Cyberculture.hu

Data Conflicts - Eastern Europe and the Geopolitics of Cyberspace
Postdam, 13-15 December 1996.
http://ppc.princeton.edu:8080/datacon/
(a cím nem él, nincs a waybackben se nyoma)

Fear & Loathing in Hungary

by

Tamas Bodoky, jr.

To the outsider it might seem that there are no data conflicts in Hungary at all. There are no bloody, violent war conflicts, no real killing fields apart of that of the multiplayer action games, the never-ending networked battles of Quake, Doom and Duke Nukem fans. There is no institutionalized state censorship, I have to say that at the moment even the german goverment is taking a more conservative approach towards the Internet than ours, which has payed little attention to it so long. There is not such a great lag in the field of information-technology that relegates Hungary to the information third world. But if we take a closer look at access to the Internet, the entire international bandwith of the country is less than ten megabits per second, which is used by two dozen national and regional Internet Service Providers, with several tens of thousands of users in the academic and research sphere using less than one tenth of it. There are still only 64 kilobit per second bandwidth copper lines between Budapest and the other large cities, the only fiber optics cable is a short FDDI ring between four Budapest Universities. Statistics say that there is ten times more data traveling into the country than out of it on the information highway. These facts put Hungary somewhere between the data-rich and the data-poor, a rising data-middle-class of this region. However, lacking greater conflicts does not equal peace: we do have several minor conflicts, which are probably typical of the former Eastern Bloc. I give you a handful of examples. ’Fear & Loathing in Hungary’ tovább…