Slashdot Mirror
German State Alters DNS To Censor Web Sites [updated]
Rabenwolf writes: "In the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the first ISP (ISIS Multimedia) has given in to pressure from the state government and has started to block foreign websites with supposedly "illegal content" by changing the corresponding DNS entries. ISIS customers trying to access these sites are redirected to the website of the local government. ISPs in North Rhine-Westphalia will have to pay a fine if they continue to provide access to sites with "illegal content" through their DNS servers. It's not as bad as China or Saudi-Arabia, but it makes you think... An article from the heise newsticker is here, and if you don't sprechen Deutsch, Google might help." Update: 11/22 15:23 GMT by T : As sqrt points out, this report is misleading: "A single technican altered the DNS Entries to demonstrate it is possible. His changes were already reversed. Heise already posted a new story about this today."
Just use a different name server then.
Anyone finding themselves redirected can use any number of simple DNS tools to find out the real IP (by querying a root server, then the authorative server), then simply access the site by IP rather than FQDN. This may sound a little technical for Johann average, but not when simple instructions are made available to them.
(This would not work with sites that rely on HTTP1.1 to tell them the name of the site, so that many sites can be hosted on a single IP, but that is less widely used than it might be.)
If this is based on DNS entries, tnen what is stopping people using the IP addresses instead?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
(From Google)
;-)
The entrance offerers had questioned thereby whether the entrance to unpleasant, abroad can be prevented gehosteten Websiten at all effectively.
I think I might as well just learn German
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
according to this article on heise, the restriction is no longer in effect. According to the press officer, a technician did it on his own and not in accordance with company policies.
Yes.
Can I censor decimal numbers? They are far more stupid and dangerous than anything else.
I'm happy to see our german friends make up for their dismal record. Censorship is not only a fact of life, it is a necessary fact of life, and despite the fact that USians can only discern other people's censorship, USians are the most censorious bastards on the planet. USian government is a sinecure thanks to the individual USian's totalitarian tendencies.
S'true.
I really hope people actually think about this before replying about how this is simply wrong. Different countries have different ways of dealing with things. In America, for example, Freedom of Speech is enshrined in law - this gives an enormous amount of protection to citizens from their government, which is good, but also ensures the right of racists and others to say what they like, and recruit new members. In other countries, they frequently take a different approach, and for example consider protecting minorities from hate speech to be more important than letting everyone say whatever they like.
/is/ correct to claim that citizens need to be able to assert control, and not be powerless against their own government, but there are clear disadvatages. The same with speech - given no censorship, and no ability to assert local laws over internet content has major disadvantages, as well as the obvious advantages.
I wish people would understand that these are simply different ways of going about things, and certainly each has its own advantages and disadvatages. I don't honestly think, for example, that one groups is simply correct about gun ownership - perhaps America
A [problem threatening free speech in the U.S.] is the FBI Wiretap of the entire Internet
coupled with the Internet's unsecured DNS. The FBI could surreptitiously censor subtly or DOS sites that criticize the government, for example.I've noticed the American tendency to drown dissenting opinion while congratulating its government for making dissenting opinion a rhetorical right.
Linux continues to suck.
This has already been reversed. See the newer article on heise
That could be interesting. A german types in thenazipartyarentthatbadafterall.de (or its German equivalent), and they get their local government website.
Could be worse, I suppose. We might see the rarest of conditions, when politicians don't want the people's votes, after their picture seems to appear on amianaziornot.de
They mention "illegal content" quite a bit, but I don't see where they define it. Then again, the Google translation left much to be desired and I did not read to the end of the article. Can anyone elaborate on it?
Side note: It would be most strange if the "illegal content" was pornography, from what I understand, prostitution is legal in Germany. Most would say that is morally worse than a little pr0n. (Me, I could care less).
I guess its all moot anyway.
-- Dan
Why is this not as bad as China or Saudi-Arabia? Censorship is censorship, and governments trying to restrict their peoples access to information on the Internet is equally despicable regardless of the information or the method with which it is attempted.
The world has suffered too much already to the German people's willingness to allow their governments to manipulate and control them. I say shame on all those who are allowing it to continue...
Already in Monday the Duesseldorfer offerer Isis Multimedia Net changed appropriate DN-its-slow-acting on its name server.
Can someone who speaks german please explain what a DN-its-slow-acting is?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Anyone know what type of sites they were attempting to filter? Even if it was just another fascist sysadmin, he must have had a list from somewhere.
Rather than sue websites (like France has done to Yahoo) Germany is attempting to address content issues within their own borders through technical means. I may or may not agree with what they are attempting to keep out, but I respect their right to try and I respect the fact their solution is lawyer free.
Of course, anyone with a phone number to an out-of-country ISP and a modem will have no trouble getting around this weak blockade, but that is a seperate issue.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Hopefully, the folks who kneejerk respond to stories about similar abuses in the US with "hah hah, the US sucks, come live in a real country" will keep this and similar problems (such as the French encryption policies and Yahoo lawsuit) in mind.
The Internet is shaking up the status quo globally, and the assaults on our freedom of speech to stop it are similarly global. If the US removes it's citizens' freedom, it affects you, whether you're in Georgia the state or Georgia the country.
but you're not.
I've alwas been a big fan of thought control.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Die Eingangsanbietenden hatten dadurch gefragt, ob der Eingang zu unangenehmem, auswärts verhindert werden kann gehosteten Websiten an allen effektiv.
(Boy, that is way above RSA.)
Censorship on Slashdot
Well I guess for those that don't live there (99.99999% of readers), we should just avoid going there than.
My Rights in in North Rhine-Westphalia are being violated! Help!
Google gives the translated title as "Net barrier for Fritzchen stupid", with somehow somes it up nicely
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Just install a DNS server (as provided on any *nix distrib), and have it not connect to the ISP's (default setting), et voila, forget that shit.
I read in the paper that they not only want to censor "nazi" sites, but also Rotten, which displays very bad taste, but bad taste has never killed anyone, has it?
It's always the same problem with censorship: they claim to only target extremist groups, but there's always collateral damages.
He posts all sorts of articles infringing on "Your Rights" even though most really don't. He seems to think that anything you ABLE to do should be a right. He needs to take some courses in politics and law before spouts off like that.
Bottom line: Michael Sims is a fucking moron.
Anti-hate-speech laws, whether in Germany or Francs or the U.S., seem to be predicated on the idea that the speech itself has some sort of magical power over people's minds. I think that's very wrong, and it distracts attention from where it's needed most.
A number of different groups would have you believe that the swastika was this magical symbol that automatically turned rational people into genocidal creatures: All you do is hide the swastikas and everything's okay. Remember that the Holocaust had a very specific economic and political context: For a number of reasons, the German people had endured one of the worst economic declines ever to be suffered by an industrialized nation, and they were terrified and desperate. This does not excuse what happens, but it gives a much more sensible explanation than what normally passes for historical analysis -- "We need to keep the images of swastikas away from impressionable white kids", or "Germans are just a racist people", or similar pap.
So now Germany has a problem with skinheads (though it tends to get blown way out of proportion because the rest of the world watches the country very carefully). So why is that? Is that because German teenagers can get their hands on albums by talentless oi-skinhead bands? Or maybe, just maybe, it's because the reunification of Germany has been fraught with all sorts of economic and political stresses, and there are too many scared, uneducated, hopeless Germans who are looking for a scapegoat.
Of course, when it comes to what a politician can do about it, there's really no option at all, is there? Either he can stand up and say "We should work hard to make sure that everybody has good economic opportunities" -- and be branded as some stuck-in-the-past Marxist -- or he can point fingers and say "Let's keep Nazi images off the internet!"
Do domain names matter?
Of course there are different ways of thinking in different countries. Gassing 6 million people is a different way of thinking. Slamming airplanes into skyscrapers with thousands of people in and around them is a different way of thinking.
Indeed it is America's different way of thinking about freedom that ensure's we get to speak about different way's of thinking. Sure, we should understand that different parts of the world are different. But they also need to understand this, too ... but without freedom of speech they cannot achieve that.
In my way of thinking, though, I see these kinds of restrictions in Germany as a return to their Nazi past. While those putting in this law might not be intent on promoting the master race, those who do can certainly make use of it's uniform acceptance, should they come back to power.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The Caos Computer Club has a transcript of the letters sent to the ISPs by the Government. They demanded the blocking of: front14.org, stormfront.org, nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com for illegal nazi-content (which is illegal in Germany for historical reasons) and rotten.com As a site that uses pictures undermining the dignity of man and endangering the youth. I'd personaly - as a german citizen - prefer to see more money spent on media-education so people could make an informed decision about good and bad links to follow than on this campaign that opens doors to censorship (which is against our constitution btw.)
Often "illegal content" in German speaking countries refers to neo Nazi material. In the states you can say "I am a Nazi and proud of it, I wish Hitler had finished his job", and have no problems. In Germany, you would land in jail.
So, is preventing this kind of speech a good thing or not? There are no simple answers, as you see.
Also, before any knee-jerk reactions, you should take a close look at how the German computer industry and government deals with electronic privacy issues. They are one of the best countries worldwide in this area. Too many folks think "Germany-Nazis-Bad". Germany was the country that managed to put enough pressure on M$ to get the $cientology "disk defragmenter" code out of Windows 98 (which, by the way, is back in XP again, but no one seems to care).
OK so everybody says it is but i can't really work out how many people have actually thought about it themselves. The main aurguement seems to be that once your an adult it's your own resonsibility about what you see, belive and say. However judging by what some people do say belive and say thiers quite a big aruguement for cencorship... i gues the question allways comes down to who gets to do the cencorship. I persnoally belivve that their is a certain point where cencorship is a good thing. It's just a questions of finding that point, and agreeing on it.
Apologies for the spelling.
--
Burt "Out of my mind back in 5 minutes"
Burt "Out of my mind back in 5 minutes"
If a country implemented DNS blocking like this as a long-standing policy, it's easy to imagine people trying all sorts of technical fixes to get around it. People would set up their own "All Hate DNS", or maybe they'd distribute .hosts files with lists of blocked domains ...
But once you're doing that, why even use the old domain name? If you had www.killalljews.com resolving through the "All Hate DNS", wouldn't you also want www.killalljews.hate, and www.finalsolution.now, and everything else?
It introduces the possibility of a conflicting, though smaller, namespace, being overlaid on the DNS -- one more step towards fragmenting the namespace. Not that such fragmentation is necessarily a good thing, but it sure would be interesting to watch ...
Do domain names matter?
Now that ISIS has stopped blocking the sites under massive objection from free speech advocates, the local government has released a press statement in which they claim that ISIS gave in to racist pressure. Guess we're all nazis now because we didn't want to allow our government to take the easy route to complete content control.
The statement is here: Pressemitteilung 467/2001 der Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf vom 22.11.2001
I had a lot of meetings with the BKA (something like the german FBI) about fighting criminality in the internet. And they underestimate scale and complexity of the net.
I give you one example. There is a software called PERKEO. PERKEO is able to checksum files quickly and has an internal database of known checksums of child pornography images. They argued, that most child pornography images (which are exchanged through the internet) are well known. Somewhat like 95+% shell be in the database.
In the discussion with the ISPs they argued, that it would be easy to add PERKEO to the proxy server. For every image accessed, the checksum is created and compared with the database. In case the checksum matches, the access is blocked.
When i tried to explain, that the introduction would only result in countermeasure (automatic modification of images), it was taken as unwillingness.
Every meeting (i know about) ended with the same results: Everyone is willing to fight criminals, but the is no modus operandi. The law enforcement agencies have wishes the ISPs do not consider compatible with the law and constitution.
Some politicians and law enforcers are growing more and more frustrated. So a state (Nordrhein- Westfalen) tries to work with laws that put more responisbility on the shoulders of the ISPs.
This generates confusion and the confusion results in such events like the one discussed.
CU, Martin
Actually, this has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with the freedom to assemble peacably.
Maybe we should ban that too?
I have a hard time seeing the "major disadvantages" of an uncensored internet. Please document these disadvantages so we can all understand how censorship is good.
In fact, I also want to know what benefit does any citizen (not government agency) get from censorship of the internet? What are these alleged "advantages" to citizens whose net access is being filtered by the government? Who knows, if the advantages are good enough, maybe I'll start writing to congress to have my internet censored.
Germany may be protecting its citizens from hate speech, but remember this: All persons are entitled to equal protection under the law. Just because you're saying "nigger" and I'm saying "potato salad" should not affect our protection by the first amendment.
I mean, if I hate potatoes, wouldn't talking badly about potato salad be "hate speech"?
Who did what now?
If you are ISP and you are being forced by the government to block sites, and you have a problem with that government censorship, I'd call this a clever way of objecting. It is trival to totally circumvent, yet with a bit of luck should satisfy facist government officials...
Still, it is really disheartening to see wide attempts by governments to gradually restrict our freedoms in just about every country in the so called 'free world'.
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
1. Post a skewed and misleading article with inflammatory headline claming "censorship" and "your rights".
2. Look like a complete fool 30 minutes later, when a reader who actually reads the article does a little checking and points out the truth.
3. Post a lame UPDATED tag, with no retraction or apology.
Hopefully, this should teach the editors to actually research and think before posting, but somehow I doubt it.
I'm an American, not a German, but I thought that Germany's constitution forbade this. In particular, quoting from Article 5:
Or, in English:
Could someone who is German or who has studied German law please clarify?
Sure, the US government is oppressive, except when compared to any other. No local magistrate has the power or ability to keep me from posting to this website, and should they try to do so, I have the power to sue them, undo the censorship, and get them to pay me for the exercise of that privilege.
Freedom of speech in the United States is not absolute, of course. But it is unparalleled elsewhere. In what other nation can you go to the nation's highest court and announce "Fuck the draft?" with absolute immunity?
It means "the technician tried to demonstrate that there is a simple technical solution to block web sites, which can be circumvented easily."
From what I understand the technician blocked the web sites on its own without consent by management. Another article states that several other german ISPs have also implemented blocks for web sites as requested by the local government.
Personally (being a german citizen) I perceive these actions as bad move towards censorship.
Just do what I did, I downloaded the New.net client and I use someone else's DNS server.
Only two problems with this:
1. I don't actually "remember" downloading the client, but I seem to be using it.
2. I CAN'T GET RID OF THE F%$#ING THING!!!
Regarding what was reported by the German computer magazine c't:
2 650088,00.html
http://cisar.org/991203a.htm
Regarding M$ capitulation and offering to remove the code (the only time M$ has ever provided a patch to REMOVE a piece of software): http://www.zdnet.com/windows/stories/main/0,4728,
A recent issue of c't indicated that the disk fragmenter has silently been re-incorporated into Windows XP. Sorry, can't find a link.
Watch your back.
Please note that this is not the latest news. Isis has removed the blocking, stating that it was installed by a technical staff member without consulting the management.
First Blocking of Web Sites in NRW
In North Rhine-Westphalia, a first internet provider has started blocking certain web sites with alleged right-wing extremist content. Isis Multimedia Net, a provider located in Düsseldorf, already changed the respective DNS entries on monday. Isis customers now find themselves on a web site of Düsseldorf's district government when entering one of the addresses in question.
The basis for this is a request by the district goverment sent to all access providers of the federal state, asking for the blocking of certain foreign web sites with illegal content. An Isis spokesperson explained the blocking was performed due to being threatened by a fine. The goverment had informed them about the illegal content, so now they were required to act.
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) opposed "censoring" the internet. "The massive restrictions for the citizens in execising their free speech rights are unacceptable," said CCC spokesperson Jens Ohlig.
The authorities had invited various providers on November 13 to dicuss technical details of blocking internet content. In this hearing, the content providers questioned the possibility of an effective blocking of unpleasent web sites hosted abroad. The participants finally agreed to discuss technical possibilities in a special interest group.
I just got off the phone yesterday with a client from germany who was telling me that his website that we host here in america was pointing to a porn site. The content on his page was correct, as was apache's httpd.conf file, and the dns records on his nameserver.. Everything was setup correctly.
:)
I told him that someone was probably playing with his ISP's DNS records. Go figure
It's very easy to pass over all this stupid barriers (including country firewalls). All I have to do is ask one single question.
Does anybody have a proxy (anonymizer) server avaiable?
Nothing else to say.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
I've found that in many cases, using the nameserver your ISP hands you will result in a 1-2 second per lookup delay - most ISPs have horribly overloaded their DNS servers. Where I work, I was seeing 2-5 seconds per lookup. I brought this to the attention of our IT staff, and had them reconfigure our plant nameserver to do the lookup directly. Name lookups went from 2-5 seconds to <100 msec. Since we are a large shop with lots of clients, it makes sense.
Running your own caching nameserver will speed up your browsing, and if you use a real name server package, you can configure it to do the lookups itself rather than going through your ISP's servers. Thus, you can prevent them from screwing with your DNS, you can use alternate root servers if you so choose, and you get better response.
I'm somewhat shocked that Assimilation-XP doesn't have a caching nameserver....
www.eFax.com are spammers
The article states that the employe did this to prove that this is possible, if the page is located on a hosting that provides storage to html pages for hundreds of other users (e.g. geocities.yahoo.com, www.christianwebhost.com (they wouln't have this kind of pages, right) all access to this web sites would be disabled completly.
Its been down (i`m in the uk) for 36 hours minimum!! any ideas?
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters; and retribution against oppressive/anti-people/anti-intellectual/anti-free dom....... policies.
... atleast for some hours ... and we'll cause your sys admins a lot of headaches.
You censor something, and we'll make sure you don't have a website to show
Phear the power of 800,000 odd geeks with a LOT of bandwidth and free time.
-Shaunak.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
A German, a German !!!!
Shoot that motherfucker.
Ha.
Believe or not that would be first reaction from my grandfather if he was presented with a German.
Your predecessors must have been truly evil to evoke that kind of reaction from an old man 55+ years after actual events.
All you need to do is install a dns server capable of resolving from the root servers - which bind 9 will do out of the box.
The article says that the government threatened the ISPs with fees up to 1 Million DM if they don't comply. ISIS forwarded e-mails concerning the matter to the government. The article ends with bashing on ISIS for taking back their measures.
Do you fly often?
The more I see occident growing strong into an enormous trade coalition and similar-culture block, the more im convinced that this will bear no good for the Rest Of Men*.
* Rest Of Men: Those that do not:
a) Own a multinational
b) Are part of a beurocracy
c) Have already succeded in selling a bad book
d) Teach students to follow the Trends Of the
Industry since we are allways to small to
change them.
Alex
NO SIG
"Slashdot - rumours for nerds. Stuff that might have happened"?
Try this. Maybe it's called "nudity", who cares?
Wouldn't it be simple for ISPs to block queries from their customers to port 53 on any systems but their designated name servers?
I'm not raising this because I think it's a good idea, but because it's obvious enough that we may have to provide a work-around, such as setting up DNS on other ports, in a widely-distributed way.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Odds are your ISP is doing this for you right now. Here in Eastern Canada a nameless major ISP routinely blocks web sites (by null routing, not by DNS) that they don't approve of... or that embarass politicians in the news. (http://www.anaconda.com, there was a slashdot story but search isn't working blah). Of course, they don't tell you they're doing this. It's the best kind of censorship, the kind where you're not even aware you're missing information.
... deserves this. Certainly it's the least difficult software I've ever installed on linux. When I first tried slackware years ago, I was constantly bugging people to help me with this or that, but even back then I managed to install bind on my own.
Besides, there is yet another benefit to running your own named. You're one step closer to escaping the ICANN tyranny. I'll let others argue which is worse, that or these German shenanigans.
Seriously, wasn't Welsh used to help with encryption during WW2? On the grounds that, even if they could decrypt it, they couldn't read it...
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Censorship on Slashdot
That "garbled" page is plain German. That's why it's called "zivildienst.at" (.at -> Austria -> German talking country). German (spoken in Germany, Austria and parts of the countries around them) is pretty similar to English, that's why you can recognize some words (Kontakt is German for contact). Additionally, it's common here to use English for Computer-related things like "download".
Hate speech, bigotry and diffamation are _not_ covered under "Freedom of Speech".
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
If a government wants to start censoring the Internet in their country, they have to be careful. If the laws there are already strict then they have no problem and can go right ahead without worrying about riots. Otherwise, they must slowly turn the people around with PR to make them think that the censorship would be for their own good.
:)
For example, they might start off by saying that the Internet promotes violence and criminal activity or terrorism. They might also explain that criminals and terrorists can use the Internet to communicate and collaborate without being traced. Another point would be that potential criminals could have access to sensitive information such as explosive techniques, or the locations of various potential targets. More recently they could put forward the point that newer trends such as p2p file sharing spread child pornography, graphical violence, and pirate material such as music, algorithms which could endanger an economy.
After this PR campaign a majority of people could be persuaded that Internet censorship is a very good idea. Given that allot (even most?) people have never used the Internet or not regularly, these will be easily led. The government could then proceed to censor. But of course that would never, ever in a million years happen in any civilized country would it?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
DDR's Constitution
Help fight continental drift.
The fake DNS entries on ISIS' server are active again. Note that they are not just redirecting www.rotten.com, but the entire domain, via a wildcard CNAME entry.
having read through the comments, i would like to add a few things.
firs of all, it affects just one state. in germany, each state is responsible for the media by themselves. this includes things like assigning frequencies and so on.
this particular state tries to push the local ISPs (which are not the ones used by the majoraty of the people living there anyway) to block access to those websites. this has been (and will be) opposed by the ISPs, for obvious (technical and constitutional) reasons. one ISIS technician did it, to prove it was possible.
it is uncertain if such a government blocking would be legal.
i agree with all of you saying censorship is bad in general. i also believe it is wrong in this special case.
but there are some things you should take in account, before judjing germany as some repressive country.
those are, of coures, historical reasons. the nazis used media propaganda not only after they gained power, but from the very beginning of their movement, as they had the support of some big publishers. and they used a hole in the constitution of the weimar republic to abandon the constitution alltogether. to prevent this in the future, when the new constitution was made, making it protective had a top priority. protective means that any attempt to fight the constitution is illegal, and certain key paragraphs must not be changed (including the one about censorship being illegal, by the way).
so if you promote a plan to abandon the constitution it is illegal, if a party proposes to abandon the constitution, the party is illegal, and if the party has no democratic structure - guess what.
nazi symbols are illegal, denying the holocaust is illegal, basicly anything pro-nazi is.
contrary to popular believe Mein Kampf is not, but the copyright is claimed by the state of bavaria, so you can't buy it (you can't read it either, i tried it once but didn't make it past the first chapter).
i believe this should be kept up for some 40 more years. imagine you have suffered under the nazis, been arrested by the gestapo or maybe even sent to a concentration camp and you see the same symbols again on someones t-shirt.
but to get to main point: nazi propaganda in germany is illegal. so some people have their sites hosted somewhere else. 90% of german language nazi content is hosted outside of germany. so the idea is to block access to it from within germany. but three question remain:
- is it possible?
- is it legal?
- is it good?
the legal status is unclear, but critical.
the technical possibility is, to say the least, questionable.
the issue iif it is good is just being discussed. i think it's not, a proper educated mind should be able to deal with propaganda, from any side.
i wanted to write something about the different freedoms you have in europe and in the US, but i will do that in another post...
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
Wrong.
You can point your computer to whatever DNS server you want. Just point to one in the US.
Kevin Fox
Which party rules North Rhine - Westphalia? (Or is it just Düsseldorf?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I'm not sure about that, but I've heard that during WWI a lot of escapped (Scottish) Highland POWs spoke to each other in the Gaelic. Any German troops overhearing (trained to investiage any English being spoken) didn't click. I thibk they just assumed that it was a weired local dialect. During WW2 Highland POWs composed new Highalnd dances to pass the time; it took a lot of persuding that the sheet music they sent in letters-to-home didn't contain a fiendish code.
I seem to remeber hearing that the Americans used Navaho, not sure if that is a Urban Myth or not.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --- Albert Einstein
in the US you can say basically anything you want. you can buy guns freely and drive a car when you're 16.
in germany you generally have the right to promote your opinion publicly, but some restrictions apply. the restrictions are about nazi propaganda and symbols, attempts to abandon the constitution, and anything that hurts anybodies dignity.
someone quoted the sentence Soldaten sind Mörder (soldiers are murderers) before. it came up as bumper stickers and someone sued against it - but it was found constitutional by our supreme court.
you are not allowed to buy or keep guns without a special permission which you can get if you have a reason and proper training.
the reason for the american liberties, as well as certain german restriction are of course historical, but apply until today in peoples minds.
people have different priorities. as well as americans would never accept such restrictions, europeans generally find things like the capital punishment barbaric. also, many criminals getting life in prison in the US would have got medical treatment in europe as they would be considered mentally ill.
this gets me to another issue - things accepted by the public.
europeans are not as easyly offended when they hear swear words on tv, or by nudity.
reading through slashdot i often get the impression that a lot of the users posting here are simply not aware of the cultural differences that lead to different values and priorities.
i am often shocked reading about curfews for minors, and i am sometimes amused seeing people drinking out of brown paperbags in movies. but that's the way it is. while europe is more liberal with alcohol, drugs and sex, the US is with speech and guns.
the restrictions about publishing your opinion here are very limited, and i have faith in our judges.
i enjoyed being allowed beer when i was 16 (in public!), and i still enjoy driving to the netherlands or switzerland to buy the best weed there is à la carte. by no means would i like to live in a country where they can take my house for growing weed on the balcony, where i would have to fear my kid being killed while playing with a friends dads gun, or could be fired every day for no reason at all.
it's a question of mentality.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
That's nothing© Here in the USA, there are people who would like to hold me accountable for my great-great-great-great-grandfather owning slaves and a plantation©
Best Slashdot comment ever
See the new movie Windtalkers. The US used Navaho speakers throughout the Pacific theater for semi-realtime transmissions, as Navaho was effectively unbreakable to the Japanese.
The Crazy Finn
So you wouldn't use something like "untenladendaten" or is that too long even for speakers of German? It sounds kinda cool to me. Probably something we could make a song out of.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In a press release published in the evening, ISIS gives its version of the day's events: According to this press release, a technician had been experimenting with blocking the relevant web sites since the beginning of the week, despite the fact that the ISP originally didn't want to implement the block (the district government had originally called for the block in early October). This experiment was then stopped in the morning, and reactivated in the late afternoon after an ISIS executive had met the head of the district government to discuss the issue. ISIS then complains about the situation of ISPs which are either perceived as censors, or as fostering right-wing radicalism. It is emphasized that ISIS maintains its criticism of the technical solution used to block the sites - in particular because the solution leaves so many back doors that the effort can't actually be justified. According to the press release, ISIS will meet the district government in December, in order to discuss further activities and work on a political solution.
According to http://www.heise.de/pda/newsticker/m22902.html the provider blocks again as told by the government.
The same problem (including the front14.org site, who got more publicity than it could ever dream of thanks to these affairs - but that's another matter) was brought to court recently in France.
The judge decided not to decide anything; basically, he chose to let the ISPs decide for themselves, what they should do with these sites. "Block it or not, you decide." Quite sensible, IMHO.
The disciple of Solomon who made that non-decision was judge Gomez, the same guy who orderd Yahoo to block access to Nazi-related auctions from French machines.
All in all, that doesn't change much, and the recent moves by the EU on that subject don't help either. At the end of the day, the only truth is that since the 1st amendment exists in the US, it now de facto exists everywhere in the world, and that the only thing that can go against it is financial threat (e.g. Yahoo who removed Nazi auctions altogether for fear that their assets in France could be at risk).
Oh strange new World, with such an Internet in't !
Thomas Miconi
Or the old man must be nuts.
The provider "ISIS" has enabled the block of this websites again !
heise.de(in german)
A member of their local goverment said that they support the racists with their unblocking of the webpages, because of that they are blocking the domains again. I think in a few days the block will be gone again, stupid. Can't they decide ?
Jan
According to Heise it has been reinstalled, but it happened because of NRW government, not because of federal government.
Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz, GG)
Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
1. What they did is TOTALLY stupid : People that really want to access these sites only have to put as nameserver not their provider DNS but ANY DNS ANYWHERE ON INTERNET !
;-)
And all comments I have read there are totally wrong (things with HTTP 1.1) you just change the DNS (resolv.conf or Panel->Network->DNS) and you're ok.
2. It's technically VERY DANGEROUS because it
could come to a name space fragmentation
3. And therefore I wonder if it's legal. Internet is owned by US governement, delegated to ICANN, and creation of toplevel domaine like
www.someaddress.new is forbidden. Chaging DNS information like this censorship is therefore maybe forbidden (we should verify) by ICANN
4. Why is it right ? It's not the same as censorship in China. To those that disagreed :
Germany is a democracy with laws. You are not allowed to deny holocaust in book, in magazines, in the streets and so on. Now, why would it be different on Internet ? Why is it bad for books and good for the net ? Why is it "dangerous" ?
You must either want both to be allowed or none, but we are in Europe and I suppose we want none to be allowed.
Even worse, do you think that killing childrens and putting photographies or MOVIES of that on the Internet is acceptable ?!?!??! Just learn that it's legal (or not prosecuted) in a lot of countries, do you still believe it shouldn't be censored ???
Ok, feel free to comment
The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance.
Blackmarket hosts files! Alright a way to pay my bills even during the tech recession using nothing but my mad Unix skills. Okay who will be the first bidder of the day! :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Well, they are covered, but it doesn't mean that you are protected from the consequences.
No text
Überschreiben das boot sektor.
Only the Germans could be manage to be fascistly anti-fascist.
IIRC, Navajo had no written language, that was one reason why it was chosen. It also had wide variations in pronunciation. The codetalkers used in WW2 were all from one family group/region and so could understand one another. Even Navajos from other regions had difficulty understanding them.
Blog
According to/
http://heise.de/newsticker/data/fr-22.11.01-001
the block is back on.
Looks like today is the day of firm decision...or is it... well maybe... but no, yes it is.
+++ath0
I don't agree. The "News" is evil, carrying stories for the sake of sensationalism rather than for any value to the viewer.
The only time I've ever seen a human beheaded was on the 6pm news. The article was about (one of?) the civil war in Rwanda. There was a mother with a baby in her arms running from "soldiers" of one faction. They caught her, and right there in center frame, pulled out a machete and chopped her head off.
The presentation didn't include any kind of face-fuzzing - there was no attempt to hide the actual act. This was the last time I took any news seriously at all.
Good on China for blocking news sites. Most of what you read is concocted by reporters who do no fact-checking or background research anyway.
Of course, if I lived in China myself, I'd be ignoring everything that their propoganda agencies tried telling me. My vision of the world would be only that which is directly in my own experience. Yes, I would have a very limited understanding of the world "out there" - but honestly, do you think you fare any better when the media in your own country portrays you as dangerous simply because you are intelligent and socially reclusive?
Ask yourself how much value you're really getting from MSNBC. Wouldn't you be better off not having it? You'd have to go do your own research then, rather than just eating up whatever swill you're served on the various news sites.
First of all note that according to this article now the sites are blocked again. So it looks like that there seems to be a need for blocking nazi sites?
Did you ever stumble over such a site by accident? I'm online now for many many years, but even hitting some hard core porn sites by misleading search engines I never hit one of the Nazi sites because I was misled (and since I'm not interested in the rubbish they have there I never visited them on purpose). So if somebody want's to get that "illegal" material he's going for it on purpose and he will surely find another way to get it. So blocking nazi sites is a sort of ostrich policy, don't look at the real problem and pretend that the problem will go away by itself.
From my very own point of view Germany has to deal with the real problem and that is the answer to the question why people should want to access such site. Why are the new nazis attracting some people.
One thing can be that even 56 years after World War II Germany is not able to deal with that dark chapter in its history at school. I remember my own school lessons about history, we were forced to learn everything about Julius Caeser for example, but the whole period between 1900 and now was more or less done in 2 hours. Just like "that was bad" and stop. The kids just don't know what really happened in that time and since nobody is telling them the truth instead of "that's some sort of taboo" they might think that it wasn't that bad. I would really strongly recommend that every kid at school has to see a KZ memorial once in his school life. There are plenty of them existing in Germany and they really give you in impression how bad it was. I recently visited Dachau and I was really feeling sorry that I had to get adult and go there by myself instead of my school taking me there.
On the other hand Germany has to deal with 4 million unemployed people (total population 82 millions) so there is a great chance that you finish school and you get no job. Education at school is focussed on a program that creates workers in a minumim time and there is not much about social competence and human rights and so on. So you have frustrated people that get the message "no future" from the actual job market, they get little supply from the social system and they are poorly educated. Do you really think that those people can resist a "strong leader" that is promising them a sort of future and that is at least dealing with them?
I think that every society or every state can be seen like a sort of organism. At the moment the human organism is attacked by flu viruses and a healthy organism can stand that attack without medication. A weak organism needs medication to survive. And blocking out things instead of "healing" the system looks like a big dosis of medication to me.
There are already several ISPs in Switzerland which do also block websites, either by altering DNS entries, blocking IP numbers at the router level or blocking transparent proxies.
Unfortunately there is not much information in english, but the case has been mentioned in a GILC newsletter (GILC Alert 52, point [7]). The Swiss Internet User Group (SIUG) has some informations, but everything is in german.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/fr-22.11.01-00 1/
We need a different type of routing,
next generation routing that uses a better
method.
Here are some characteristics:
server destinations are presented in a different way:
One that shows you their PHYSICAL location
in world coordinates. That way you can
look at a map and see where the routes are
coming from (a patented tool provided, by me, at a fee)
if a route is changed then you will see it
flicker on a map, that way you will know
where things are coming from.
And then you only accept data from the specific
locations that you request. Anything
else is thrown away. If routes are changed
you know immediately.
How do we do this? We encode somehow on our
pages the same data about the servers
REAL WORLD COORDINATES and if they don't match what the header says, well then just throw that packet away.
Yes, it will involve a significant amount of work on my part to make this happen for me and my friends. We will have this secret network and we won't be bugged by the facists fash-holes that want to rule the world from their desks in a spy agency.
If they don't know that the data is there,
they can't tap it and they can't monitor it.
One other point: send as much data as possible.
That way if they are monitoring you: you over load their systems. The one thing that can never be prevented is stack overloads due to large volumes of data.
Have a nice day.
Here is the law that I go under, forget the rest because you can't remember it all:
Love your neighbor like yourself.
Facism is a fact of life, it is due to insecurity of faithless people. They aren't evil, just weak. so they claim that they want to help and protect. We need them to a point
Facists are mostly people who will understand when things are taken too far. They are community oriented. They want to be able to listen in.
Do you really think that these laws mean anything? They probably don't matter at all because they are most likely unconstitutional. And when they come and get you, call a lawyer and then sue them for false arrest.
You know that draconian wire taping can't work long term on the internet. There is just TOO MUCH data. maybe they will use these tools for going after real criminals, and if so then that is a good thing. Laws are only selectively applied anyway, many are presented merely as a way to get away with something in the short term and the writers of these laws know that they won't hold up in constitutional court.
So. . . if you are a good person who isn't a terrorist, then why worry about government listen if you live in a free society. If you don't live in a free society then why are you on the internet anyway? Go change your government.
I know my government is listening to me. They don't care about me because I'm not doing anything wrong. I agree if you live in a country with a strong tradition of facism, (like Germany) then maybe you should worry.
I don't worry. And if I was worried, I'd be out working for social change in a non-violent way.
Oh, and here is a good suggestion:
instead of hating facists, pray for them.
Things will change, try to grab a hold of the changing net and follow along with it.
---on a side note I have my own website running on port 80 and 81 because I have AT&T cable modem which is STILL blocking port 80! So I am right there with you on using different port numbers.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)