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> maintains a blocklist of foreign sites linked to child pornography. This blocklist is enforced on Finnish Internet users."

The list contains both foreign and local sites. The list contains several non-child porn sites (perhaps even most of them, hard to tell because the list is secret). The blocklist is enforced only for some Internet users, e.g. I'm not affected by it.

It is also worth mentioning that it is impossible to get off the list (the only known person who has tried it, has been trying to get off the list for almost 5 years, without a success. ). Quote "2011-05-23:
The administrative court recently ruled that the police should've removed my site from the list when I asked them to. However, they also say police made no error when they chose not to remove me, so I'll have to pay the legal fees myself. The police is apparently considering to appeal the decision and I'm still on the secret blacklist"
From: http://lapsiporno.info/

The law actually says the list is supposed to be used against sites outside Finland. Not sites residing in Finland. And even then this particular site has no child porn on it. And why would you block a local site ineffectively when you can just go and take the server out?

Remember the censorship and blacklist has been in use for years. Matti Nikki found out that many of the sites are totally within laws and has been compiling a list of them. Curiously, many of the false positives contained gay porn.

This story is about expanding the censorship, but it's already being used to block other than child porn sites. I'm not quite sure about the situation nowadays but originally there was no way for you to file a complaint about ending up on the list. If I recall correctly, Matti Nikki found out that apparently the police compiling a list does not constitute an official ruling, so there's no way to complain about it.

You know the major ISPs in Finland already block The Pirate Bay? It's painful for me to say, but the good thing in TPB block is that at least it got done by a court order. One way or another, sites like lapsiporno.info and TPB are going to get blocked. Then there are the online casinos, "extremists" and you know, all the Bad guys(tm)...

The law actually says the list is supposed to be used against sites outside Finland. Not sites residing in Finland. And even then this particular site has no child porn on it. And why would you block a local site ineffectively when you can just go and take the server out?

Remember the censorship and blacklist has been in use for years. Matti Nikki found out that many of the sites are totally within laws and has been compiling a list of them. Curiously, many of the false positives contained gay porn.

This story is about expanding the censorship, but it's already being used to block other than child porn sites. I'm not quite sure about the situation nowadays but originally there was no way for you to file a complaint about ending up on the list. If I recall correctly, Matti Nikki found out that apparently the police compiling a list does not constitute an official ruling, so there's no way to complain about it.

You know the major ISPs in Finland already block The Pirate Bay? It's painful for me to say, but the good thing in TPB block is that at least it got done by a court order. One way or another, sites like lapsiporno.info and TPB are going to get blocked. Then there are the online casinos, "extremists" and you know, all the Bad guys(tm)...

The blocklist is a joke that can be circumvented with a minimal effort, largely consisting of dead sites, legal(mostly gay) porn of various flavors and some real head-scratchers like this: http://lapsiporno.info/
That is a page that analyzes and critizises the blocklist itself. It's now removed from the blocklist, but only after an arduous court battle. There is also some info in english.

A few years ago in Finland, an Information Society Party was being organized, but it did not go very far. Both the name and the idea were considered bland, as most other parties had something to say about the information society as well.

However, in the past two years or so, PP Finland has made great progress. It has been registered for the upcoming parliamentary election, and its number of members puts it in the same league with the smallest parties currently in parliament.

Besides the catchier name, it must be said that the political climate has changed as well. Finland used to be one of the least corrupt countries in the world, but the past year or so has revealed a huge amount of corruption in the leading parties, including the former PM himself. The idea of an integrity party and other alternatives are thus gaining interest. Of course, privacy and freedom of speech have also become increasingly important, for example due to our Internet censorship.

He's not alone (In the assault part he probably is). The concern is universal. A lot of us Tor Network admins who do not provide exit nodes have opened ports for twitter, IM, and IRC...

How do you do that, exactly speaking? I've been running a Tor relay since the Finnish police erected the Great Firewall of Finland and blocked a site critical of it (http://lapsiporno.info/), but I don't really know too much about its internals, or those of Twitter, IM or IRC for that matter.

We've had this in Finland for a while now, too. See http://lapsiporno.info/english-2008-02-15.html for internet activist Matti Nikki's fight against the debated censorship. OpenDNS is the de facto way to circumvent this censor list. Ironically, his site is blocked by the child porn list by our Keskusrikospoliisi (federal police).

Obviously I screwed up the link :(

Somewhat similar scheme was attempted in Finland... starting about a year ago. It wasn't officially mandatory but the minister in charge hinted it would be made so unless ISPs cooperated "voluntarily". It rather blew on their face when it was discovered how poorly it worked (like, 95%+ of the sites blocked weren't what they were supposed to be - e.g., w3c.org was blocked for a while), and after a public uproar they backed down - not dismantling the system or admitting it was a mistake, but saying "of course it was intended as voluntary to everybody all along".

Today, police still maintains the blacklist and many ISPs use it by default but if you complain, they just tell you how to bypass it (change DNS servers), and some ignore it completely.

There're English stories about it here and here.

"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/

.

"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 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?

http://lapsiporno.info/
It's mostly in Finnish. But it does have a medium page in English with a summary.

There are a few things Google were asked to remove from their search results for google.co.uk -- I think things that a court injunction meant could not legally be revealed. AFAIK there is nothing stopping anyone in the UK from accessing them though.

I see this list of domains: http://lapsiporno.info/filtered.demon (from a Google search for uk net censorship list)
It claims the sites aren't accessible, and perhaps it's true. I'm not willing to look too closely, they're (apparently) child pornography sites and my curiosity on net censorship only goes so far. The first in the list doesn't resolve using dig +trace 1st... (it times out) but I can resolve it using dig @ns1.mit.edu 1st.... I can't ping 216.255.189.11 (where the MIT server resolves it to) though, or connect to port 80. The same for the second (17-j...). I can resolve the third (beaut... -> 79.135.166.102) but not ping it, I can resolve and ping the fourth (badj... -> 64.210.151.186, 66.254.121.94).

Here's an explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom

I'm not sure on my opinion on this.
For a start, possessing the images those websites contain is almost certainly illegal in the UK, with serious consequences for offenders. Blocking them prevents 'accidental' visits, and might put off someone just 'surfing' for illegal images. Wiki says it's easy to get round the block though. By banning access to them from the UK the country shows it doesn't accept child pornography, but I don't think any country does anyway so that doesn't really matter.

However, the technology used to block access to them could potentially be used to block other websites.

Since the opinion of a massive majority (well over 99.9%, I would guess?) of the UK's people is that child pornography should be forbidden I think the block is reasonable, but I also think it would be much better for everyone if forbidden URLs were redirected to a UK government "The page you are trying to view is blocked, by law X. It was reported to contain explicit images of children, which are illegal to posses under section X of law Y".

Norway has a different list, with different kind of sites blocked.

Here's a partial list for Norway: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.nextgentel
Heck, here's one for Sweden, too: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.glocalnet
And now that I'm at it, Denmark: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.cybercity

Also, it might be just a matter of time until Finnish Police tries to push my site into lists of other countries too.

Norway has a different list, with different kind of sites blocked.

Here's a partial list for Norway: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.nextgentel
Heck, here's one for Sweden, too: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.glocalnet
And now that I'm at it, Denmark: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.cybercity

Also, it might be just a matter of time until Finnish Police tries to push my site into lists of other countries too.

Norway has a different list, with different kind of sites blocked.

Here's a partial list for Norway: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.nextgentel
Heck, here's one for Sweden, too: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.glocalnet
And now that I'm at it, Denmark: http://lapsiporno.info/blocked.cybercity

Also, it might be just a matter of time until Finnish Police tries to push my site into lists of other countries too.

I've written a little bit of text in English about my page and the situation.

"Finnish ISPs are required by law to block access to sites on the list, according to The Register"

Actually, The Register doesn't say this. There exists a law specifically crafted due to this child porn censorship program, but it technically doesn't mandate ISPs into participating to the censorship. Well, except for the fact that the people behind the law have made public statements that if voluntary "self-regulation" isn't enough, then there will be such a law. So, it's not exactly voluntary when the ISPs are being threatened, but technically they can claim it's not required by the law...

Anyway, regarding the free speech advocate who has gotten his site censored, that's me. I've written a little bit of text in English about my page and the situation.