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Argentina Censors Over a Million Blogs
In his first accepted submission, bs0d3 writes "A judge in Argentina ordered ISPs to block two websites — leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com. According to Google, many ISPs have simply blocked the IP 216.239.32.2 instead of using a targeted DNS filter. Over a million blogs are hosted by Blogger at this IP. Freedom of speech advocate Jillian York wrote, 'IP blocking is a blunt method of filtering content that can erase from view large swaths of innocuous sites by virtue of the fact that they are hosted on the same IP address as the site that was intended to be censored. One such example of overblocking by IP address can be found in India, where the IP blocking of a Hindu Unity website (blocked by an order from Mumbai police) resulted in the blocking of several other, unrelated sites."
I'm from argentina. I've lived here all my life and I'm in Buenos Aires as I write this.
If the state is guilty of something regarding internet and new technology here, is barely knowing of its existance. This is not the result of "censorship" as this dumb summary claims.
This is a fuckup, nothing more.
Of course, emos and other trash from Taringa will blow it out of proportion claiming it's wide-spread censorship, and try to politicize the hell out of it.
Yes but it doesn't seem like it was malicious, i.e., they were censored for content. They were censored because the ISPs are fucking retarded. Still worthy of getting angry about, for sure, but it's certainly not the government's fault, and the headline certainly comes across like it's the government doing the censoring.
Of course, if the government is involved for some reason in some shadowy way, then by all means, burn that mother down...
But I heard the government is smart and should be trusted to run everything for me. Clearly no government would ever be involved in something like this.
Um.. censorship is ALWAYS malicious... And the authorities are always willing to sink an entire ship to get one guy.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
This is probably a screw-up more than censorship. Given the popularity of Blogspot, I suspect the people who did this just simply entered in a website, got an IP address, and added an iptables rule or equivalent, without looking or realizing what they were blocking. Hell, that could even be scripted, and I could easily see an intern or low-level staff having just entered "leakymails.blogspot.com" into a script without knowing what happened behind the scenes. I know ISPs hate net neutrality, but it's really not in their best interests to completely cut off access to blogspot.com; even if they have a monopoly they're just going to get flooded with complaints, with real competitive advantage in return to justify the added cost.
Barring a simple but stupid mistake like this from someone routing traffic, IANAL but it should not be the ISP's responsibility to not only screw with people's internet access at the request of the government, but go the extra mile and cut off access to the entire service provider. If we allow that kind of action, then we'll see a whole array of other sites getting blocked at a national level. Then, in an effort to keep themselves accessible around the world, we'll see hosting providers around the world bend over backwards to censor themselves and their users just because somebody, somewhere in the world, might object to some kind of political content one of their users posted.
This makes a good case for IPV6 so every site/device will have their own IP instead of sharing one IP for a million blogs.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Exactly. The whole reason the "Stasi 2.0" filter was blown off in Germany, was because the politicians and lawyers always talked about blocking "domains", and the ISPs knowing that this is technically absurd. There are so many things wrong... tons of false positives, false negatives, extreme bottlenecks since the government is always being cheap, etc, etc, etc.
But IP blocking is still retarded. I know a guy from the UAE, where they have massive China-level blocking and censorship. And everyone there simply has at least one VPN. There are companies specifically providing this.
He has three. US, UK, Germany. And since he pays money for it (about $5/month), the speed is better than what his ISP can provide. So the only difference he ever notices, is a bit of lag. Which means FPS online games with people from e.g. Europe is out of the question (2 seconds ping!). But that's the case when off the VPN too, since it's the filtering servers that cause nearly all of the lag.
Seriously, the ONLY way to effectively censor things, is a WHITElist. NOT a blacklist. And even that only works when there is no corruption, no people living close to each other with WLAN, nobody putting a large dish under his roof that goes to another dish outside the country (something that was normal for getting TV in the GDR), and no server in your whitelist being compromised or also not actually liking you.
Which, in practice, are more than delusional expectations.
So I don't see anything from
A) brainwashing people with social engineering to want to act like you want them to act, or
B) a 1984-like totalitarian control on the level of "chip in your head"
ever working.
And A is way more likely than B, since it's already successfully proven to work with hundreds of years of experience all over the world. (Hell, it's the whole damn purpose of lobbying, churches, politics, marketing and intelligence agencies' "public relations" sections, etc, etc, etc.)
Indeed, it's one of the strengths of Blogger/blogspot that it's all-for-one-and-one-for-all.
On censorship, I'd rather rely on Google than my government. So far.
If you're outside Argentina, go see for yourself: http://leakymails.com
If you're in Argentina, here are the official mirrors:
http://leakymails.tk
http://leakymails1.tk
http://leakymails2.tk
http://justiciainutil.tk
Here's an article about LeakyMails: Argentina: Judge orders all ISPs to block the sites LeakyMails.com and Leakymails.blogspot.com
The use of the past tense is strange. Leakymails seems very much alive.
A judge in Argentina ordered ISPs to block two websites -- leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com. According to Google, many ISPs have simply blocked the IP 216.239.32.2 instead of using a targeted DNS filter.
"Argentina" didn't do anything. The government didn't pass a law. A judge ordered two URLs to be blocked.
Idiot ISPs blocked an IP address that led to a million blogs.
The title should read: Inept Argentinian ISPs Block a Million Blogs Rather Than Blocking Two URLs to Satisfy Court Ruling
They were censored because the ISPs are fucking retarded.
You wouldn't say that had you ever worked as a network engineer at a large ISP.
First, you'd have to route IP packets for the impacted address to an internal filtering machine. What filtering machine? Well, that's a rub too... you'd have to build one and while it's possible with open source, it isn't easy or particularly cheap.
Then once you've "transparently proxied" the HTTP requests you want to block, you have to somehow send those packets merrily on their way... except the route for that IP address leads back to you. So, you have to tunnel it out to an system beyond your routing domain. Which means you'll need to NAT the source for anything that isn't outright proxied. That's more money.
And then you have to very strongly log the proxied and/or NATed packets because any abuse is going to lead back to your filter machine instead of back to the customer and when the policia come knocking, by God they're going to want to know who did it and they're not going to accept the answer that the Judge-ordered filtering obscured the activity near the site ordered filtered.
The ISPs aren't retarded here. The judge ordering an ISP to filter on a criteria ISPs aren't equipped to filter on is the retarded one.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Never attribute to malice, what you can attribute to stupidity.
Someone must've honestly thought that one IP = one site. One can only wonder how someone that stupid can work on ISP networking.
The government didn't censor the other blogs, though, the stupid ISP did when they put up the blanket filter that blocks a million websites in order to comply with an order to block two. That being said, the courts didn't say block a million blogs, they said block two blogs. The only people censoring the other 999,998+ blogs are the ISPs, not the government, and the government never told them to block those blogs, either. They're not even censoring those 999,998 blogs for content reasons, obviously. Those 2 blogs that are being censored are a different matter.
I'm not arguing for censorship. I'm not even really talking about censorship at all...my original post was in response to someone saying that the headline was accurate, i.e., the Argentinian Government is censoring a million blogs. That's not true at all, that's a headline being spun to make it look like Argentina is pulling an Egypt or something. Censorship is always wrong, but the AG didn't censor a million blogs, and I'm not arguing about censorship at all, Argentina's really fucked up, ok, I get that. I'm arguing that the headline to this story is fucking retarded and sensationalist. It should read "Argentina judge orders two blogs censored, ISPs censor a million" not "Argentina Censors Over a Million Blogs" You can see the difference, right? Unless, of course, the ISPs are government run. TFA certainly doesn't make it seem like they are.
Or a crafty way to let make the whole country aware of the censorship.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I guess it's up for debate whether censorship is always reprehensible or not
Censorship is always reprehensible. Taking legal action against an entity for publishing stolen personal correspondence is not censorship.
(I haven't read the article, I don't know what Leakymails has published, etc. I'm simply making a point based strictly upon parent.)
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/argentina-isps-ip-overblocking
The past 8 years on Argentina have been strange, to put it mildly. I've never seen people so polarized about the current administration (and the previous one, which was the current Presidents' husband) in my life. Roughly 50% will approve anything the government does, while the rest will not hesitate to note that we have a very poorly managed economy, the second highest inflation rate in the world, weakened institutions and a new case of official corruption coming to light every other week.
This blockade was due to a court ruling regarding a site called LeakyMails, which supposedly posted hacked mails between government officials. These weren't exactly flattering, to put it mildly. I honestly don't know about the legality of such mails going public (i beleive that all communications between public employees regarding their work should be available to the citizenship), but this is another misstep on an long list of poor decisions. Very poor ones.
For example, the official crusade against "opposing" media is way worse than this - one of Argentinas' main media conglomerates had, over the course of two years:
- One of its main distribution plants for newspaper blocked by trucks affiliated with the transport union (CGT),
- One of its main directives harassed for several years under accusations of having its sons being illegally adopted during the last military dictatorship in the 70s. Not a single shred of evidence was ever presented for this, other than suspicious timings- Recent DNA analysis has proven this to be false.
- An official ruling which impossibilited the sale of one of their newspapers in the Central Market of Buenos Aires,
- Revoked its contract to televise soccer matches, which is now handled directly by the government which pays an astronomic cost each year with taxpayers money.
- A new media law passed with shady articles, tailored specifically to hurt this conglomerate. Several of them are currently in hold after being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
We're living some crazy times down here. The Leakymails fiasco is yet another item in a very long list of poor decisions taken by a government which i feel it will remembered as one of the worse we ever had in a couple of years.