W3C.org Briefly Censored In Finland

k33l0r writes "The web site of W3C, w3.org or w3c.org, was briefly censored (Google Translation) by at least some of the local ISPs. For an unknown reason the URL was mistakenly entered into the Federal Police's censor database. Some of the Finnish ISPs use the database to filter out questionable content such as child pornography." Finnish online activist Matti Nikki describes some of the problems with this database-based censorship.

That's no biggie...

In Redmond, Washington w3.org has been blacklisted for the developers of Internet Explorer for years!

Human translation

Sorry for the bad quality, it is 5 AM in Finland, and I'm very tired. But I bet I can still beat Google's translation service.

W3C's site on Finnish censorship list

(Updated on 27/9/08 at 19:31: DNA wasn't the only operator affected by the censorship.)

Customers of telecom operator DNA were unable to access the web server of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organisation developing web standards, on Friday evening and early Saturday, because the address of the site had erroneously became included on the censorship list of National Bureau of Investigation.

Many readers of Tietokone magazine informed us late Friday evening and early Saturday that a police information page was opened instead of www.w3.org. The information page says that the target page includes child pornography. The problem was fixed on early Saturday, and currently DNA's customers should be able to access W3C's site normally.

Different operators use the same filtering list provided by the NBI, but different operators may fetch the updated list at different times.

Internet activist Matti Nikki also describes of these observations on his lapsiporno.info -site (lapsiporno == child pornography), which still cannot be accessed by those operators' connections that use the filtering list. (Translator's note: using the list is not mandatory for operators.)

Operators have kept filtering webpages by domain, even though this is not the first time the practice has caused ambiguousness in censorship.

NBI and operators assured last spring, that ambiguous domain-based filtering can be replaced by URL-based filtering, but implementation of this change has been delayed. Many operators have also announced that they will make the filtering voluntary to their customers due to technical problems and negative publicity.

Censorship list in the hands of the NBI

Internet operators gave an estimate for Tietokone magazine last spring, that implementing a precise URL-based filtering system will cost millions of euros. Present domain-based filtering methods are based on domain name redirects or so-called mandatory proxies, i.e. transparent proxies.

Public relationship officer of DNA, Sinikka Veneranta, says that the police removes and adds addresses to the list as they see best, and the operator does no processing for the addresses on the list by itself.

But there are still differences in the time how quickly the addresses on the list will end up in systems of different operators. W3C's address is known to have been end up also to the systems of Mikkeli Telecom Co-operative (MPY).

Re:Grammar Nazi nitpicking

I could certainly write better English than the person you're replying to. On the other hand it wouldn't bear much relation to the original, since I don't understand Finnish. Cut the guy some slack already.

Re:

Now - this actually presents us with the reality that the filtering that occurs on the web is flawed.

If they only could filter junk like spam emails and annoying commercials the filtering would be better.

It's also worth to realize that "illegal" content is available in so many places that it's like filtering water with a colander. ("illegal" because not everything filtered is illegal - or only illegal in one country but not another).

Another impact this has is that whole domains/sites can be filtered out jus

Clever strategy

Obviously child-porn websites can't exist without protocol standards that designate how things like HTTP and HTML are to work.

The police who created this list were simply cutting off the head of the beast. Sure, there might be a little collateral damage... but won't somebody think of the children?

Anyhow, mission accomplished. You might even say it has been finnished.

Re:Clever strategy

ah, but there are still analog transmission methods. the way i see it, eyeballs are the problem...

Re:Clever strategy

[Finland censorship activated] ah, but there are still ****og transmission methods. the way i see it, eye***** are the problem...

Re:Clever strategy

"but won't somebody think of the children?"

That is precisely the situation they are trying to stop.

Easy to circumvent:

Effi: Finnish police censors a critic of censorship [effi.org]

This shows that they are using DNS based filtering. Very easy to get around, run your own DNS servers and bypass your ISP's DNS servers alltogether.

Interesting.

Clearly Finland only approves of mature web standards...

A clear case of "why you should not do it"

Though noone will likely die or even loose any large ammounts of money or similar due to this particular case, it should still be seen as a clear warning.

As next time it might be something very important that gets accidentally blocked.

Both a direct warning to use a ISP that does not do the filtering(all ISPs in Finland do not use it).

And on second level a warning to reverse the clearly bad law where the Police is allowed to block sites without accountability and

Re:

> Though noone will likely die or even loose any large ammounts of money or similar due to this particular case

They have already also blocked a site of several companies. Some which are not related to porn at all, but about 99% of the websites they block are legal porn-sites. Also a website who is making critique about this censorship and publishing a list of blocked but legal websites is blocked.

It is quite interesting how little people are defending these legal porn sites. As if it is okay to block the

Straightening out some facts

1) Not all ISPs use DNS-based filtering - for example the aforementioned DNA Finland, which uses proxy-based filtering, which in turn is a lot more difficult to bypass.

2) W3C is, AFAIK, still being blocked by MPY.

3) On the first version of the list, less than 1% [kapsi.fi] of the sites were child pornography. Coincidently, a lot of the rest were gay porn.

This is, of course, not at all related to the general opinion on gay people in Finland - in fact, we've already gone half a century without a single forced castration of a gay man!

Boy, does my country make me proud or what.

Censoring by domain name?

How do they censor by domain name? Do they force/expect everyone to use the ISP proxy server? Do they force/expect everyone to use the ISP name server? Unless they block direct access, it should be easy enough for a user to get around. Of course most users would not know how. OTOH a lot of the really bad pr0n sites don't even use domain names. They use constantly changing IP addresses of proxies running on exploited home/office Windows computers.

Background on Finnish censorship from a Finn

I'm a Finnish tech student and have been following this for a good long time now. Let me give a run-down of what's going on. Afterwards I have a very important question to ask - I'll add that as a reply.

Finland is one of those modern first-world democracies that accords its citizens more freedom than the United States and is smug about it. Like many such states, Finland's government has been taking steps to change that. Case in point: From January 1st, 2008 onward, Finland's Federal Bureau has had the right to list child born websites for ISPs to block. This has been accused of being a sterotypical power grab (and some representatives are openly salivating at the prospect of expanding censorship), but more likely it's just stereotypical gross populism. There was no chance of defeating the bill that had a stated purpose of fighting child porn.

Finland's geek population is united against censorship for a simple reason. It does not and cannot work. This has not been disputed - everyone and their mother has been trying to tell the lawmakers that, including the Federal Bureau before the law came to force. Effective Internet censorship is not possible without an effort on China's or Saudi Arabia's level, and even then Saudi Arabia's leaks like a sieve. I can think of four ways of circumventing Finland's without specialist knowledge, and I got a 1/5 out of my single network course. In fact everything about this is permeated by bureaucratic incompetence to the point that accusing W3C of child porn is not disproportionate. Not only does the censorship only target web pages, which I'm told make up a very small percentage of online child porn, there's no oversight, no way to appeal, and in several publicized cases, no effort to remove the material from the Internet.

Matti Nikki is both a devoted proponent of online freedom and kind of a dick. He published a list of censored sites to prove that censorship makes them much easier to catch with an automated webcrawler without restricting access in any meaningful way. (Later examinations of this list suggest that it has a 2% accuracy rate, but happens to feature the first Google search results for "gay porn.") When Nikki converted the list into links, his site was censored. That is to say, a domestic text-only website was censored using a law that legalized the censorship of foreign child porn. BOOM! Organized resistance!

Censorship made the evening news a couple of times, appeared in some newspapers and talk shows, and sparked one large geek demonstration back in March. "Google is a browser! Google is a browser!" we chanted, quoting the Bureau's chief on why Google has not been censored despite making child porn available as much as Nikki. We had no effect whatsoever. Okay, some ISPs have made censorship an opt-out system and maybe the Parliament will be wary about expanding it. Aside from that, I feel like the biggest achievement involved was me pissing off a bodyguard of the Minister of Communications with my taped-over mouth. Everything about the issue seems to be mired in its morass of utter incompetence that makes it meaningful debate impossible. For instance, the spokesman of a usually benign children-saving organization appeared in a debate and went on for minutes about the way censorship is a valuable statement of principles (as if making child porn strictly illegal wasn't enough) without ever addressing her opponent's statement that censorship does not work, cannot work, and does more harm than good to its cause. That debate sums up this whole sordid mess.

Nowadays Finland's tech-savvy population is quietly simmering, and the local IT building's basement has had a poster of the Minister of Communications in a Nazi uniform since February with no complaints from the staff.

Re:Blacklists suck.

To my knowledge, only even remotely comparable situation where so obviously legal site has ended up on the list is the site criticising the list. Of course, in case of w3.org, block was removed in hours, in case of the other site, it has been there for months (and it's till there).

The fact that, for instance, some gay porn sites have ended up on this list so easily tells something about the list. At least about the fact that thanks to horribly badly designed legislation, nobody putting these sites on the list actually needs to fear getting punished for misconduct, caused harm... or anything else.

Re:Blacklists suck.

So far all I've figured out is that W3C has a lot of clout and you're apparently looking for gay porn in Finland.

This is a special case.

Given everything the W3C has done over recent years, nobody is entirely sure if blocking the W3C is censorship or saving the planet from standards bloat.

Re:Questionable content?

Some of the Finnish ISPs use the database to filter out questionable content such as child pornography.*

To be fair, I think that's a bit beyond questionable... don't you?

(*emphasis added)

It has been my experience that such things become a problem when they aren't questioned.

Re:Questionable content?

Do you know, when I was a kid, pictures of naked children were socially acceptable (after all, kids often didn't wear clothes on the beach, and everyone washes their own kids, right? So you're not seeing anything you haven't seen a thousand times before), and pictures of naked adults were not (because that's just not ... right). I think this establishes that, yes, it is possible to ask some questions here. You'll note that I'm not trying to imply any particular answers, but then while politically I oppose the abuse of anyone, my sexual tastes run only to adult women, so I'm hardly in a position to judge this with any sensitivity.

Think. Think is good. Think of the adults, think of the children, think of the society we are trying to engineer, but please, couldn't we try to think?

No matter where the right and wrong lie, you can't build justice out of knee-jerk reactions, and egging people on to visceral responses makes you one of, to be blunt, the enemy. Because, you know, it's that kind of unthinking action on the basis of hormones that we are supposedly trying to fight when we jointly choose to try to limit people's proclivities.

Re:Questionable content?

By child pornography, I mean adult porn with children. A picture of a thirty-year-old man naked != porn. Picture af ten-year-old naked != porn. Picture of either of said persons engaging in sexual acts or behaving provocatively = porn.

That again: child running about naked on beach - NOT PORN. Child having sex or being filmed in a way intended to arouse the viewer - IS PORN, therefore far beyond questionable content.

Re:

behaving provocatively
a way intended to arouse the viewer

Care to define those terms so they are beyond question for us? I mean, there have been people who've said that skirts ending above the ankles are provocative, and there are people who can be aroused by just about anything.

Re:

What about a pair of 17 year olds filming themselves having sex.

Child porn?

Should they be charged with a felony? (For the video, assume the sex was in a state where that is legal)

Child-pornography by children

There have actually been cases of this happening. Basically what usually happens is the children (up to 17) are punished without the law (suspended if done at school, etc) and any adults/companies/etc knowingly involved in the reproduction, distribution and/or storage of the material are slapped (rather viciously) with child-pornography charges.

The children are usually not charged legally, but after their parents, school administration, older siblings, etc get a hold of them, they wish they hadn't done it.

Re:Questionable content?

"By child pornography, I mean adult porn with children. A picture of a thirty-year-old man naked != porn. Picture af ten-year-old naked != porn. Picture of either of said persons engaging in sexual acts or behaving provocatively = porn. "

Yes, but since you're probably not one of the Finnish policemen in charge of this black list, nor are you one of the highly trained Kmart/Walgreens photo clerk employees, your definition of what "child porn" is -- probably highly suspect.

• William Kelly was arrested in Maryland in 1987 after dropping off a roll of film that included shots his 10-year-old daughter and younger children had taken of each other nude.
• David Urban in 1989 took photos of his wife and 15-month-old grandson, both nude, as she was giving him a bath. Kmart turned him in and he was convicted by a Missouri court (later overturned).
• A gay adult couple in Florida decided to shave their bodies and snap their lovemaking, convincing a Walgreens clerk that one of them was a child. They are suing the Fort Lauderdale police.
• More recently, Cynthia Stewart turned in bath-time pictures of her 8-year-old daughter to a Fuji film processing lab in Oberlin, Ohio. The lab contacted the local police, who found the pictures "over the line" and arrested the mother for, among other things, snapping in the same frame with her daughter a showerhead, which the prosecution apparently planned to relate somehow to hints of masturbation.

• http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/01/31/kincaid/ [salon.com]

.

"That again: child running about naked on beach - NOT PORN. Child having sex or being filmed in a way intended to arouse the viewer - IS PORN, therefore far beyond questionable content. "

Sure, but that has yet to be proven. This guy [lapsiporno.info] for instance has already received personal threats against him because his site is listed as a "child porn web site", and yet he doesn't have a single picture on his site -- he only compiled a list of web sites that were banned by this list (he simply used a scanner to obtain that information, and it turns out that 99% of those web sites listed do not contain child pornography according to him). Should he put in jail because of this so-called "questionable content"? Should he be branded as a sexual predator and a child porn peddler because of this personal expose?