James Enck (EuroTelcoBlog) points out the German Wikipedia site is currently down. Here's the site in German and here's Google Language Tool's English translation.
Delving a little deeper, it appears the family of Boris Floricic (a German hacker well known under the pseudonym Tron who died in 1998) has sued the German Wikipedia foundation to protect his privacy and has obtained a court order in Germany that's caused the German site to stop displaying any of the German version of Wikipedia.
Of course, this is doesn't work in the Internet age. The Internet is global, while laws are largely national.
So while Wikipedia in German is down, the German text is still available. For those of you who follow hacking, the English details of Tron's career are available here. More importantly, the entire German version of Wikipedia is still available through Wikipedia.org here. While I can sympathize with Boris Floricic's family's pain at his death, Tron was a very public figure so it's hard to see how anyone could expect to keep the details of his life secret.
In more controlled societies it possible for the government to filter all Internet connections as China does. And every society regulates their citizens' behavior in various regards, witness US attempts to restrict Internet gambling. But the music industry hasn't stopped file sharing and it's unlikely the Chinese have suppressed all discussion of banned issues.
Think of the Internet as comparable to the printing press in its impact on 15th and 16th century Europe. That revolution stretched over several hundred years. Communications is much faster today, but laws change slowly and culture is a generational thing. When will law and regulation catch up with the Internet age?
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