter what our decision may be, at the end, the people that sits at the government buildings are the one that dictate what we can or cannot do. It doesn’t matter which government you’re going to vote for, it’ll all be the same.

If you have problems accessing sites you have been told is a big no no, here’s a few proxy servers you can tap on to help you get around the “red tapes”: http://www.nsfwproxy.com/ or http://bypassanything.com/ or https://proxyplace.net/ or https://proxify.com/ or http://www.hidemyass.com/ or http://miniproxy.org or http://ibypass.net

Alternatively, you could try setting the DNS servers.:

For Windows XP users:

1. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Network and Internet Connections, and then click Network Connections.

2.Right-click the network connection that you want to configure (the one that connect you to the Internet), and then click Properties.

3.On the General tab (for a local area connection), or the Networking tab (for all other connections), click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) from the list, and then click the Properties button.

4.You do not want to obtain DNS server addresses from a DHCP server, click Use the following DNS server addresses.

5. Enter 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 then click OK.

For Windows Vista users:

1.Click Start, click Control Panel, click Network and Internet, and then click Network and Sharing Center.

2.Click Manage network connections from the list of tasks.

3.Right-click the network connection that you want to configure (the one that connect you to the Internet), and then click Properties.

4.On the General tab (for a local area connection), or the Networking tab (for all other connections), click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) or Internet Protocol version 4 (TCP/IPv4) from the list, and then click the Properties button.

5.Select Use the following following DNS server addresses.

6.Enter 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 then click OK

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

No related posts yet.