A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany 420
Several readers including erlehmann and tmk wrote to inform us about the dawning of Internet censorship in Germany under the usual guise of protecting the children. "This week, the two big political parties ruling Germany in a coalition held the final talks on their proposed Internet censorship scheme. DNS queries for sites on a list will be given fake answers that lead to a page with a stop sign. The list itself is maintained by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt). A protest movement has formed over the course of the last several months, and over 130K citizens have signed a petition protesting the law. Despite this, and despite criticism from all sides, the two parties sped up the process for the law to be signed on Thursday, June 18, 2009."
alternative dns servers; (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.opendns.com/ [opendns.com]
http://www.dnsserverlist.org/ [dnsserverlist.org]
Re:What are they censoring? (Score:3, Informative)
I would have expected something like this "DNS blacklist" in Iran or China. But Germany??
This sounds like censorship for the sake of censorship
You must not know much about Germany to be surprised by this. Have a good read on this [wikipedia.org] article.
Old news for Finland, too (Score:5, Informative)
For a list of the fastest DNS servers for you... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:alternative dns servers; (Score:5, Informative)
apt-get install bind9
127.0.0.1 top of resolv.conf
Any slashdot discussion about DNS will imminently fill up with hundreds of recommendations for opendns.com ...which is fine, but also a bit puzzling.
Don't most of us have at least one linux machine somewhere, where you can put a caching nameserver, then point any windows machines on the LAN to that.
Re:DNS spoofing is just one way to satisfy the law (Score:5, Informative)
Given that the whole world is moving to DNSSEC, have fun trying to spoof it two years from now.
Re:What's Next? (Score:3, Informative)
Are gonna start tagging "children" with gps locator tag subcutaneous inserts?
Then we start with those older folks suffering from dementia?
Whole families have been chipped in Florida by their choice.
http://www.miaminightout.com/spotlight/advop/11172002/microchip.shtml
Then we go on next to those who committed felonies?
We're on it. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~pozefsky/COMP006D_F05/Criminal.ppt
Finally, making it a requirement for all people who want to work, buy groceries, etc?
What's next?
There's firms that used to exist called city watcher that had their employees gain access to doors. U Conn developing chips to implant into soldiers to monitor vital signs.
Re:Old news for Finland, too (Score:2, Informative)
Seems like your Finnish ISP has the censor list in use - that's the page you land on.
For all I know, you might be some guy who tries to enforce Lex Karpela or something, so I won't give you any advice to circumvent the restriction. Sorry for that. Google around and you're bound to find it out yourself.
Re:Gigaton Fail - (Score:5, Informative)
My host forgive me. http://www.exstatic.org.nyud.net:8080/proxybox/ [nyud.net].
Again, this is just something I thew together last night when people on Fark (VII threads and counting) were wanting to help but not able to figure out squid.
I would appreciate any feedback or help hardening it or adding features or getting the download size down or etc...
jjarvis98@gmail.com
Not just Germany. (Score:3, Informative)
Check the UK's digital Britain report released today. Under their plans to tackle file sharing they will start by sending letters.
If file sharing hasn't dropped by 70%, they're going to start blocking sites, packet shaping, etc.
It doesn't make for pleasant reading, there is absolutely no way they'll get a 70% drop in file sharing, especially not in 6 months so effectively it sounds like the government is using citizens not stopping file sharing as an excuse for a much greater censorship program by setting unrealistic targets on file sharing.
It's nice to know the Labour government is finished, but it's disturbing to know that the Tories will almost certainly follow through with this legislation and that even some of the Lib Dems support it.
Re:The real discouraging thing (Score:4, Informative)
> "Oh I'm sorry I thought this was a democracy".
Do not confound democracy with liberty.
Re:alternative dns servers; (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not fine to recommend OpenDNS [slashdot.org].
Re:Geez! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, it's only a selected few politicians.
Everyone outside their small circle is opposed to this. From techies to NGOs and even abuse victims.
Re:alternative dns servers; (Score:1, Informative)
No but from international (hopefully not censored) root servers instead?
Re:Contacting politicians (Score:3, Informative)
Oops, please mod parent down, I got the URLs wrong:
If you're interested in expressing your opinion from an international point of view you may contact the German members of the bundestag here: http://www.bundestag.de/parlament/fraktion/spd.html [bundestag.de]
or here
http://www.bundestag.de/parlament/fraktion/cducsu.html [bundestag.de]
The party that cowardly shied away from a real election campaign because they were afraid of the boulevard press and thus helps installing the censorship is called "SPD", Social Democratic Party.
The party that want's to install this censorship-infrastructure without judicial oversight because "Will somebody please think of the children" and of the starving artists is called CDU (Christian Democratical Union) or CSU (Christian Social Union). They eventried to ban paintball and first person shooters a few months ago.
You can find the website of the cowards and turncoats here: http://www.spd.de/start/portal/index.html [www.spd.de] [www.spd.de]
Re:I know the feeling. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if you consider the UK a functioning democracy, but recently they rounded up a group of hippies on the grounds that they might be thinking about causing disruption at a power station.
They were then released on bail, the conditions of which were that they weren't allowed to be hippies, weren't allowed to be against power stations, and weren't allowed to talk to anyone who was either a hippy or against power stations. More or less it amounts to house arrest. Without any form of trial or due process.
Note: I don't agree with the aforementioned hippies policy wise. But when they came for the hippies, I didn't speak out...