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Hundreds of Sites Blocked By Canadian ISP
An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot reported on the blockage
of a union website by Telus, a leading Canadian ISP. Since
that story, the company has restored access but the fallout
continues. The move may lead to new
ISP regulations in Canada and a study
by the OpenNet Initiative has found that by blocking the union
site, Telus also blocked an additional 766 websites including a breast
cancer fundraising site." From the article: "While there are a number of different ways to block access to Web
sites, the method Telus chose to block the Voices for Change site --
blocking its IP address -- produced massive collateral filtering.
Filtering by IP address is efficient since ISPs can quickly and
effectively block access to the target site using their existing routing
technology. Many ISPs already block certain IP addresses to combat
spam and viruses. Large networks, like Telus, have mechanisms in
place to block IP addresses almost instantaneously, simply by
updating their routers with a "block list" of addresses.
However, it is common for many different, unrelated Web sites to
share the same IP address."
but expect to be sued for providing access to childporn, illegal software, coprighted material, terrorist training manuals, political sites, communists, bomb making equipment
slippery slope egh ? see you in the next RIAA lawsuit !!
From The OpenNet Initiative PDF:Clearly, Telus violated the Canadian Telecommunications Act by their heavy-handed disconnection of www.voices-for-change.com. This alone should be grounds for revocation of their license, but the incidental blocking of an additional 766 unrelated websites is even more reprehensible than their intended censorship.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The ISP was pretty much forced to take down the block because of public outcry. No one wants to do business with an ISP that does things like that. With regulation the Canadian government has two options:
a) Force them to let everything through, but this means they can't block virus speading sites, etc
b) Only allow them to block what the regulators seem fit. Which puts what you see and can't see into the hands of beurocrats. This would cover all ISPs in Canada so you can't switch to one that does block stuff you want it to (Porn if you have little kids, etc.)
I personally prefer to let people hurt them in the wallet when they pull crap like this. Corporations take more notice when something hurts them in the wallet.
Collateral damage happens, like it or not.
No, it doesn't. Collateral damage happens when the sysadmin is question is lazy and/or ignorant. It would have been easy to block access to only www.voices-for-change.com, and no others, but instead they chose to block the entire IP address. Either they wanted to pass the blockage off as an accidental outage (and failed) or the sysadmin just couldn't be bothered to do the extra work, and just blocked an entire IP in the router. Either way, it's despicable.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
If you are working with large-scale routing you aren't going to do application-layer filtering unless you have to. They didn't have to until this incident so the infrastructure (and it does require a massive one, transparent proxies for all their bandwidth) wasn't in place. Therefore, a quick instruction to the Cisco BFRs and no more website, based on IP.
It's unfortunate that the virtual hosting got nailed by it but if their decision (a bad one, the PR in Canada right now is horrible) was to block it, that was the only way to implement it.
Telus is a company that holds itself out to the public. They had no right to block information that was discerning to their own viewpoints (something we agree on). So if they didn't have a right to block the union website, how does "some poor cancer website" constitute as just collateral damage? This is not war, this is a company stepping over the boundaries of its regulatory regime. Maybe I just see it differently than you.
And what of the poor terrorists who are incidentally paying for the bandwidth too ? I am not trolling or flamebaiting -- all I am saying is that censorship is not a part of a free society -- disagreement is.
Collateral damage is, what it is: Damage. And as such it should be handled. If you damage something, it's YOUR fault. End of story.
I have long argued that the internet access business has needed regulations that govern Quality of Service, Code of Conduct and a Consumer's Bill of Rights.
The behaviour of Telus is outrageous and is probably a VERY SMALL tip on a MASSIVE iceberg.
As more and more services fight for consumer's internet pipe they should have protection against bad service and questionable tactics.
Ok fine it is a stupid move to have an ISP block access to any website and it should not be done... But the striking telus workers are just as much to blame. Those striking goons have been going about cutting fiber lines... Not to mention they have been asking people to pretty much DOS telus call centers with fake problems.
PS: The website was blocked after Telus found that their striking workers where taking pictures of employees who were crossing the picket line for the purpose of later harrasing those said employees. In my opinion both parties are equally at fault for the nice mess they cooked up.
The voices-for-change website was being put all over the news and the radio, saying GO AND SEE PICS OF THE SCABS AT www.voices-for-change.com
The voices for change website was publicly posting pictures of telus employees, management and Union employees that crossed the picket lines, putting their saftey at risk. If you have not noticed, the union in BC can be pretty militant, so yes Telus Banned access to the website until they were able to get a court order to have the website admin remove the pictures, once Telus had this court order, they returned access to the website.
so some can argue that they did it `so that the word of the union cant get out`, but Telus does actually care about their employees, so they shut it down for that reason, for the saftey of their employees, until they were able to take legal action that came to the same result.
Five continents: America, Eurasia, Africa, Oceania, Antarctica.
America has three subcontinents: North -, South -, and Central America.
North and South America aren't separated by sea, only by an ARTIFICIAL cannal in Panama.
Eurasia has subcontinents: Europe and Asia.
Asia is not considered a subcontinent as a matter of fact, being "the central and eastern part of the continent of Eurasia, defined by subtracting the European peninsula from Eurasia", according to wikipedia; it's further subdivided in various regions: North Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Southwest Asia.
Back to America, WP says: "The Americas refers collectively to North, Central and South America. The term is a relatively recent and less ambiguous alternative to the name America, which may refer to either the Americas or the USA. The former usage is now often considered archaic in English, but still in use in other languages, where the Americas is often considered to form a single continent. The use of the term America for the United States of America in English and colloquially in other languages is seen by some as politically incorrect (it may be seen as cultural imperialism). Strictly speaking, it is also illogical (for example, it would place South America outside America). Although the context usually makes clear which 'America' is meant, this led to the emergence of the term Americas to take away the ambiguity (in English), if not the illogicality."
Because I consider myself an inhabitant of America, even if I am not a citizen of the US, in Portuguese, I refer to the continent as "América" and to the country as "Estados Unidos" (and its citizens as "Estado-unidenses") and, in English, the continent as America, the country as "the United States" or "USofA", and the citizens "US citizens" if formal and "USofAns" if informal.
You can say all you want that "it won't change a few hundred years of established usage in the English language", but IMHO you are really talking about en_US, not about the other kinds of English. I believe British People refer to the country as "the United States", also.
Feel free to ignore me.
MODERATORS: *Please*, feel free to ignore me.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
No no no, the IP address was blocked. That's why over 700 other sites were unavailable to Telus customers as well -- making Telus look really foolish and incompetent.
But maybe there is another angle here: the staff on strike may have been able to point out the (purely technical) foolishness of blocking an IP address, while the current replacement staff knows only little.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Buddy, I wholly agree that the website was condemnable. No argument there whatsoever. There may even be grounds for prosecuting the person who posted the pictures, or the web site operator himself.
That's all beside the point.
Access to that which is legal must be made available. It is not Telus' role to act as judge and jury.
There is simply no other practical option.
As an aside:
Telus did not stop access to the site. It simply made it damn difficult for me, having paid them to provide me access to all that is legal on the internet, to view some 700-odd websites for a week.
They broke the contract I believe I have with them (and as a very, very earlier subscriber, I rather suspect the contract I signed did not contain weaselwords about that which they think they should stop me from seeing).
I am pissed, and I want them slapped for it. I phoned the Executive Offices and chewed the ass out of someone there, I phoned the Telus PR guy, I phoned a few other Telus numbers, I emailed the CRTC, I emailed executive directors, and I finally got around to cancelling some services I've not found worthwhile. And if there's a C.A. lawsuit, I'm in like Flynn.
There needs to be such a severe backlash from this stupid, stupid move on their part that no ISP in the Western world dares be so stupid again.
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