So as terrible as it might seem, I don’t believe anyone will ever go to jail for blog here, it’s plain stupid.

I don’t thing the blogs you read are really going to shut, but it is good to say it aloud that we don’t want it to happen :-)

They obviously can’t expect to fully enforce it and it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose.

@little brother -

A law to be ignored.

A pretty much secure way to do that is to open a SSH connection and use it as a proxy. The server should be in another country, like Brazil ;). Has anybody said socrates?

Yes, I could use a VPN instead, so I don’t need to blog through a terminal, but as you said, it doesn’t seem necessary :-)

Is the moral question that is the problem.

A pretty much secure way to do that is to open a SSH connection and use it as a proxy. The server should be in another country, like Brazil ;). Has anybody said socrates?

… so that they could be monitored beats the purpose of promoting freedom of speech in a fully-democratic country.

Exactly. Democracy, roughly speaking, means that we elect a government to represent our will. While it is a simplistic definition addresses the point that politicians are not there to control people thoughts and expressions since you need them to elect politicians in the first place.

@Jen / domestika -

It always amazes me when governments propse laws that are clearly not enforceable…

Exactly, I would even add: even if it were enforceable, how can you make a country walk forward when you put into jail a considerable for just not fulfilling bureaucratic requirements.

I am not sure what the legislative process is in Italy(…) It seems unlikely that anyone could expect such a bill to be passed(…)

Neither I am, I moved to Italy just a few months ago. But seems correct that there is something behind this.

I am not sure what the legislative process is in Italy, but it sounds like what happened on Oct 12 was that the draft law was, as we in Canada, would say, approved to “go forward to the House” [for voting by members of Parliament]. Is that more-or-less right?

It seems unlikely that anyone could expect such a bill to be passed by elected representatives, or that such a law could possibly be enforced if it were to be enacted.

There has to be something else behind this — I’ll bet there is another planned piece of legislation, for which this one is a “trial balloon”:
Get everyone in an uproar by proposing an extreme piece of legislation, then withdraw or amend it — and another, slightly less repressive, similar law is likely to slip through quite easily, without a loud public outcry, because it seems so benign by comparison.

What do you think of that theory?

Exactly! A lot of Malaysian bloggers blogged against the “suggested law”, mostly on the grounds that requiring bloggers to register so that they could be monitored beats the purpose of promoting freedom of speech in a fully-democratic country.

But then we all know that there’s no way the Government could “monitor” the bloggers. There are far more important issues that needed to be tackled urgently than tracking down bloggers, LOL.

I do think it is absurd to require bloggers to register, but I find it even more absurd to have a prison instead of a fine as a penalty.

Not registering as a blogger is treated closer to the case of a doctor with unethical behavior than not paying your car plate fee.

Moreover, in theory, you can go to jail if you don’t control what your blog show. This is a serious attack over freedom of speech.

Seems than you have to enable comment moderation and enforce censorship yourself, or be considered as “guilty” as the author comment, or more.

By the way… Guilty of what? Isn’t this a democracy?

But of course, after all those talks of registering Malaysian bloggers as well as bloggers whose blogs are registered with any Malaysian company, we hear nothing more after that.

This law is an absurd indeed! Next step is to demand a visa for the people who wants to leave the country…

I hope this is not as close as it indeed seems.