Bram Dov Abramson wrote:
The NY Times ran a pretty good piece on this (http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/2003-April/019695.html)
If you liked the NY Times piece, you'll like this commentary from The Register (UK) from a few days earlier: Al Jazeera's web site - DDoSed or unplugged? By John Lettice 27/03/2003 http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29984.html The interesting thing about the Al-Jazeera story is that at first it seems to be about "those evil hackers" again. But underneath is a poignant example of how the legal structure of the Internet constrains speech. Because an Internet ISP has nothing resembling a nondiscrimination duty (unlike, e.g., a telephone company) and ISPs are often protected from liability for censorship (e.g., the "good samaritan" blocking and screening clause in the US Telecoms Act of 1996), this produces a recipe for overbroad private censorship. Any hacking only makes unpopular views even more likely to be rejected by ISPs; the Register piece calls unpopular content the "poisoned chalice". Another facet of this story is about how the technical (as opposed to legal) structure constrains speech. While Al-Jazeera was down, did anyone try to find extremely controversial non-Western media coverage on the Internet (e.g., Al-Jazeera's footage of civilian dead or British soldiers)? I did, and it is very difficult to find the controversial pictures on the Web (I found only a few grainy screen shots). But you can easily find MPEGs of several controversial Al-Jazeera stories on peer-to-peer networks. Christian -- http://www.niftyc.org/