It is going to be impossible to discuss many things that affect the internet and computing without involving politics. Net neutrality, DNS control, Chinese filters...the list is long.

I agree that doing business with the Cuban government is bad. However I also don't believe our government has a right to control what its people do in this way. And it's completely ineffective. Additionally it's hypocritical since we do business with China and others with terrible human rights problems. The only logical conclusion is that there are irrelevant political/power reasons for it.

And certainly, it illustrates why government control is bad.

On the note of Chinese filters, and web filtering in general. Since I work IT for public schools, K-12, we are required to filter the internet browsing both on and off campus. Since we have 5500 or more macbooks and they all have wireless and every high school kid gets their own personal macbook they can take home, by policy we must filter the internet both at school and at home.

Which is a pain in the ______ (pick your favorite quote and insert)!

Why do we have to do this? Simple, by policy, parents don't want any responsibility for anything a child may do at home. Why is it the school's responsibility? Well, it is our equipment. So, if a kid were to go off school grounds, and not during school hours browse for porn on a school computer we are held liable. It makes total sense.....:rolleyes:

So, during our deployment we messed with several different filters. The first one we tried required a box to sit outside your network for external authentication, well it was getting slammed by all kinds of internet browsers from both China (who are trying to bypass the government filters) and several from Czech and other nearby countries (the spammers, hackers) over and over again that we had to just kill the default set up and require authentication to even touch it.

If it were up to me, I would just make the parents responsible and let the kids surf unfiltered at home. I mean, there has to be a fine line of responsibility between the education administration and parenting, and I think that once you leave school grounds it is no longer anyone in the school's responsibility.

It is very interesting to see all the chinese IPs just peg the crap out of our external filter box, it was like they were trying to be less filtered? Even if any of them actually gained access, they still would have been filtered.

Too bad the school system here doesn't have enough money to do something like that.

Anyway, here's something interesting:

Pakistan government accidentally placed worldwide block on Youtube:
General info: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...30210920080226
Technical info: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-pakistan.html

The Pakistan government recently found YouTube hosting "content deemed offensive to Islamic beliefs" and ordered all ISP's in Pakistan to ban YouTube.

From what I understand, this ban accidentally spread to an ISP in Hong Kong, which then spread to some other ISPs, which then started a chain reaction, and affected every single ISP's in the world.

Would this be considered a major security hole? I mean, would it be possible for some hacker get into an ISP's system and place an 'auto-ban' on any site they wanted?

That particular exploit was known, and while I am not a routing expert, it seems to me like some of the network admins who run these ISPs were lazy, or did not configure their routing tables correctly.

It's always been my impression that the US Government's policy towards Cuba has more to do with the feelings of Cubans living in Florida than anything else. In that sense, the government is just fulfilling the will of its people, which is far better than a corporation like Comcast "shaping" internet traffic.