http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080224/ap_on_hi_te/pakistan_youtube_blocked;_ylt=AiersweI4R3n6sfQuGp9egWs0NUE

They don't like the anti-islamic videos.  Probably don't like Chris Crocker's videos either. :P

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080224/ap_on_hi_te/pakistan_youtube_blocked;_ylt=AiersweI4R3n6sfQuGp9egWs0NUE

They don't like the anti-islamic videos.  Probably don't like Chris Crocker's videos either. :P


Blocking views does not make them cease to exist. But yeah, at least Pakistanis won't have to see Chris Crocker anymore.

Ant

http://i123.photobucket.com/albums/o283/Nerdprincess1980/CHRIS_cROCKER_DO_NOT_WANT.jpg

The religion of peace strikes again.

The religion of peace strikes again.

This is why I am for separation of church and state.
::)

They don't like the anti-islamic videos.  Probably don't like Chris Crocker's videos either. :P


Actually, they're fine with those.  What they really don't like is the video showing new tidbits of what happened when Bhutto got blowed up.  The ISI had to change its cover story at least three times due to videos that got circulated around the 'net.  First it was a bomb.  Then it was a gun, because there was a video showing shots fired before the explosion.  Then it wasn't a gun or a bomb, but she killed herself by smacking her head into the sunroof, because of reports circulating that showing that the gunshot wounds weren't what did her in.  That would have been great, except that nobody believed it -- and because a few weeks later, the final independent reports pointed out that she didn't smack her head into the sunroof (died-of-stupid), she had it smacked into the sunroof from the concussion (got-killed-by-someone-else). The distinction between died-of-stupid and got-killed-by-someone-else carries religious connotations with most Pakistanis, which means it also carries political implications.

Nobody really knows what happened that day. But the one thing any organization hates to do is having to change its cover stories on a daily basis because wise-asses keep uploading embarassing material onto YouTube.

You know how everyone's least-favorite UFO cult has been having a really bad year in 2008 because people keep posting funny stuff about it on YouTube?  Six weeks ago, people were snarking about an actor on YouTube.  Two weeks ago, 9000+ anonymous people showed up, wearing Guy Fawkes masks and singing Rick Astley songs, and now that the cult's been shown to be powerless against distributed communication systems, who knows how big it'll have snowballed by the Ides of March?  Winner gets to brag about having won.

Well, Pakistan's people have been playing the same sort of game with the Internet, except that the winner gets billions in US military aid, plus the keys to a nice set of nukes.

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
  - Commisioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
    (from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, 1999, emphasis added by poster)

The religion of peace strikes again.



Ah yes, censorship is quite unknown in Christianity  ::)

Ah yes, censorship is quite unknown in Christianity   ::)


I will agree with you. Pat Robertson will rant about some things immoral, but if America became like Pakistan "Family Guy" would NEVER air.

Blocking views does not make them cease to exist. But yeah, at least Pakistanis won't have to see Chris Crocker anymore.

Ant


They just lifted the ban today.  They state they've taken out the offensive material.  If they had any sense they'd do more then take the anti-islamic stuff off. ;D

actually it got out today that the ban actually caused youtube to go down over 2/3 of the world. i posted something hysterical in the weirdos thread about youtube going down and joking about how it was a conspiracy and then... turns out it was. pakistan did it. :o

Actually, they're fine with those.  What they really don't like is the video showing new tidbits of what happened when Bhutto got blowed up.  The ISI had to change its cover story at least three times due to videos that got circulated around the 'net.  First it was a bomb.  Then it was a gun, because there was a video showing shots fired before the explosion.  Then it wasn't a gun or a bomb, but she killed herself by smacking her head into the sunroof, because of reports circulating that showing that the gunshot wounds weren't what did her in.  That would have been great, except that nobody believed it -- and because a few weeks later, the final independent reports pointed out that she didn't smack her head into the sunroof (died-of-stupid), she had it smacked into the sunroof from the concussion (got-killed-by-someone-else). The distinction between died-of-stupid and got-killed-by-someone-else carries religious connotations with most Pakistanis, which means it also carries political implications.

Nobody really knows what happened that day. But the one thing any organization hates to do is having to change its cover stories on a daily basis because wise-asses keep uploading embarassing material onto YouTube.

You know how everyone's least-favorite UFO cult has been having a really bad year in 2008 because people keep posting funny stuff about it on YouTube?  Six weeks ago, people were snarking about an actor on YouTube.  Two weeks ago, 9000+ anonymous people showed up, wearing Guy Fawkes masks and singing Rick Astley songs, and now that the cult's been shown to be powerless against distributed communication systems, who knows how big it'll have snowballed by the Ides of March?  Winner gets to brag about having won.

Well, Pakistan's people have been playing the same sort of game with the Internet, except that the winner gets billions in US military aid, plus the keys to a nice set of nukes.

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
  - Commisioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
    (from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, 1999, emphasis added by poster)
props for this post, by the way. which UFO cult are we talking about? they're all pretty popular with me so naturally i'm confused. :P

actually it got out today that the ban actually caused youtube to go down over 2/3 of the world. i posted something hysterical in the weirdos thread about youtube going down and joking about how it was a conspiracy and then... turns out it was. pakistan did it. :o


The Pakistani Government doesn't know how much suffering they've caused.

props for this post, by the way. which UFO cult are we talking about? they're all pretty popular with me so naturally i'm confused. :P


The one that Tom Cruise belongs to.

The one that Tom Cruise belongs to.


Scientology

I will agree with you. Pat Robertson will rant about some things immoral, but if America became like Pakistan "Family Guy" would NEVER air.

:\'(

props for this post, by the way. which UFO cult are we talking about? they're all pretty popular with me so naturally i'm confused. :P


Congratulations, Jessica, Danoota&Me, and Tia!  You found the card!

Yeah, that one.  They've been at war with the 'net since the early '90s.  That war was fought to a stalemate, and sat mostly dormant until January 2008, when that video of Tom Cruise got leaked.  Tom's cackling madly to himself about how his mental superpowers help him "confront and smash" people who don't like the cult, how his fellow cultists "are the authorities", etc. etc... makes his couch-jumping episode on Oprah look sane in comparison.

In response to the embarassing PR (the speech was never supposed to be shown to non-members), the cult's lawyers started trying to DMCA it off of YouTube, the Streisand Effect kicked in, a few dumbasses tried to DDOS the cult's website, the mainstream media started reporting on it, and people everywhere started asking why a religion needed an army of copyright and trademark lawyers in the first place, what "fair game" meant, what "operation snow white" and "operation freakout" were, why it costs $360,000+ to get as far as Cruise did, and so on.  All of a sudden, it stopped being about the funny Xenu story in the South Park episode, and it started becoming serious business.

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/0/03/AnonymousLondonPanorama1.jpg
  - London, February 10th, 2008

The Internet has organized flash mobs before -- there are some awesome (and delightfully funny, completely apolitical, "just for the fun of it") examples of the phenomenon at Newmindspace and Improv Everywhere.  But those are typically organized months in advance, and for just one city.

This is the first time something of this scale been done with no organizers, planet-wide, and against a well-funded opponent with a track record for playing hardball, and that picture up there was taken less than three weeks after the fit hit the shan.  How does a rigidly hierarchical organization respond to a completely decentralized opposition -- who do you sue when the opposition has no leader?  Conversely, can a completely decentralized group of people get their collective acts and messages together for long enough to effect real-world changes in a hierarchical opponent that has hundreds of millions of dollars in its bank -- or will the Internet simply decide that this was merely 2008's version of the Hamster Dance, All-Your-Base, or LOLcats, and find another amusement for 2009?  Those kinds of questions have security implications that go straight back to the Pakistan-vs-YouTube debate, and even to the Iraq war.

I don't know how it'll play out, but it's gonna be fascinating (and considering the participants' propensity for photoshopping motivational posters and captioning image macros, absolutely hilarious) to watch.

How does a rigidly hierarchical organization respond to a completely decentralized opposition -- who do you sue when the opposition has no leader?  more importantly, how do i gain control of these legions and get them to do my bidding and send me money?

seriously, though, that's interesting and i'm curious to learn more about it. the internet might lead to a lot more order-out-of-chaos things like this.

more importantly, how do i gain control of these legions and get them to do my bidding and send me money?

seriously, though, that's interesting and i'm curious to learn more about it. the internet might lead to a lot more order-out-of-chaos things like this.


Well, don't forget... Anonymous is not your personal army -- it's nobody's personal army.

Consider meat: influenza pandemics often start when a new or novel strain decimates a population -- but within a few years, the descendant strains give the surviving population nothing more than a week of the sniffles.  Ebola's too virulent to propagate -- it kills its hosts before they can spread the disease.  Syphillis once gave its victims rotting sores and terminal brain damage; a few hundred years later, the virulent strains have died out, and the surviving strains merely produce uncomfortable chronic low-grade infection.  Human bodies are merely a medium in which genes (be they human, bacterial, and viral) self-replicate.

Now consider the mind:  What makes something like "All Your Base" catch on among millions of geeks, and then die out?  Why our collective obsession with penguins here, but not on other message boards?  Why do some ideas self-replicate, and others not?  Why do most religions (which are, after all, self-replicating groups of ideas) seem to go through a phase of violence and virulence before either burning themselves into extinction or changing to non-virulence?  If meat is the machine that genes use to self-replicate, what is a mind, but a machine by which ideas, or memes use for self-replication?

The study of such phenomena has been called Memetics, and the field is in its infancy. 

Homework:  Short-circuit the Iraqi insurgency by coming up with memes that will propagate well among the people of Iraq.  Stop a potential Jonestown Massacre by defusing the memes of a cult bent on political infiltration and world domination.  Win the 2008 election for your party of choice by making sure everyone thinks the opposing candidate is unfit for office because he/she is "Muslim", "cold and calculating", or "too conservative", or "not conservative enough".  (It doesn't matter if any of these are true; the assignment is merely to find a meme that infects enough voters that they can swing the election to your side.)

Extra credit:  Equipped with nothing more than a time machine, a printing press, a pen, and a microphone and radio, create a meme to inoculate the Germans of the Weimar republic against a coming memetic plague.  Everyone likes to feel superior to the guy next to them -- your meme has to make 1920s Germans feel sufficiently good about themselves that they laugh at the funny moustachioed guy, but not so good about themselves that you accidentally create an outcome even bloodier than WW2.

I like to think of Anonymous as a promising student who's doing pretty well in Memetics 101, where the final exam was:  "Get a million office workers who've never heard of you to laugh at three of your memes, once a day, for a year", and the answer was "LOLcats, demotivational posters, and pictures of accidents captioned with the word 'FAIL'."

Let the games begin.

It's the Ides of March, and half a world away in Sydney and Perth, Operation Party Hard is GO.

Ah yes, censorship is quite unknown in Christianity   ::)


Hey, don't get me wrong.  I don't like religion in general.  The whole thing strikes me as Santa Claus for adults.

Still, I can deal with Christianity better than Islam.  I think you and I totally agree on the Religious Right in general, but at the same time, I don't make exceptions for Muslims either.

Pat Condell has the right idea.