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Germany Institutes Censorship Infrastructure

Posted by samzenpus on from the not-for-your-eyes dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Germany's government has passed a draft law for censorship of domains hosting content related to child pornography. A secret list of IPs will be created by the BKA, Germany's federal police; any attempted access to addresses on this list is blocked, logged (the draft seems to contradict press reports on this point) and redirected to a government page featuring a large stop sign. The law has not yet passed the assembly, however five of the largest ISPs have already agreed to voluntarily submit to the process even without a law in place. Critics argue that with the censorship infrastructure in place, the barrier for blocking access for various other reasons is very low. The fact that the current block can easily be circumvented may lead to more effective technologies to be used in the future. There are general elections as well as elections in several of the states later this year."

5 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Inc. China by Manip · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Step 1) Child Porn
    2) Other "Offensive" Material (e.g. Nazi Material)
    3) ???
    4) Welcome to the great firewall

    1. Re:Inc. China by spankyofoz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But look at what ended up on our blacklist here in Australia (it's also on wikileaks). It too was set up to counter the scourge of child porn.

      But we ended up with blocked sites containing
      euthanasia
      abortion
      malware
      online gambling

      It's not much of a stretch to see other politically sensitive topics being blocked.

      --

      - There is no point, it's like a sphere -
    2. Re:Inc. China by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      it hasn't been extended in any degree to include anything other than what has been deemed as child porn.

      It's impossible to know that.

  2. Re:RickRoll Germany by EdIII · · Score: 5, Funny

    huge percentage of Germans will be found out as perverts.

    huge percentage of German will be confirmed to be perverts.

    There fixed it for you.

    I'm not trolling here either :) German porn is legendary . Can make you hard and sick at the same time :)

  3. Miserable failure in Finland by grimJester · · Score: 5, Informative

    Assuming the site still exists, here's a site explaining what's wrong with the finnish version of this list. I can't check the link for reasons that should be obvious.

    Short list of problems:
    - 98+% false positives, including the top 7 or 8 google hits for "gay porn"
    - Majority of sites are in the EU or US, yet the sites are still up
    - The law only allows non-finnish sites to be on that list, yet a finnish site critical of the list is blocked.