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The Coming Censorship Wars
KentuckyFC writes "Many countries censor internet traffic using techniques such as blocking IP addresses, filtering traffic with certain URLs in the data packets and prefix hijacking. Others allow wiretapping of international traffic with few if any legal safeguards. There are growing fears that these practices could trigger a major international incident should international
traffic routed through these countries fall victim, whether deliberately or by accident (witness the prefix hijacking of YouTube in Pakistan last year). So how to avoid these places? A group of computer scientists investigating this problem say it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to determine which countries traffic might pass through. But their initial assessment indicates that the countries with the most pervasive censorship policies — China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — pose a minimal threat because so little international traffic passes their way. The researchers instead point the finger at western countries that have active censorship policies and carry large amounts of international traffic. They highlight the roles of the two biggest carriers: Great Britain, which actively censors internet traffic, and the US, which allows warrantless wiretapping of international traffic (abstract)."
In few years the Internet as we knew it will become a Frankennet made of closed bubbles that will talk each other only through heavily filtered pipes. Every nation will spy on its own citizen and impose filters to limit or stop connectivity when necessary.
Freedom of communication is simply a too dangerous weapon to be left in the hands of common people.
AFAIK, this process already started a few years ago.
I'm kind of on the fence about my country's censorship (The UK, that is). As far as I know, it's only child porn that is actively censored, and whilst I don't mind it being censored due to what it is, it does spark the question "Where will it stop?"
The other problem is that they don't censor everything else that's illegal - so should they continue to censor child porn and nothing else, or censor everything illegal? Or abandon all censorship? It's a tricky conundrum once it starts to involve the law :/
I'm not sure who we are talking about. Who is it that needs to avoid countries actively censoring?
Considering the countries actively censoring or monitoring I'm aware of are: USA, UK, Germany, France, Belgium, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Austria, Australia, China, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. I'm sure there also many more.
Are we talking about Latvia trying to route to Luxembourg here? Who?
Surely... The sane thing to do is to actually stand up and stop governments censoring and monitoring, rather than talk about some small country re-routing to another. Look at the list above, that's probably 75% of the internet there (I'm guessing that figure).
Re-routing is a sin of commission. Lets actually fix the fucking problem, rather than step over it. Our Governments do not represent us any more. Get them out of office. Make your voices heard, while you still actually have them.
Or are you just going to sit there and take it? The time to act is now, not soon, nor when it gets really bad.
Except that in real life the world isn't binary, my friends.
Maybe it is all binary -- just a lot of bits.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
None of the countries who censor the internet are ever portrayed as "free". Though the governments of those countries claim that they are free, even the media and the average Joe know that they are not free. On the the other hand, all the western civilizations try to claim that they are the most free nation on the face of the earth. Ever. And the mainstream media buys into that, all the while they are doing things that if they were taking place in another country would make that country seem more "non-free" by the media.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There are growing fears that these practices could trigger a major international incident
Just wait until the print newspapers are gone. When the only source of news is via the internet...
In the end, anyone with an IP address can act as a host or relay. If something wants to get through, it will.
There was an advantage to the uucp forwarding network, in that routing could be managed and the number of possible paths was immense. Anyone with a basic PC and a modem could install Waffle and become a uucp node. For two years when the wall was still up, I had an ongoing conversation with a mathematician/cryptographer in Minsk (no Tom Lear jokes, please). I was always concerned that the Soviets would find him out, but he never shared my concern. Messages between us usually took more than twenty hops, one of which was a diskette hand-carried between East and West Berlin.
A little-known fact is that the fall of the Soviet Union was in part coordinated via email carried on uucp and fidoNet. Mainly this was because these networks ran "below the radar", from one phone to another and could change their locations at will. There also was an advantage in these networks' use of Zmodem for exchange. Zmodem's error correction, rate adjustment and pig-headed retry made sure the message got through in spite of the really poor state of Soviet phone service.
The Internet's biggest weakness right now is that most of the traffic ends up on a small number of backbones. The only thing standing between the current tree-structured internet and a true network is incentive. Censorship would probably stimulate a change in topology.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Well you might go back to Lincoln or a bit later to the national fireamrs in the 1930's act or the 1968 gun control act or the 1986 out ban on new NFA registries or the go back to the era of the NFA and the tax on hemp which became a ban because you can't pay the tax.
Governments are made of two kinds of people, those that really serve the people and those that serve the system. Those that serve the system end up running it. That's Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view408.html#Iron
You can't change it, you can't steer it with any precision and you can't make it go away easily.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Not that I agree with the other side of the argument, but there have been US cases where money (or other asset) was the defendant.
It's really weird.
Do you really think that in government (at least above the local level) there are some that mostly want to serve the people?
To quote Lazarus Long
Political tags-such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth-are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those want people controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
They have a blacklist and are running a 'trial' to determine the effectiveness of a proposed censorship system. Only a couple of ISPs are involved in the trial at this point.
The trial run was an election promise to get a daft politician on side for one of the parties for some key issues.
A popular running theory is that the list was intentionally leaked and the censorship so poorly implemented that the trial process is set up to fail and make it appear that it failed on its own merits.
in Australia it's even worse. child pornography is a 15 year old girl recording herself nude on her mobile phone and then sending the video to her boyfriend in his 15th birthday. it doesnt matter that both parties are under 18 and both are consensual, the girl could be charged with making and distributing child porn and the guy for possession of child porn.
triple j (an Australian government funded radio station) had a segment late last year where they interviewed a bunch of school students and asked them about this. a large number of them admitted they'd been involved in such acts in the past and had no idea it was even illegal.
it's a perfect example that there is way too much focus on how the law is written instead of what it is supposed to achieve
TIAEAE!