Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Thy Name is Irony

Yes, I know that our government showed lack of better judgement by instructing to block Youtube. Obviously, they haven't learned their history of censorship.

Our ISPs followed suit, by reacting out of fear (and the natural ability to shirk responsibilities), blocking five to seven sites. Any site that they thought would risk Indonesians getting their hands on Fitna. Including Multiply, which is basically a social networking site like Friendster or Facebook.

One of their formal announcement is worth quoting:


Dear Customer,

According our Minister Communication and Info Letter No : 84/m.KOMINFO/04/08 April 2nd 2008: about The blockading of the Site and Blog That contained the Fitnah Film, then the site along with this for the time being we were closed until the further notification :

1. Youtube 2. MySpace 3. Metacafe 4. Multiply 5. Rapid-share

Was like this information that could be sent by us as information from our backbone internet Excelcomindo, upper the understood we say thank you.
Warm Regards,

*-Aditya-*
*Customer Service Support**
**Corporate Solution* PT Excelcomindo Pratama Tbk.
Phone : 021 - 57959817
Email : cs-busol@xl.co.id

People who resort to transtooled messages obviously care much more about following orders blindly instead of consequences.

On April 7th, the Ministry of Information and Communication held a discussion about the electronic information and transaction law. More than seventy people from blogging communities attend. They voiced their concerns about the law having potentials to repress the freedom of expressions. And that the site-filtering decision is like--to borrow a blogger expression--a cannon blast to ward off mosquitoes.

What did the government had to say? Here's a key quote:

"If a husband can only get aroused after watching porn and then have sex with his wife, isn't this some kind of dishonesty?"
--Edmond, Ministry of Information and Communication staff member


As expected, the discussion led nowhere. The blocking continues. Multiply was officially shot down at April 8th. Indonesiaonlineshop, a community of about 1,000 online business owners (50-60% of them use Multiply) are one of the bystanders who suffer the blast.

A lot of Multiply users fought back by posting articles similarly, "How to Fight the Filter and Keep Accessing Multiply."

However, they posted these articles on their Multiply blogs.

I don't know about you. But if we want to show our government a better example of common sense, I don't think this is working.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

"upper the understood we say thank you"

Hahahahahahaahahahahahaahahaahaha.

I was going to write this whole long paragraph about my opinion on this whole thing. But I decided to erase everything and sum it up in word. "seriously?"

Anonymous said...

Used tunneling proxy.
"Pornno Is Part Of Our Faith and Believe"
Believe it or not the most visitor of Zuideck Amsterdam, Geylang Singapore, or Shinjuku japan mostly indonesian students :).
Double moral/bigotry is good than accepted reality as it is; the morals is not much better than the Araber or Malaysians.

Isman H. Suryaman said...

That word sums it up perfectly, meta.

I was wondering more about why did the guy come up with that line in the first place? What's that gotta do with the discussion?

Therry said...

That's because he did it too and he merely just wanted approval from people that it was actually okay.

To watch porn and get turned on and wanting to screw your wife, I mean.

Maybe he was one of those religious dilemmatic man who thinks anything that is a bit out of normal is considered a sin.

Masturbating? Sin.

Watch porn? Sin.

Watch porn then get MORE turned on that he did when he saw his wife? Sin.

Maybe he should ask his wife to join and watch it with him. LOL

Isman H. Suryaman said...

A philosophical question, suppose a guy played a porn movie he had downloaded earlier while believing that he was commiting a sin. Turned out the scene showed his wife masturbating.

Would he call his wife with her stage name?