All Content Related to IP blocking

China's latest Internet crackdown

jillian — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:10:19 -0500

This blog post was originally posted at Rebecca MacKinnon's blog, RConversation, and is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license.

Seven different government agencies, including the Ministry of Public Security and the State Council Information Office declared war on Internet smut today. 19 Internet companies, including Google, Baidu, Sina, and others, were cited for "violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of youth and young people."

The official government online announcement is here. Another Chinese language report, including video of a TV report with footage of computer servers being confiscated by police at an unknown location and unknown time is here.

The meeting was chaired by Vice Minister Cai Mingzhao of the State Council Information Office (the same guy who met a few months back with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, and who has been emphasizing the need for strategic control of the Internet for the past few years in various speeches). According to Reuters:

"Some websites have exploited loopholes in laws and regulations," said Cai Mingzhao, a deputy chief of the State Council Information Office, who chaired the meeting, according to a report on an official news website (www.china.com.cn).

"They have used all kinds of ways to distribute content that is low-class, crude and even vulgar, gravely damaging mores on the Internet."

The Information Office is the government face of the Party's propaganda and censorship machine.

Cai told officials to "fully grasp the gravity and threat of the vulgar current infesting the Internet" and said law-breakers face "stern punishment."

Representatives of Google, Baidu, Sina, and others who journalists contacted as of this writing have so far had no meaningful comment.

It is of course unclear to what extent this anti-smut crackdown is or isn't going to lead to a tightening on politically sensitive content as well. Historically in China (if you can call the story of China's Internet "history"), the technology used to censor porn has ended up being used more vigorously to censor political content than smut. The Financial Times has a story today quoting He Zhaohui, marketing manager at TRS Information Technology, "China's leading provider of search technology and text mining solutions." According to the FT, He says TRS is "thriving on the government's desire to better "manage" public opinion, comes as the political leadership is facing growing challenges, mostly voiced through the internet."

The folks over at Danwei.org, who have been following Chinese media regulations for years, aren't about to get their panties in a twist over loss of smut just yet. Alice Xin Liu writes: "This campaign is very similar to countless content cleansing campaigns over the past few years. It does not signify much except that the Net Nanny is making sure everyone knows who is boss before the Chinese New Year starts." Jeremy Goldkorn points out that on the same day this campaign is announced, the People's Daily website among others ran racy photos of Zhang Ziyi. Heck, it wasn't long ago that Xinhua was known widely around the China expat web as "Skinhua"... How quickly people forget...

I heard from a couple of reporters today who asked if there's been any other crackdown like this in the past. It seems that everybody has also forgotten the crackdown on video websites that took place last March, which caused the Chinese YouTube clone Tudou.com to go offline for 24 hours in order to upgrade its censorship and monitoring systems.

One reporter asked me whether this latest crackdown marks a new hard-line phase after the "relative freedom of 2008." I pointed out that the unblocking of a number of prominent foreign websites around the Olympics was only one part of the picture for 2008. Chinese domestic websites hosting blogs, chatrooms, and other user-generated content never let up on political censorship. It's just that foreigners only seem to notice what happens to foreign websites...

Secret Censorship in Denmark

jillian — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:06:58 -0500

While you were sleeping, Wikileaks released yet another report on Internet filtering...But this time the filtering is not in China, or Thailand, or Saudi Arabia...this time, it's in Denmark.

The report states that Denmark chooses to filter child pornography rather than face legislation, and has included nearly 4,000 sites in their filtering scheme. The country's top 3 ISPs participate.

Rather than simply post a list of blocked sites that they felt were actually legal, Wikileaks has published the entire secret list of sites, including many which truly contain child pornography. Wikinews (not affiliated) questioned Wikileaks on this:

We asked if Wikileaks was worried about the criminal implications of linking to so much illegal content, but they were not. The said that it was "politically untenable" to prosecute them, pointing out that Wikileaks is hosted in many different countries accross the globe.

We asked them if they were "concerned about the possibility of censorship in the UK, Denmark, Finland etc.?" "No," Wikileaks told us "We welcome it." Wikinews wondered if this was because of the Streisand effect, but Wikileaks said it was "because it will demonstrate how censorship systems are abused."

Indeed, there are several pornographic sites caught in the list which do not seem to contain child pornography. Many of the links on the list direct to dead sites.

While it is doubtful that many will come forward against the filtering of child pornography, Wikileaks states that "secret censorship systems are unaccountable and dangerous."

When asked how child pornography should be dealt with, Wikileaks responded:

Block financial transactions after due process. It's easy to set up servers. It is not so easy to set up merchant accounts...

Due process would involve sending a letter to the owner of the merchant account with the accusation and giving them a right to be heard and an appeal process. The banks are politically a lot more powerful than the internet industry so this hasn't happened.

FCC Plans Filtering for 2155 MHz Spectrum

brendan — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:13:28 -0500

Facing heavy pressure from Congress, the FCC last week delayed its planned auction for the 2155-2188 MHz band of spectrum. Among the points of contention, the auction as it is currently designed would require that the winner filter pornography from the freely-available portions of its network. I've already blogged about whether such a requirement is legally possible. Here I'll briefly touch on whether such a requirement is technically feasible.

Were filtering requirement to remain in the auction rules, the easiest way for the spectrum winner to filter pornography would be through what is known as TCP/IP header filtering. In this method, the network operator's routers would block any traffic headed to specific IP addresses (e.g. those of porn sites). But there are three problems (pdf) with this sort of method. First, IP addresses often direct to more than one website or service (e.g. email). Therefore users would not be able to access some websites or services because they shared an IP address with a blocked site. Second, no network operator could track every pornographic site, and so the TCP/IP filter would almost certainly fail to capture a significant portion of online pornography. Finally, any filter that identifies sites by keywords would block some sites that were not pornographic in nature. Sites about sexually transmitted infections, safe-sex, or any number of other topics might be blocked that ought not to be.

Ultimately, filtering might not be necessary to protect children from pornography. Depending who wins the auction, consumers might have to pay as much as $150 for the hardware to get on the network, keeping access unaffordable for most children.

Turkey's Capricious Filtering - Just Too Easy

jillian — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:31:33 -0500

Turkey has made headlines lately for its capricious filtering; although previous incidents involved filtering sites which insulted Kemal Ataturk or "Turkishness" in general, lately, the filtering seems nearly impulsive.

A site entitled List of websites blocked by Turkish Telecom...or how Turkey disgraces herself shows that, while many of the blocked sites are pornographic by nature, there are plenty which aren't. One can search by categories on the site: the category entitled "Harun Yahya/Adnan Oktar" refers to Turkish creationist Adnan Oktar, who of late has come under fire in the news for his incessant filtering requests in Turkish courts; another category entitled "Mistake/Overkill" shows that the Turkish Telecom isn't even careful: "imbd.com" appears to be filtered in place of popular film database "imdb.com" (why that site was meant to be filtered in the first place remains unknown).

It seems that the majority of filtered sites not relating to gambling or pornography fall into two categories: those which insult Turkishness (including those insulting Kemal Ataturk) and those which Adnan Oktar has managed to get shut down. As we said earlier, it's amazing that one man has the ability to get so many sites filtered.

The administrator of Mindtrick.net pointed me to a Turkish site to which anyone may submit a filtering request. The site [in Turkish] breaks sites down into nine simple categories, making it simple for anyone to register a complaint.

In other words, anyone could play the role of Adnan Oktar. It seems that, without change, it won't be long until Turkey has censored the entire Internet.

Italy blocks The Pirate Bay, inadvertantly increasing traffic to the site

jillian — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:25:59 -0400

On July 14, the International Herald Tribune reported that an Italian judge had ordered all ISPs in that country to filter access to The Pirate Bay, one of the world's most popular file-sharing sites.

The Pirate Bay, based in Sweden, allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (also known as "torrents"), small files that contain machine-readable information necessary to download data files from other users.

This is not the first time The Pirate Bay has experienced legal troubles. In 2006, Swedish police conducted a raid against The Pirate Bay's servers. Earlier this year, a court in Denmark ordered Danish ISP Tele2 to block access to The Pirate Bay. And just this month, the International Olympic Committee asked the Swedish government for cooperation in preventing Pirate Bay users from sharing video clips of the Olympics. In response, The Pirate Bay renamed their BitTorrent tracker The Beijing Bay.

This time, Italy's attempt to block access to The Pirate Bay stemmed from an investigation into copyright violation by an anti-piracy group in Milan and was backed by Italian record labels. The action was quickly criticized in the Italian blogosphere, leading to increased traffic to the site.

In fact, traffic from Italy to The Pirate Bay actually increased five percent during the first week of the block, according to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde. Sunde also reported that he would be implementing a complex system that involved changing IP addresses and mirroring the site at Labaia.org (labaia="the bay"). However, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak he was implementing "a really annoying system for them to filter" that involved changing IP addresses and mirroring the site at Labaia.org (labaia is Italian for "the bay"). He also encouraged users to use OpenDNS to circumvent ISP blocks.

As the debate about copyright infringement and online file sharing rages on around the world, it is interesting to note that P2P file sharing as a practice continues to increase, with some sources claiming that file sharing actually boosts music sales.

And as for the future of The Pirate Bay in Italy? The company filed a lawsuit against the decree [it] used to force Italian ISPs to block the site. A decision is expected within a few weeks.