German State Alters DNS To Censor Web Sites [updated] 261
Rabenwolf writes: "In the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the first ISP (ISIS Multimedia) has given in to pressure from the state government and has started to block foreign websites with supposedly "illegal content" by changing the corresponding DNS entries. ISIS customers trying to access these sites are redirected to the website of the local government. ISPs in North Rhine-Westphalia will have to pay a fine if they continue to provide access to sites with "illegal content" through their DNS servers. It's not as bad as China or Saudi-Arabia, but it makes you think... An article from the heise newsticker is here, and if you don't sprechen Deutsch, Google might help." Update: 11/22 15:23 GMT by T : As sqrt points out, this report is misleading: "A single technican altered the DNS Entries to demonstrate it is possible. His changes were already reversed. Heise already posted a new story about this today."
Curious... (Score:2, Interesting)
Side note: It would be most strange if the "illegal content" was pornography, from what I understand, prostitution is legal in Germany. Most would say that is morally worse than a little pr0n. (Me, I could care less).
I guess its all moot anyway.
Fragmenting the namespace? (Score:5, Interesting)
If a country implemented DNS blocking like this as a long-standing policy, it's easy to imagine people trying all sorts of technical fixes to get around it. People would set up their own "All Hate DNS", or maybe they'd distribute .hosts files with lists of blocked domains ...
But once you're doing that, why even use the old domain name? If you had www.killalljews.com resolving through the "All Hate DNS", wouldn't you also want www.killalljews.hate, and www.finalsolution.now, and everything else?
It introduces the possibility of a conflicting, though smaller, namespace, being overlaid on the DNS -- one more step towards fragmenting the namespace [fhwang.net]. Not that such fragmentation is necessarily a good thing, but it sure would be interesting to watch ...
Re:IP addresses? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Virtual host by name" where you have many sites on one IP address (encouraged by the folks who bring you fewer than 4 billion addresses) identified by a "Host:" header in HTTP/1.1 is what is stopping them. It's a whole lot easier to just change the DNS server settings (Settings > Control Panel > Network > TCP/IP (your adapter) > Properties > DNS Configuration) to use a DNS server outside the country. Those with BSD/Linux/Unix/WinNT/Win2K/WinXPpro of course can run their own DNS server.
Re:Different places have different ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
I never thought about that, I think you're right about this. And yes, we have a Nazi "obsession": once is enough. More than enough.
I personally am left-winged and a member of the "Internet community" for years, I have contact to several foreigners, and because of that I simply hate Nazis for their stupidity. I made the experience that most Nazis here in Germany are stupid people, mostly job-less stupid people. They like to blame that on foreigners, simply because it's easy and avoids them from facing the truth: that they themselves are the problem.
We don't like to have a majority of such fools again, so we try all kind of things to prevent that.
You're right that we may go too far with this sometimes, but the fear that Nazis become strong again in Germany sits deep within us germans now, and it's not limited to germans: most other countries don't like to see them become strong again.
Re:Why is censorship bad? (Score:2, Interesting)
For the record I am not Pro internet cencorship I just belive that cencorship does have a place in society, it's just that you have to make sure it's the right place. And no matter what you think about it some form of cencorship affects you everyday.
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