31 December 2007

Blogging is a criminal hobby, part 1

There are so many laws and regulations, the average blogger must surely be violating one or more of them. And they are vague too, so you can never be sure. Full essay.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

With so much inconsistency in the laws and their enforcement, one might be led to believe that the problem lies with the ones who wrote the laws. Perhaps the members of Parliament responsible, and their civil servants (experts in drafting laws, no doubt) are actually incompetent at this part of their job. I have every right to state my opinion that I believe many MP's are incompetent. This blog demonstrates a cogent analysis of why that is the case. Thank you!

Anonymous said...

how about you identify all your own criminal blogging activities, and let someone decide whether to prosecute you? if they choose to ignore all your transgressions, then other bloggers can feel more secure

sgsociety.com

Abao said...

There's a simple approach to solving the problem actually.

Instead of telling us what we cant do, define what we can do. That in itself, would reduce the huge chunk of laws and regulations that we need to take note of.

Yawning Bread Sampler said...

Abao - I disagree with that approach. A positive list can never be exhaustive enough, especially as the technology continues to change. We'd be left with the situation where something that was excluded from a positive list, perhaps because nobody foresaw it, would be considered banned unless the law is changed. It also goes against the grain of English-derived justice, a fundamental principle being that whatever is not specifically forbidden is allowed.

Abao said...

Makes sense...shows my naiveness.

But there should still be a basic "can-do" list to supplement the "cant-do"'s so that at least we still have some basic rights that is guaranteed.

Anonymous said...

This is a very insightful article. I enjoyed it very much.

Let me just ask one question; what is the law? They cannot make it up as they go along. It has to be clear, unambigious and more importantly communicated to the general public - otherwise it cannot be enforced, go and ask any lawyer worth his salt - he will testify to this as matter of fact. Ignorance in this case is not only a mitigating factor but also a defence if it can be established no reasonable steps have been taken by the authorities to inform the general public.

So this leads to another question: why then are the battle lines blur? Is it by chance or design? I can see only one possible motivation, they are trying to keep as much widget space as possible for any eventualities which may crop up down the road.

Question: is this a good strategy. Yes for policy makers, but no for businesses as it means ppl will just pick up and go a to another domain. Then they can go and be king in the kingdom of the blind, it matters little to those who see the world in stereo.

One can plan only to be ruled by accidents.

Darkness 2007

Anonymous said...

law or no law. I am not personally a lawyer myself. But if I had to comment on the matter. I really like the response of the brotherhood fellow Mr or dr darkness, where he says something to the effect, if the conditions no good, we just go somewhere else la. You are dispensible. That I feel is real confidence.

I mean if you go to a shop and order mee siam and they serve you a shoe, can they blame you, if you decide to go somewhere else.

I am first a customer and secondly only a blogger, this is the only rights and law I need to know.

Anonymous said...

I think asking people who are unhappy in Singapore to just leave and go somewhere else is insensitive. Leaving Singapore is just not a viable option for most Singaporeans. I think people deserve civil rights regardless of where they live. Emigration from Singapore is a realistic option only for the well-off, who are unburdened by HDB loans, families, and jobs. It's just a lot harder to leave than people make it sound. Furthermore, to emigrate to a country with a better human rights situation than Singapore (Canada, the US, etc.), one must meet very strict visa requirements. Singaporeans can travel for 90 days to such countries visa-free, but it's completely naive to compare that to freedom to emigrate there permanently. And just because some neighbouring countries don't offer those rights, does not absolve Singapore of its "teapot dictatorship" qualities either. I'm just getting fed up with the "if you don't like Singapore, leave" excuse.

Anonymous said...

brotherhood can afford to do that as 90% of their readers are adept at looking for them in cyberspace. The rely on only 5% of their readers from links etc. Infact, they dont even have one single link if you notice. Through the years their readers have been abused and used to logging in and finding out their fav reads have skipped town like a travelling circus. So to them it is nothing.

However, for the rest of us in blogosphere, I dont think the situation is like that, we are I believe to domesticated, there is still a big reliance on links and role of aggregators to direct readers to our sites. That I feel makes us all the more vulnerable bc we cannot just pick and go. Not without completely losing our reader segment.

One thing is very clear if they go, it will be like the INTELLIGENT SINGAPOREAN or ICERED>COM in HK, they will burn everything and leave a big gaping hole in blogosphere. Even today the situation in HK hasn't recovered completely, all the brains just disapppeared literally over night pushing back the whole IT field by at least 5 years.

It was ruthless.

Yawning Bread Sampler said...

If you don't understand the above comment, you're not alone. I don't either. I think it's off-topic, but I'll leave it here so you can assess yourself.

Anonymous said...

IMHO not very nice to accuse ppl of doing things they didnt do.

Anonymous said...

This whole idea of them abusing their readers is so...i dunno what to say. I mean how do you even abuse a reader? You mean to say they force ppl to read their stuff?

Icered.com died under mysterious circumstances, so did the Intelligent Singapore, but why should they kill their own kind?

I oersonally think, those sites were hunted down and so they evac.