I'm a Singaporean and I fucking hate this. In fact, I built getgom.com because our government has decided to ban porn as well.
And now.. THIS. Any Singaporean HNers out there, if you're up for it, as a programmer, I'm wanna build something to circumvent this. Holler if you're keen. Cheers.
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On another note, this is why whenever people say that Singapore is a fine place to start a business, I say thats probably because you don't "live LIVE" here. It's just another hub that you'll attempt to start up a business, and leave somewhat. Unless you come from a 3rd world/developing nation and come here to build wages. Other than that, I don't know many true blue Singaporeans that's actually happy with the state of things.
If the regulations are about blocking websites using standard Internet censorship techniques akin to the Great Firewall of China, then it is relatively easy to circumvent (provided that Singapore doesn't implement that at a scale comparable to China). VPN, SSH server in foreign country, proxy, Tor etc should do the job.
But if the regulations are about monitoring, reviewing and controlling, say, local news reports before they are published on those websites, then there is nothing you can do, unfortunately.
> And now.. THIS. Any Singaporean HNers out there, if you're up for it, as a programmer, I'm wanna build something to circumvent this. Holler if you're keen. Cheers.
This might not be possible to circumvent with a 'hack'. What this is, is the digital equivalent to the Newspapers and Printing Presses Act [1] (which is part of the "regulatory framework" for traditional news platforms that is cited in the article). It's a legal/regulatory thing, not a software thing.
Put simply, yes, this is a way for the government to regulate major news organisations that are regularly visited by Singapore IP addresses, and that write Singapore-related news articles at least once a week. (The MDA seems to consider online services regulated under the Broadcasting Act. [2]) So:
(1) they ask these big companies to put up a $50,000 bond;
(2) big company's employees may feel the need to self-censor, especially if there's a possibility that they might lose their jobs and much more if they're the ones who write the articles causing big company to lose part of their performance bond;
(3) they achieve some degree of control over news and media organisations with an incorporated entity in Singapore, since those are the easiest to regulate.
The way I see it, it's really hard to define what Singapore-related news is, and 50,000 unique IPs is roughly 0.08% of the IPv4 addresses allocated to Singapore [3]. Considering that most consumer internet services here use dynamic IP allocation, it's not a high threshold to hit.
(I'm not a lawyer. I'm also very interested in hearing everyone else's take on this.)
My initial reaction on the new regulation was "good luck with that one" but... like you point out, large organizations will likely comply to take down requests or risk getting blocked (for less tech savvy users anyway), and eventually reduce their reporting or self-censor.
I-am-not-a-lawyer, but my guess is that organizations outside of Singapore that ignore the law will put their executive staff at risk of prosecution if they ever travel through Singapore (a significant hub of air travel).
So the likelihood that this regulation is toothless and can be circumvented via proxies or Tor is low.
And now.. THIS. Any Singaporean HNers out there, if you're up for it, as a programmer, I'm wanna build something to circumvent this. Holler if you're keen. Cheers.
--
On another note, this is why whenever people say that Singapore is a fine place to start a business, I say thats probably because you don't "live LIVE" here. It's just another hub that you'll attempt to start up a business, and leave somewhat. Unless you come from a 3rd world/developing nation and come here to build wages. Other than that, I don't know many true blue Singaporeans that's actually happy with the state of things.