'Old' man non-techie libertarian expat's challenges getting his first ereader

[hermes]

>Easy to point at paranoia,

and I am the first.

>but the OP actually does have a point with what he listed (The Satanic Verses, et al), and one might have some surprises with trying to bring any scientology literature into Germany,


Or bringing the bible into Saudi Arabia, no?


Are you serious about scientology books being verboten in Germany? I must look into this. It is my belief that by criminalizing weird ideas you give them power. Leave them in the open where we can laugh at them. Did six million die? Who cares? At least I don't, whether it was six or five million or the whole holocaust was an invention of the 'Jews who control the world'. But in Canada and Germany both, people have actually gone to prison for questioning historical details or having some nutty ideas. I don't support their ideas but I support their right to express them.

As much as I think some islamic looneys also are potentially dangerous, even if the Koran advises violence (I haven't read it yet) and historically is a form of 'religious' racism, hey, the koran is just a book - paper and binding. Own it, buy it, sell it, honour it ritually, interpret it as you wish (and yes, burn it if that suits you). But what is happening is people who question the wisdom of Islam or muslim immigration go to prison in Europe and are charged with a crime in Canada. I don't know who is more dangerous - people who want to kill sellers of Danish cartoon buttons or the governments that penalize those who sell them. I don't want to have anything to do with either group.

>for another example (they're very sensitive to anything that feels cultish, for obvious reasons). The point is that we take our freedoms very much for granted, and many of those freedoms do not exist world-wide.

Exactly.

[hermes]

Originally Posted by silasgreenback

I've voted Libertarian through several elections, but truthfully, I fall under "Bizarrely Hypocritical".

Socially Libertarian, very much yes. Economically, I don't want Wall Street to have any more of a claim to my life and corpse than they're already allowed.

I used to be a member of that party, but I quit after I realized that there is no, and has never been, a true market economy, and it might not even be a good thing to have no state controls. Mostly I got fed up when I observed that almost all the members were millionaires and businessmen and all they cared about was not paying taxes - something I sympathize with (at least a flat tax). I think the Libertarian Party has been co-opted by rightists. Though

I did enjoy watching Rand Paul fillerbusting the renewal of the Patriot Act.

Party-line Libertarians tend to be like Trotskyites, intellectual ideologues - which is why I admire and keep at a distance both so much.

To using calibre in another section...

[witeowl]

Originally Posted by hermes

Are you serious about scientology books being verboten in Germany? I must look into this.

I don't know exactly what the situation is, but I know it makes Germans very uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that Cruise wasn't allowed to film in Germany. It was just the first random example of animosity in a toward literature that came to mind. To hear my father tell it (a German citizen living in the US on a permanent green card for over 40 years), scientology is completely banned, but other sources say that there is an active scientology church. So don't listen to me.

[m-reader]

I think the OP needs to travel a bit. World is not exactly like in the movies. Common sense applied, in most places (including Yemen, Australia, etc.) the authorities do not give a flying hoot about what you have on your e-reader.

[m-reader]

Originally Posted by witeowl

I don't know exactly what the situation is, but I know it makes Germans very uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that Cruise wasn't allowed to film in Germany. It was just the first random example of animosity in a toward literature that came to mind. To hear my father tell it (a German citizen living in the US on a permanent green card for over 40 years), scientology is completely banned, but other sources say that there is an active scientology church. So don't listen to me.

Not banned, just not given the same status as other religious institutions (taxation purposes, etc).

[m-reader]

Or bringing the bible into Saudi Arabia, no?

I for one can guarantee that you can freely bring the bible into KSA so long as you are not Muslim.
I am not defending the religious freedoms of non-muslims in the country (which is non-existent), just pointing out the facts based on personal experiences.

[hermes]

Originally Posted by m-reader

Or bringing the bible into Saudi Arabia, no?

I for one can guarantee that you can freely bring the bible into KSA so long as you are not Muslim.
I am not defending the religious freedoms of non-muslims in the country (which is non-existent), just pointing out the facts based on personal experiences.

Good to hear from someone with personal experience, not just theory. I presumed wrongly based on hearsay. The reason I said this was based on the comment from an American I know who was working in KSA. He told me that the symbol for a visiting (?) airline was just a bit too close to a cross and that airline had to change its symbol to use Saudi airspace. Or it could have been just a story...

[hermes]

Originally Posted by m-reader

I think the OP needs to travel a bit. World is not exactly like in the movies. Common sense applied, in most places (including Yemen, Australia, etc.) the authorities do not give a flying hoot about what you have on your e-reader.

Actually I have visited over 20 nations outside of Canada, mostly in third world Asia, plus a few Indian Ocean nations and a little bit in the Latin Caribbean. But yes I would like to travel a bit more. Never been to Europe or the South Seas.

Rearding authorities not being interested in digital content, most nations might not care what one carries in one's ereader, however Anglo nations such as UK are indeed exceptions.

See these articles relevant to Canada and USA...

http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/11/05/c...ne/#more-89428

http://www.pcworld.com/article/17110...d_to_know.html

The legal authority to search is not limited to computers per se but anything that stores information or images. This includes flashdrives, CDs etc. Trust me. At one of my interrogations I observed a man 'could not remember' the password for encrypted data on his CD and the Canada Border Services officer got huffy told him that he was going to keep the property for an extended period (the exact length I forget, but it was not weeks) and seize everything electronic the guard wanted to inspect. Thus, the man was being punished for not co-operating 100%. Basically if you value your privacy from the state - you don't have any.

[hermes]

I take responsibility for getting this track off-topic and would like to bring this thread back on track - anonymity and international use of e-readers.

[HarryT]

You are subject to the laws of the country that you're in, even if only as a visitor. Nobody is "above the law", and it seems to me as though what you're actually asking for here is assistance in becoming so.

[ATDrake]

If you're that serious about keeping the contents of your e-reader reasonably private in terms of material you think may be subject to arbitrary and unreasonable confiscation which would include seizing your entire reader, you really have two choices:

1) Delete potentially offending material off your reader before entry, but keep an online backup that you can use to reload it when you've left the country.

2) Hide in plain sight: don't bother encrypting your potentially problematic books, just alter the metadata to give it a less tell-tale title. Most searchers probably won't bother looking through each and every book on your reader to see what the contents are.

And if you're worried about that, you can always do a sort of hollowed-out-book thing where you take the text of one e-book and sandwich it in between the text of another, blander book.

It's easy enough with Amazon's Mobi format to have an entire concealed sub-book complete with navigable chapter marks stuck within a single chapter of another book, which won't show at all during cursory examination of the wrapper book, due to the way it renders anything but 1st-level NCX navigation functional but virtually invisible, as far as the Kindle user interface goes.

I will recommend choice 1) as the optimal solution unless one is truly determined to smuggle one's e-book collection of popular banned books around the world in order to prove one could do so (and maybe have photographs of said titles loaded up on the e-reader in recognizable landmark locales the way some people do those "garden gnomes around the world" photos).

Anyway, for truly anonymous use of any e-reader, you'd pretty much have to have the sort of reader which doesn't require registration to unlock its more useful functions (or be willing to skip use of said functions), and load up books that are either DRM-free to begin with, or can be made so in order to not require registration, and thus, identifying personal information, to use them.

As for international use, leaving aside geo-restrictions, the DRM does kind of mess with you in that regard. B&N openly blocks e-book purchases from non-US/Canadian IPs unless one has a US military e-mail address, and I can imagine handling ADE would be pretty difficult if one doesn't carry around one's own laptop for downloading the files to before transferring them to the reader and has to rely on random computers available via internet cafés and so forth.

Assuming one wants to get books by major authors/publishers (nearly all DRM-ed), one would pretty much have to register one's reader in order to be able to obtain the books and load them wirelessly without use of one's own computer while overseas.

Of course, DRM-free books don't come with these hassles, but your reading selection kind of narrows a lot unless you really like a) computer technical how-tos, b) science fiction and fantasy, c) erotic romance, because those are the main categories which are available DRM-free outside of amateur self-publication.