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A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany

Posted by kdawson on from the sun-going-down dept.

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."

23 of 420 comments (clear)

  1. I know the feeling. by cyborch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We've had that in Denmark for years now. OpenDNS should be the solution to all of your problems...

    1. Re:I know the feeling. by ae1294 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We've had that in Denmark for years now. OpenDNS should be the solution to all of your problems...

      Do you really think that the government doesn't know about other DNS servers? I assure you there is some sort of plan and reason why they have not asked the ISP's to block or MASQ any request with a destination of 53.

      My simple guess is any request with a destination of 53 is logged and then resolved at some later time. A database of people who use these other servers is maintained and flags are included such as "pedophile, hacker, warez, terrorist, etc". This list then is used to help law enforcement and or they will just come and round all of you up one day.

      What's going to end up happening is someone is going to have to run a hacked all the hell bind server that takes encrypted requests on port 80 and replies back with your request which will then need to be cached locally so as not to totally hose your browsing. Then the government is going to start banning those server's IP addresses and someone is going to have to make a DNS resolver that runs in a distributed manner. Then the government will do something else, probably make it a huge crime to use any of this stuff and we will all be basically where we are now with copyright infringement which is to say that people don't respect that law and so all law becomes less respected. This is all the same as what happened in the 1930's US Prohibition of booze.

      "All of this has happened before, and it will happen again..."

    2. Re:I know the feeling. by an+unsound+mind · · Score: 5, Funny

      In Nazi Germany... wait, that isn't funny.

    3. Re:I know the feeling. by Hurricane78 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?
      Hey, I know it: Infect the censorship servers *themselves*! :D

      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.
    4. Re:I know the feeling. by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Informative

      I don't know if you consider the UK a functioning democracy, but recently they rounded up a group of hippies on the grounds that they might be thinking about causing disruption at a power station.

      They were then released on bail, the conditions of which were that they weren't allowed to be hippies, weren't allowed to be against power stations, and weren't allowed to talk to anyone who was either a hippy or against power stations. More or less it amounts to house arrest. Without any form of trial or due process.

      Note: I don't agree with the aforementioned hippies policy wise. But when they came for the hippies, I didn't speak out...

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Geez! by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Man, those Germans are worse than Nazis.

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  3. alternative dns servers; by miruku · · Score: 5, Informative

    https://www.opendns.com/

    http://www.dnsserverlist.org/

    --
    MilkMiruku
    1. Re:alternative dns servers; by sakdoctor · · Score: 5, Informative

      apt-get install bind9
      127.0.0.1 top of resolv.conf

      Any slashdot discussion about DNS will imminently fill up with hundreds of recommendations for opendns.com ...which is fine, but also a bit puzzling.
      Don't most of us have at least one linux machine somewhere, where you can put a caching nameserver, then point any windows machines on the LAN to that.

    2. Re:alternative dns servers; by BenoitRen · · Score: 5, Informative

      Any slashdot discussion about DNS will imminently fill up with hundreds of recommendations for opendns.com ...which is fine

      No, it's not fine to recommend OpenDNS.

  4. Gigaton Fail - by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Looks like it's time for Germans to learn how to browse like the Chinese; Encryption, proxies, darknets, deep web crawling, and leaving as few traces behind as possible.

    For whatever naive reason I allowed myself to assume that Western Europe had finally begun to understand that police states are regressive and undesirable. Each passing day, it becomes clearer and clearer that realization has still yet to be made.

    1. Re:Gigaton Fail - by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Gigaton Fail - by MrEricSir · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's not what the Ministry of Truth told me.

      --
      There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
    3. Re:Gigaton Fail - by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Imagine if every single person in Iran thought that before they went outside.

      I'm just a white collar guy that works 9-5. People asked for proxy servers. People wanted help setting up proxy servers. I did what I could.

      I should have just watched American Idol.

  5. Easily circumvented? by JesseL · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!"
  6. Mein Herr! by BigBlueOx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Before you get on ze net, ve neet to zee your papers. Your papers, bitte.

    First, switch to Open DNS, second, vote the bastards out. Keep voting the bastards out until you get your bastards in there.

    1. Re:Mein Herr! by nausea_malvarma · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What happens when the ballot looks like this:

      Please select the candidate of your choice

      • Bastard 1
      • Bastard 2
      • Bastard 3
  7. Holy shit! by jockeys · · Score: 5, Funny

    This thread is Godwin-proof!

    Think about it:
    1. it's a story about government censorship (with all the usual iron-fisted delicacy wielded by big-government)
    2. it's a process that is completely non-transparent, and creates a sort of internet-secret-police
    3. it's happening in Germany

    It's the perfect storm of internet flamewars, completely immune to Godwin's Lawn!

    --

    In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
  8. Old news for Finland, too by wolfie123 · · Score: 5, Informative

    We've had this in Finland for a while now, too. See http://lapsiporno.info/english-2008-02-15.html for internet activist Matti Nikki's fight against the debated censorship. OpenDNS is the de facto way to circumvent this censor list. Ironically, his site is blocked by the child porn list by our Keskusrikospoliisi (federal police).

    --
    I am convinced that I can always be convinced otherwise.
  9. Re:Before we use the 'police state' meme again... by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  10. Re:Before we use the 'police state' meme again... by Repossessed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Censorship is *always* backed by the majority. Doesn't keep it from being a violation of human rights.

    --
    Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
  11. Re:Before we use the 'police state' meme again... by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, that is exactly what Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill warned about when they talked about the "Tyranny of the majority."

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  12. Re:Before we use the 'police state' meme again... by 0123456 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Read TFA. This is not a 'police state' in the forming.

    Indeed not. When the police can decide what you are and aren't allowed to access on the Internet, the police state is already here.

  13. The real discouraging thing by Xelios · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The real discouraging thing here isn't the law itself (though that'd be enough in and of itself), it's the fact that despite criticism from all sides, a huge petition, thousands of people writing their elected officials and several protests outside government buildings the law is still being passed. Hell I've even seen stickers protesting the proposed law at bus stops and train stations. The "Zensursula" stickers are everywhere around here. When your government flat out ignores these things what's left to do? Wait for the next election, elect some other party into the majority and hope they actually behave differently? Just seems like every year things get worse, no matter who's in office.

    One other fun fact, the ruling parties (the CDU and SPD) have already mentioned using this blacklist for other things too, mainly gambling sites, Islamic sites and "Killerspiele" (sites that contain or promote violent games).

    It all brings to mind that South Park baseball episode where Randy gets arrested, with one small difference, "Oh I'm sorry I thought this was a democracy".

    --
    Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.