Study on Internet Censorship in Germany 54
An anonymous reader writes "There is a report on Germany forcing ISPs to censor the Internet by faking DNS entries. ISPs also seem to use this to steal mail and generally screw up the Internet. Next thing they plan is using BGP to break routing to unwanted webservers. Scary."
Good old Germany (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Dose of their own medicine (Score:2)
it sure works (Score:1)
No no no... (Score:3, Interesting)
</sarcasm>
I love how everytime folks dislike a law (many of them bad) declare that they are going to move to Canada or Europe where freedoms really mean something.
Well, lets see. Strike out Germany, they censor the web. Strike out France, they also prevent auctions on WWII artifacts. England with their video cameras and national ID cards are out.
To tell the truth, I found I was able to get the the stormfront site that one of the links mentioned. Why? I live in the US. While we do have freedom issues here, I don't think they are quite the same as many other countries.
Here, you are allowed to go against popular ideas. You can be a racist if you like. You can hate whites, blacks, anyone you want. You can hate the government or current administration.
In the US you are able to create your own website and report any news you like. Infact, you can go to any website you wish, and you will actually get there (barring internet routing problems). The government isn't going to force ISPs to route around you.
While many of the reactionary laws from 9/11 are causing problems, we have Ashcroft fighting to keep those laws on the books. You know why? Because, they are not permanent, there was a sunset clause put into the law. You know what else? Ashcroft isn't having an easy go at it.
So, next time that you want to throw a temper tantrum that the US is removing your freedoms, keep in mind we could do much worse. We could be making it so you could not go to German sites or French sites or muslim sites or Christian sites.
This isn't to say we should have these PATRIOT acts and such, but here we have the power and ability to fight laws like that. I think our energy is best used in that fashion, not whining how some other country that has a good law here or there but also has some other horrible laws.
Re:No no no... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No no no... (Score:2, Insightful)
Myself, I have other issues with many of those other countries. I am not a big fan of being taxed any more than I already am. I don't know the tax rates in any of those countries, but I'd bet they are more than the US. I don't like the idea of nationalized health care, as Canada has, and Denmark and Sweeden probably have (I could look it up, but not worth it).
My point original point was that the US isn't this draconiam state where the gove
Re:No no no... (Score:1)
Yeah, most can survive on 2000 though.
I'm not saying most don't eat 4000, but 2000 should keep you comfortable with a relatively light amount of activity.
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
I eat 4500-6000 depending on how heavily I am training, and I am a marathoner. Most people exhibit looks of shock when I get our my lunch bag at work, it takes me about an hour and a half of slow steady eating for both lunch and dinner. This is far from the american norm...
Re:No no no... (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as it isn't one of the many forbidden herbs, in which case you could go to jail.
where you work,
Unless you want to work for a government contractor and happen to enjoy the aforementioned forbidden herbs. All government contractors are required to give drug tests.
Or maybe you want to conduct business on Sunday, or sell alcohol, things that are still forbidden in many areas.
what entertainment you are allowed
Unless you want to:
Have anal or oral sex (in m
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
What they don't appreciate is, like you say, the current state of some things, like the corruption of state officials, and the Bush administrations failure to stand up to the standards of our forfathers, for instance rallying against freedom of religion (one nati
Re:No no no... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No no no... (Score:1)
Re:No no no... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
I think you are right on penn, but I could get to Al Jazeera during the war...
Re:No no no... (Score:1)
I did some looking on the Pennsynlvania stuff. Yeah, I guess there is some law that says you can't goto child porn sites. You are right there.
I agree that the idea of censoring them is wrong. But wait, there's more! I disagree with censoring them because of the i
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
Oh, no, they were just really slow all over the world for no good reason.
I think someone other than yourself would have mentioned something, or there is a much larger conspiracy out there to hide the fact.
So the fact that you didn't hear about it in the streamlined media is proof it didn't happen.
I did some looking on the Pennsynlvania stuff. Yeah, I guess there is some law that says you can't
Re:No no no... (Score:1)
I guess the fact I haven't heard that aliens did an anal probe to Lars T means it happened too.
Not only did I not hear about it from the mainstream media, I didn't hear about it from anyone else. I didn't scour the net for information, but I do read enough sources to get a general idea of what is going on. Had I read an even remotely credible source during the war, I'd have checked it out. Heck, even if just t
Re:No no no... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
Just like there is a law in Germany that you can't tell lies about how the Holocaust never happened.
You just said a mouthful right there. There's a world of difference between outlawing child abuse and outlawing speech. That would not happen here in the US.
Germany is walking right back into the Statist quagmire that spawned Hitler and you don't even know it. Y'all better start haulin' back on the reins of your bureaucrats real hard...
The free people in the rest of the world also need to stay vigilant.
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
And don't tell me that the Astro-Turf campaigns to shut up people in the US are any better.
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
Oh, no, they were just really slow all over the world for no good reason. "
You must be new here. This is called the "Slashdot effect." Most likely, more people were trying to go to Al Jazeera's servers than they could handle.
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
I did notice that many countries *did* block Al Jadzira with warnings/notices that it wasn't allowed.
Re:No no no... (Score:2, Interesting)
I think that is a very naive statement. I'm pretty sure that in august 2001 you'd have sworn that the government would never [insert power given to government by the patriot act here].
Europe isn't perfect, either. In Denmark we are currently dealing with very xenophopic legislation - and it isn't even caused by post 9-11 panic, "we" just don't like other peoples. Add 50+% income taxes, and I wouldn't want to live here, had it not been my father
Re:No no no... (Score:2)
Re:No no no... (Score:2, Interesting)
Not only is the method idiotic and broken... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:scary. but bad example. (Score:1)
How would you like it if the US decided that slashdot was just a bunch of liberal idiots and incited folks to be anti America so they decided to censor it.
Its easy when you are in the majority to say that other people are unreasonable. Heck, 150 years ago in the US these white supremacists would have been able to say you were bing unreasonable and tried to censor you.
A couple hundred years before that G
Re:scary. but bad example. (Score:1)
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
What's all this then? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps somebody who actually understands how DNS works could convince me this isn't just a black-helicopter urban legend. Until then, I'm inclined to put this with that guy that "proved" that whitehouse.gov was registered in the U.K.!
Re:What's all this then? (Score:4, Interesting)
In any case, such blocking is interesting from a technical viewpoint. Doing it in DNS is easy and it scales well, but it is also easy to circumvent. Doing it by inserting a black hole route in BGP is easy for the first couple, but routers will not be able to handle an unlimited number of /32 blackhole routes. As long as the router does not melt, it is a pretty effective method. There are other methods, but they all suck in at least one way.
And then someone invented Freenet. Practically impossible to block. It will be interesting to see which country that will be the first to make it illegal.
Censorship and Conspiracy (Score:2)
Re:What's all this then? (Score:1)
The WDR is the organisation, who deleted a critical online article [archive.org] after pressure from the master of censorship.
For more infos about this see ÂEine Zensur findet doch statt [odem.org].
There IS action against this (Score:1)
At ODEM.org (english) [odem.org] we have a lot of material and infos [odem.org] and so on about this -- but the most are in german.
We have an online petition [odem.org] (Link to the english version) with more then 17000 signers, including the "internet experts" of the big political parties, the "reporters without frontier", Ian Clarke, Richard Stallman and others. You are invited to sign [odem.org] also
But, yes: in the public outside of the net communi
Re:There IS action against this (Score:2)
You seem to be saying that somebody is tweaking the German internet, and nobody's raising any fuss about it because it's anti-Nazi censorship? You're going to have to offer a lot more than a few ambiguous DNS listings to make that convincing!
This VS the spamhaus project (Score:2)
Now don't get me wrong, I use spamhaus my self. But make no mistake, it is a form of censorship. I use it specificly to censor sites that have had prior evidence of sending spam.
The only key diffrence here is that Germany seems to be taking a stand on hate groups. In america there are a vast number of ISPs
Re:This VS the spamhaus project (Score:2)
It's clearly Germany's choice to *block* access to www.stormfront.org. They don't want their nationals exposed to objectionable material. They choose to censor it. They are engaging in censorship.
It's both censorship, the choice to remove material that is considered morally, politicall
Re:This VS the spamhaus project (Score:2)
Technically speaking it is censorship in it's purest form. When one person or a group acts as a censor to block objectionable material from larger group of pepole, this is the version defination of censorship. The diffrence is I was asked to take such measures, I was asked to protect people from material they had no wish in seeing.
Is it any less censorship in Germany because people can choos
Online Petition, more material, and experiment (Score:1)
Hi,
at ODEM.org [odem.org] we provide a lot of stuff to this topic:
BGP is NOT gobernement censorship (Score:2)
Hate to break it to you, but using the web within a corporate environnement is a perk, not a right. And they CAN , have the RIGHT, to censor what they deem an abuse like looking for porn, gambling, whatever.
As for the other stuff "blocking stormfront", 1) I dislike to break it to you, but some web site are contrary to german law. I see nothing wrong in blocking them. You are american and dis