Turning off the internet

A couple of interesting blog href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/06/irans_internet_dilemma.html">posts

looking at the difficulties Iran is having in turning off it's

internet. While countries like Iran and China have some very

sophisticated filtering solutions to limit what their own citizens can

see on the internet (just like us) as the internet becomes more pervasive the option to turn it

off becomes harder to do. Countries have to balance economic interests

with their desire for political control.

Assuming there will always be some connectivity it makes sense to

support projects like href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)">Tor

and Freenet that

allow users to bypass state imposed censorship. We should be very wary

if our governments start mandating what we href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8091044.stm">should

and shouldn't run on our machines. We should always protect href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">freedom 0.