W3C.org Briefly Censored In Finland

k33l0r writes "The web site of W3C, w3.org or w3c.org, was briefly censored (Google Translation) by at least some of the local ISPs. For an unknown reason the URL was mistakenly entered into the Federal Police's censor database. Some of the Finnish ISPs use the database to filter out questionable content such as child pornography." Finnish online activist Matti Nikki describes some of the problems with this database-based censorship.

Comments

Easy to circumvent:

[WTF Chuck]

Effi: Finnish police censors a critic of censorship

This shows that they are using DNS based filtering. Very easy to get around, run your own DNS servers and bypass your ISP's DNS servers alltogether.

Human translation

[plj]

Sorry for the bad quality, it is 5 AM in Finland, and I'm very tired. But I bet I can still beat Google's translation service.

W3C's site on Finnish censorship list

(Updated on 27/9/08 at 19:31: DNA wasn't the only operator affected by the censorship.)

Customers of telecom operator DNA were unable to access the web server of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organisation developing web standards, on Friday evening and early Saturday, because the address of the site had erroneously became included on the censorship list of National Bureau of Investigation.

Many readers of Tietokone magazine informed us late Friday evening and early Saturday that a police information page was opened instead of www.w3.org. The information page says that the target page includes child pornography. The problem was fixed on early Saturday, and currently DNA's customers should be able to access W3C's site normally.

Different operators use the same filtering list provided by the NBI, but different operators may fetch the updated list at different times.

Internet activist Matti Nikki also describes of these observations on his lapsiporno.info -site (lapsiporno == child pornography), which still cannot be accessed by those operators' connections that use the filtering list. (Translator's note: using the list is not mandatory for operators.)

Operators have kept filtering webpages by domain, even though this is not the first time the practice has caused ambiguousness in censorship.

NBI and operators assured last spring, that ambiguous domain-based filtering can be replaced by URL-based filtering, but implementation of this change has been delayed. Many operators have also announced that they will make the filtering voluntary to their customers due to technical problems and negative publicity.

Censorship list in the hands of the NBI

Internet operators gave an estimate for Tietokone magazine last spring, that implementing a precise URL-based filtering system will cost millions of euros. Present domain-based filtering methods are based on domain name redirects or so-called mandatory proxies, i.e. transparent proxies.

Public relationship officer of DNA, Sinikka Veneranta, says that the police removes and adds addresses to the list as they see best, and the operator does no processing for the addresses on the list by itself.

But there are still differences in the time how quickly the addresses on the list will end up in systems of different operators. W3C's address is known to have been end up also to the systems of Mikkeli Telecom Co-operative (MPY).