Government Intervention Of The Internet Essays (2723 words)

Government Intervention Of The Internet Government Intervention Of The Internet During the past decade, our society has become based solely on the ability to move large amounts of information across large distances quickly. Computerization has influenced everyone's life. The natural evolution of computers and this need for ultra-fast communications has caused a global network of interconnected computers to develop. This global net allows a person to send E-mail across the world in mere fractions of a second, and enables even the common person to access information world-wide. With advances such as software that allows users with a sound card to use the Internet as a carrier for long distance voice calls and video conferencing, this network is key to the future of the knowledge society. At present, this net is the epitome of the first amendment: free speech. It is a place where people can speak their mind without being reprimanded for what they say, or how they choose to say it. The key to the world-wide success of the Internet is its protection of free speech, not only in America, but in other countries where free speech is not protected by a constitution. To be found on the Internet is a huge collection of obscene graphics, Anarchists' cookbooks and countless other things that offend some people. With over 30 million Internet users in the U.S. alone (only 3 million of which surf the net from home), everything is bound to offend someone. The newest wave of laws floating through law making bodies around the world threatens to stifle this area of spontaneity. Recently, Congress has been considering passing laws that will make it a crime punishable by jail to send "vulgar" language over the net, and to export encryption software. No matter how small, any attempt at government intervention in the Internet will stifle the greatest communication innovation of this century. The government wants to maintain control over this new form of communication, and they are trying to use the protection of children as a smoke screen to pass laws that will allow them to regulate and censor the Internet, while banning techniques that could eliminate the need for regulation. Censorship of the Internet threatens to destroy its freelance atmosphere, while wide spread encryption could help prevent the need for government intervention. The current body of laws existing today in America does not apply well to the Internet. Is the Internet like a bookstore, where servers cannot be expected to review every title? Is it like a phone company who must ignore what it carries because of privacy? Is it like a broadcasting medium, where the government monitors what is broadcast? The trouble is that the Internet can be all or none of these things depending on how it's used. The Internet cannot be viewed as one type of transfer medium under current broadcast definitions. The Internet differs from broadcasting media in that one cannot just happen upon a vulgar site without first entering a complicated address, or following a link from another source. "The Internet is much more like going into a book store and choosing to look at adult magazines." (Miller 75). Jim Exon, a democratic senator from Nebraska, wants to pass a decency bill regulating the Internet. If the bill passes, certain commercial servers that post pictures of unclad beings, like those run by Penthouse or Playboy, would of course be shut down immediately or risk prosecution. The same goes for any amateur web site that features nudity, sex talk, or rough language. Posting any dirty words in a Usenet discussion group, which occurs routinely, could make one liable for a $50,000 fine and six months in jail. Even worse, if a magazine that commonly runs some of those nasty words in its pages, The New Yorker for instance, decided to post its contents on-line, its leaders would be held responsible for a $100,000 fine and two years in jail. Why does it suddenly become illegal to post something that has been legal for years in print? Exon's bill apparently would also "criminalize private mail," ... "I can call my brother on the phone and say anything--but if I say it on the Internet, it's illegal" (Levy 53). Congress, in their pursuit of regulations, seems to have overlooked the fact that the majority of the adult material on the Internet comes from overseas. Although many U.S. government sources helped fund Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet, they no longer control it. Many of the new Internet technologies, including the World Wide Web, have come from overseas. There is no clear boundary between information held in the U.S. and information stored in other countries. Data held in foreign computers is just as accessible as data in America, all it takes is the click of a mouse to access. Even if our government tried to regulate the Internet, we have no control over what is posted in other countries, and we

Hash libraries for C Programmers

Hash libraries for C Programmers This page lists a collection of libraries that will help you in programming in C. Libraries here are open source and used to help you store data, without having to roll your own linked list etc data structures. uthash Developed by Troy D. Hanson, any C structure can be stored in a hash table using uthash. Just include #include uthash.h then add a UT_hash_handle to the structure and choose one or more fields in your structure to act as the key. Then use HASH_ADD_INT, HASH_FIND_INT and macros to store, retrieve or delete items from the hash table. It uses int, string and binary keys. Judy Judy is a C library that implements a sparse dynamic array. Judy arrays are declared simply with a null pointer and consume  memory only when populated. They can grow to use all available memory if desired. Judys key benefits are scalability, high performance, and memory efficiency. It can be used for dynamically sized arrays, associative arrays or a simple-to-use interface that requires no rework for expansion or contraction and can replace many common data structures, such as arrays, sparse arrays, hash tables, B-trees, binary trees, linear lists, skiplists, other sort and search algorithms, and counting functions. SGLIB SGLIB is short for  Simple Generic Library and consists of a single header file sglib.h that provides generic implementation of most common algorithms for arrays, lists, sorted lists and red-black trees. The library is generic and it does not define its own data structures. Rather it acts on existing user-defined data structures via a generic interface. It also does not allocate or deallocate any memory and does not depend on any particular memory management. All algorithms are implemented in form of macros parametrized by the type of data structure and comparator function (or comparator macro). Several further generic parameters such as the name of next field for linked lists may be required for some algorithms and data structures.