Letter on Internet Censorship

During the last INTIMA Forum (1 month ago from this post), I raised a few issues one of which pertains to internet censorship in the college network. The director of the student services department asked for me to write a report to her regarding which sites were censored. A friend of mine asked me to post here about it.

I went overboard and wrote a full letter instead of a brief report. Here is what I had submitted, verbatim.

I initially noticed that www.collegeboard.com was blocked when the college network returned me to ecampus.inti.edu.my . That was awhile ago and now it seems fine.

Friends point that www.kennysia.com and www.xanga.com is blocked too. The former is a harmless blog. The latter is a blogging service.

Both are harmless. The thing here is that I'm sure that these are not the only sites that are blocked. The trend here is obvious, harmless sites are getting the block.

Google's 'cache' is blocked too. This function in Google allows you to view pages saved by Google devoid of any pictures and media, it's text only. The usefulness is apparent when sites are offline, barring any access to its information. The cache from Google enables one to view information saved by Google that would otherwise be unaccessible then. Important tool when doing research as you do not want to skip valuable stuff.

Google also allows viewing of PDF and DOC documents in HTML, meaning you can view in your web browser PDF and DOC materials. You may ask why is this important but in case you do not know, INTI's gateway seems to dislike downloads, giving downloads a painfully slow download rate. The result: if you're looking to retrieve PDF and DOC materials from the web by downloading them to your local drive to be viewed, you need wait an entire day.


That was the gist of the issue raised during the forum but let me humbly advance the issue further.

The point in pointing out these 'blocks' is not to request for the college management to consider 'unblocking' them, (for I could have done that with less effort and less inconvenience it seems if I had referred them to the relevant offices) but to request that the college reconsider its policy of blocking internet content. In my humble opinion, I strongly believe that the college should not have a hand in any forms of social engineering and therefore has no reason to even engage in internet content filtering. I'm sure this opinion of mine is shared by many students alike.

I do understand that there are schools of views that advance how certain content should not be accessible through the college infrastructure due to reasons of impropriety, for example pornography. But consider the age-old argument of impracticality. If the process is going to be automatic, otherwise what would be non-offensive sites will be blocked. If the process is going to be manual, it is going to be subjective and worse, too impractical for it to have any effect.

The forum is as what I believe, a place for students, not just your students but your paying customers, to voice out what they believe should be given attention to. I'm saying this because I am actually very convinced that nothing will be done to loosen current levels of content censorship, save maybe the few sites which I have named. Yet I raised the issue with the slightest hope that it'll be given even some attention.

Take no offense with what I've said so far for essentially I'm making no requests.

I thank you :D