New Zealand set to join internet blocking club

Inaccurate and sloppy reporting?

"since the list runs at internet address level, a number of sites may be blocked that host perfectly legitimate content."

Errr, no!

The previously mentioned boxes that are to be used do NOT work this way. To paraphrase, they *redirect* specific IP addresses (at BGP level) known to host dodgy material towards the equipment that then analyzes the URL and blocks the inappropriate ones. This means that any 'collateral' will not be blocked.

the list runs at internet address level?

Obviously the system was designed by people with no understanding of how modern web hosting works.

More will follow

As sure as night follows day, Governments around the world are salivating at the leash to sign up to this kind of state-mandated censorship of the interweb. All in the name of the fight against international terrorism and protecting children from 'predatory' paedophiles, of course.

Of course. And we'll all bend over and take our medicine because nobody has the guts to fight it, to call it out and at least try to preserve the web as some place where some measure of personal freedom might still exist. Governments around the world are now set on a single purpose with regard to the interweb: get it firmly under control, lock it down, filter it and monitor it 24/7.

Who will argue?

How much?

$150,000 is that all? Jeez, I work for some tin-pot little company that no one has heard of and even our blocking software/hardware spend is double that!

Why not have the sites taken offline?

Funny thing. You never hear a word about actually removing the sites in question. Here in Germany, a private organisation chose 20 sites from the Danish blocklist and notified the respective hosting services. Within one day, 16 of those sites were offline and 3 more were checked but found to be legal under local laws. (Comment in German citing this experiment: http://www.heise.de/ct/Die-Argumente-fuer-Kinderporno-Sperren-laufen-ins-Leere--/artikel/135867)

The BKA always complains this is impossible or not feasible. A site that recently made fun of the minister of interior and his terrorists-are-everywhere campaign got taken offline by one call from the ministry to the hoster. However this is deemed to be infeasible for a child-porn website even if it is hosted in Germany.

Oh, and the id of accounts trying to access blocked sites are still available to the police without a warrant. It's just that instead of the data being sent by the provider to the BKA directly via a script, the BKA now has to ask for them. A process that can probably be scripted, too.

Earlier this month the minister chiefly pressing for the filter claimed there were 95 countries without child porn legislation. As it turned out in 71 of them all porn is illegal and the rest are in a state of civil war or just recovering from one and not exactly on a big pipe to the net. The minister however simply refuses to even listen, instead going around with he fingers in her ears singing LaLaLa at the top of her voice.

One of the countries she decried as a child-porn haven is India, which is now protesting over diplomatic channels. (Sorry, German again, but with some interesting source links: http://netzpolitik.org/2009/von-der-leyen-und-indien-antwort-der-botschaft/)

The good news: the filters are going to be implemented via forged DNS answers for now. A Youtube video shows how to change your DNS-Server from your ISPs to a properly functioning one in 27 seconds.

Oversight - Lack of.

I'm sure we're all agreed CP is a bad thing and that restricting access to CP is a good thing.

However, what makes this operation, whichever country it is, a VERY bad thing is the way in which the system is massively open to abuse and indeed appears to encourage a kind of 'as wide as we can get away with' philosophy to censorship.

Nobody with any sense trusts the people that make these decisions, nobody with an ounce of critical analysis ability is going to trust that the people making these decisions won't be following their own narrow-minded, sexually repressed, conservative (deliberate small 'c') agenda and nobody trusts the people making these decisions not to expand their censorship regime to anything else at all that they deem inappropriate. It's already happening and it's only going to get worse.

How long before 'opposing political views' are on the list? Oh, hang on...

P.S. I've depressed myself with this post.

P.P.S. How long before we have to go back to disseminating controversial informatrion by print? At least that way when they kick your door in you'll have given them the trouble of having to move the printing presses themselves (though they'd probably charge you for it).

Censorship Enforcement Activities

I like the sound of that: <<< Censorship Enforcement Activities >>>

Sounds properly Orwellian, except that he would have known better than to keep the word Censorship in there.

Lenin would be proud (or is it Trotski? Hard to tell with that old photo.)

Couple of things wrong

For one, the ISP is 'iHug' and not 'hug'; and that brand of ISP is now 100% owned by Vodafone. Vodafone/TelstraClear/Telecom own the lion share of internet users.

The other is that the (secret) block list is by specific URL; not IP. The IP address is used to only route suspect traffic to the URL checking box.

I think this is a bad thing - imagine being reported to the police because you followed a link to Simpson characters doing naughty things? (yes - cartoons can be classified as CP - but we don't know as the list is secret).

I am not defending CP, but If my ISP does sign up to this I will move to another that does not do this. If the block list was publicly available and agreed upon (like other censored material), I might be more open to accepting this.