Finnish Censorship Expanding

Thomas Nybergh lets us know about the secret list maintained by the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, containing an estimated 1,700 foreign "child pornography'" sites. These are mostly in the US and the EU, and certainly not all of them contain child porn or even links to it. Finnish ISPs are required by law to block access to sites on the list, according to The Register. Finland's EFF has information about the block list, which reportedly includes a musical instrument store, a doll store, and a site of Windows tips in Thai. Recently added to the list — which by law should contain only child pornography sites — is the text-only site of a Finnish free-speech advocate who criticizes the censorship law. Evading the ISPs' block is trivial, of course.

Comments

Re:Not "required" by the law

[catmistake]

I'm way way way off topic here, but all I know about the Finns is that their language is beautiful. I do not know this from personal experience but from a biography I read about my favorite author as a child. J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist and studied many languages, and claimed that, by far, the Finnish language (is it called Finnish?) was the most beautiful human language there was (what about French you ask? Tolkien hated French, called it barbaric). Also, again off topic (but getting closer) its been theorized that he stole ancient Finnish mythology and redressed it as The Lord of the Rings (Gandalf is a Merlin-type wizardish archetype from this mythology??). Apparently, we would all be aware of and well versed in this ancient Finnish mythology, but, presumably, its all been censored (and were back on topic).