how truly globally connected we are...

Ok, so I have to share this story with you, which I first heard on NPR one morning, and also found in Wired. The discussion on the radio station was about how connected the world is now a days with the proliferation of online content and it's availability through an internet connection. I know there has been lots of contreversy lately with some well known search engines and some nations that like to censor information for their country, but I want to keep politics out of this and just talk about this interesting news story and article, so it comes from France and has to do with Nazi items that were being auctioned on Yahoo!'s auction site. Now in France there is a law that prohibits and display of Nazi items or pictures related to it which sparks indignation, well actually it's more like prohibiting items "that incite racial hatred" (source: Wired) and having memorabilia items on the auction which could be accessed by people from all over the world including France seemed to stir the courts and a judge said that the auction offended "the collective memory of the country" (source: bbc news). But anyway I'm not talking politics or offering my opinion I just wanted to have a lead into what happens, well so the French government asked several security experts whether there was a way to block the auctioned items and what a viable solution could be. So they asked Yahoo to filter items from users from the country or be fined certain amount of francs everyday that the filter wasn't up and running past the given deadline. However since the yahoo auction site is hosted in the US on a .com removing those items would mean violating the US Constitutional rights to Freedom of Speech. And after much review yahoo also determined that it would be hard to solely filter based on IP address matches from the country and would only really work for 90% of the users that came from the location they would be filtering for. And I think in the end from what I heard from the radio broadcast Yahoo! decided to just remove the items instead of pay fines and legal fees. Now this really goes to show you how connected our world really is, and information you put on the web is truly global, makes you feel even smaller when you imagine yourself existing as only an IP address in cyberspace amongst millions of other users, just as small as my own existence on this planet. But an interesting story.