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A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany
Several readers including erlehmann and tmk wrote to inform us about the dawning of Internet censorship in Germany under the usual guise of protecting the children. "This week, the two big political parties ruling Germany in a coalition held the final talks on their proposed Internet censorship scheme. DNS queries for sites on a list will be given fake answers that lead to a page with a stop sign. The list itself is maintained by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt). A protest movement has formed over the course of the last several months, and over 130K citizens have signed a petition protesting the law. Despite this, and despite criticism from all sides, the two parties sped up the process for the law to be signed on Thursday, June 18, 2009."
Not that easy circumvention of a bad law makes it okay, but as a practical measure wouldn't it be easy to just use a DNS server in a different country? Or is Germany planning on firewalling all DNS queries except those from 'official' servers?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Or browse like the Iranians. There's currently a pretty decent number of people helping set up proxies around the world for use in Iran. Austin Heap managed to setup some VPN servers on gigabit-ethernet.
I'm working on a Virtual Appliance that runs Squid, Tor, Polipo+Tor, ziproxy & ssh for use by people who don't quite know how to setup squid for themselves or want to sandbox it.
I don't believe its at all the will of the people, on this one.
its a power grab for the gov, plain and simple.
germans tend to be technical, detail oriented and saavy and there is no way I can believe the population would WANT this.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Do you really think that the government doesn't know about other DNS servers?
Yes, after some TV magazine report, I know that they don't think that far.
Blocking people from getting there is not the point. Intimidation, and getting the people used to this kind of government, is the real point.
Besides: Who stops you from using another port, and encrypting the data trough a VPN? Hell, my router can do that. Trough a simple web-interface. I don't need to change anything on my pc. It's done in 5 minutes. Now if you offer me an offshore DNS server with a VPN, a good connection, and just the price of keeping it running, you will have a client. (Those free ones are too slow, and the others that you buy are way too expensive, because they want to profit big time from it.)
I smell a nice non-profit business model here. Especially since half the world can be your clients.
As long as they don't go to war against our small island full of servers, and as long as they do still allow data into the net, we can circumvent their censorship. And offer the whole world to do so too, in one click (insert USB stick, run autostart, click OK, done).
I wonder how one could protect those servers better, even in case of attacks? :D
Hey, I know it: Infect the censorship servers *themselves*!
Who wants to apply for a well-payed job in this emerging censorship-server-market? :)
If we storm them, all of us will pretty much be moles. Meaning we can perfectly disable the censorship proxies/routers for users with our special client patch.
My god, and they thought they could stop *us all*. They can't even stop me alone.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.