Argentina Censors Over a Million Blogs 170
In his first accepted submission, bs0d3 writes "A judge in Argentina ordered ISPs to block two websites — leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com. According to Google, many ISPs have simply blocked the IP 216.239.32.2 instead of using a targeted DNS filter. Over a million blogs are hosted by Blogger at this IP. Freedom of speech advocate Jillian York wrote, 'IP blocking is a blunt method of filtering content that can erase from view large swaths of innocuous sites by virtue of the fact that they are hosted on the same IP address as the site that was intended to be censored. One such example of overblocking by IP address can be found in India, where the IP blocking of a Hindu Unity website (blocked by an order from Mumbai police) resulted in the blocking of several other, unrelated sites."
Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm from argentina. I've lived here all my life and I'm in Buenos Aires as I write this.
If the state is guilty of something regarding internet and new technology here, is barely knowing of its existance. This is not the result of "censorship" as this dumb summary claims.
This is a fuckup, nothing more.
Of course, emos and other trash from Taringa will blow it out of proportion claiming it's wide-spread censorship, and try to politicize the hell out of it.
Re:Blocking with DNS does not work (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly. The whole reason the "Stasi 2.0" filter was blown off in Germany, was because the politicians and lawyers always talked about blocking "domains", and the ISPs knowing that this is technically absurd. There are so many things wrong... tons of false positives, false negatives, extreme bottlenecks since the government is always being cheap, etc, etc, etc.
But IP blocking is still retarded. I know a guy from the UAE, where they have massive China-level blocking and censorship. And everyone there simply has at least one VPN. There are companies specifically providing this.
He has three. US, UK, Germany. And since he pays money for it (about $5/month), the speed is better than what his ISP can provide. So the only difference he ever notices, is a bit of lag. Which means FPS online games with people from e.g. Europe is out of the question (2 seconds ping!). But that's the case when off the VPN too, since it's the filtering servers that cause nearly all of the lag.
Seriously, the ONLY way to effectively censor things, is a WHITElist. NOT a blacklist. And even that only works when there is no corruption, no people living close to each other with WLAN, nobody putting a large dish under his roof that goes to another dish outside the country (something that was normal for getting TV in the GDR), and no server in your whitelist being compromised or also not actually liking you.
Which, in practice, are more than delusional expectations.
So I don't see anything from
A) brainwashing people with social engineering to want to act like you want them to act, or
B) a 1984-like totalitarian control on the level of "chip in your head"
ever working.
And A is way more likely than B, since it's already successfully proven to work with hundreds of years of experience all over the world. (Hell, it's the whole damn purpose of lobbying, churches, politics, marketing and intelligence agencies' "public relations" sections, etc, etc, etc.)
Re:Bullshit (Score:2, Interesting)
It was, indeed. Censorship in pure form. The website is a whistleblower distribution site, and it contains many documents which go against the current government.
Re:i used to try to tell this to IRC ops (Score:4, Interesting)
Or a crafty way to let make the whole country aware of the censorship.