The Silent Room

Whoohoo, get a load of this:

BLOGGERS using locally hosted websites may be asked to register with the authorities, Deputy Energy, Water and Communications Minister Datuk Shaziman Abu Mansor said.

He said registration was one of the measures the Government was considering to prevent the spread of negative or malicious content on the Internet.

Shaziman said this while winding up the debate on the motion of thanks on the Royal Address for his ministry.

He added that the ministry did not have any problem with bloggers who identified themselves, and he welcomed blogging activities.

However, he said there were about 50,000 websites registered under the .my suffix and there were a lot of avenues for anyone to host websites with malicious content which could harm the country’s security.

- [source]

Yea sure, I’m a bit late of the news, but what do I care?

It looks like another politician wants to have some light shed on himself. Let’s all welcome the new Moron Of The Week: Shaziman Abu Mansor! *applause*

You know, I think some people forgot what country we live in. We live a place called Malaysia, not the Republic of China. We are a country of democracy not a country under communist rule. You can slowly encourage and subtly influence the words and actions of the people, but if you think you can put a duct tape over their mouth – think again.

I can freely, and openly escape this bullshit of a bloggers registration. My server is hosted in the United Kingdom, my domain registrar is in South America [and I already cleaned out the WHOIS info], and I blog from at least 5 different PCs across an area of at least a 50-mile radius to cover – and all those PCs are connected to the net with dynamic IP addresses, and what if I used a proxy in Australia? You would search across the whole bloody planet to find me?

Here’s the situation, in simpler terms:
Government wants to own your mouth, and your asshole. They wish to control what goes in, and what goes out.

Here’s what’s gonna happen:
Government won’t find it so easily done. At least not without spending several million ringgits worth of TAXPAYER’S money.

The champions are, of course, Uncle Lim and Kak Marina. These two shine like beacons of common sense and logic surrounded by uneducated pricks who get driven around in their Bentleys and Mercs and Beemers who think ‘blogs’ is synonymous to ‘chance get government contract and climb the ladder’.

Bloggers are liars. Blogs are collections of lies. Blogs defame Malaysia. Bloggers are unemployed. Blogs are this, blogs are that.

I think a good word to replace the word ‘blog’ in the above comments are ‘politics’ and ‘politicians’. I’m sure, for all that matters, with the number of free blogging services, the innumerable methods to surf and post contents anonymously, people are just going to ignore the rule to impose a bloggers’ registration act. People will ignore the rule, ridicule it, and send the news to Reuter’s Oddly Enough section. The country will once again become a source of humour for the world.

Now I can almost picture the scene

Shaziman: Your ass, and your mouth. A simple offering of submission to the Gahmen.
Silencers: *pulls out sword* There’s plenty down there. Dig it out yourselves.
Shaziman: *looks into bottomless pit* This is blasphemy! This is madness!
Silencers: THIS. IS. A BLOG! *kick*

Oh man, that would be so fucking awesome. You want us to surrender our personal info so you can hound us? Mol?n labe! (Come and get them!)