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Australian Networks Block Community University Website
Peter Eckersley writes "At the EFF we were recently contacted by the organisers of the Melbourne Free University (MFU), an Australian community education group, whose website had been unreachable from a number of Australian ISPs since the 4th of April. It turns out that the IP address of MFU's virtual host has been black-holed by several Australian networks; there is suggestive but not conclusive evidence that this is a result of some sort of government request or order. It is possible that MFU and 1200 other sites that use that IP address are the victims of a block that was put in place for some other reason. Further technical analysis and commentary is in our blog post."
Next will be political web sites. What government wouldn't exercise the power to remove a critical opposition web site from the internet just before an election?
A site is blocked by various ISPs. Nobody knows for sure why. Some would like to pose the situation as a government conspiracy, or at least an example of why new regulations requiring ISPs to block certain sites is bad.
No one really knows what's going on, least of all the author. There's lots of hand waving and half hearted finger pointing.
Rabble unite?
Sadly, it doesn't even need to be maliciously abused ... just incompetently written and ineptly applied.
Like all laws applying to technology, the people writing them are usually incapable of understanding all of the side effects. So they get passed, and applied as written, which has the unfortunate effect of breaking lots of legitimate things.
If there's 1200 sites sharing that IP address, but they block all of them based on a single complaint, these fall into the category of collateral damage.
Sadly, I'm betting someone made an effort to point this potential out to them and got ignored.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hmmm... which is more likely? An utterly inoffensive group providing free education materials on the internet is the victim of a shadowy government conspiracy, or that one of the 1,200 other sites on the same IP did something sufficiently stupid as to attract govt. attention.
I know that the summary and the article both mention that the latter is a possibility, but the headline, summary, and article, are all written as if the most likely possibility was that MFU was targeted directly.
I suspect that the ISP got a request from somebody about one of the hosted sites doing something very naughty, and the person who's job it was to pay attention to such requests didn't get them or ignored them, so an IP block was the next step.
I love the assumption that the whole world has a DMCA just because you do...
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
With the US exporting these laws and forcing trade partners to adopt them it's getting there.
This was exported to Australia years ago. America has been doing this for some time, and with lots of other countries, essentially over-riding the citizens in favor of their interests.
Do you even pay attention to the stories around here?
I guess a major part of the problem might be, that there is no penalty for blocking too much. If there is a penalty for blocking too little but none for blocking too much, then there is little incentive to do accurate filtering. A discussion about whether blocking would have been appropriate in this case, had it been more accurately targeted, seems pointless, since we don't even know what content triggered the blocking. And that may actually be the largest problem with this sort of blocking.
Some do see it as a benefit though. How often have some country blocked the worlds largest sites on the excuse that one page on each site is offending their religion. The more coarse grained your filtering is, the easier it is to conceal what you were really aiming to censor and the easier it is to find a plausible excuse for applying the filter in the first place. A civilized country shouldn't accept censorship, and especially not when it comes with such collateral damage. I don't believe there exist a problem in this world, for which censorship is the best solution.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Hi. Stephen Conroy here. Labor party member. You morons need to know that when we, the government, block sites, its for your own good. Sure, we don't tell you about it, and we've probably blocked things like a dentists website, but really, what about the children?
Australian checking in. Yes, they raid our universities to find kids breaching copyright, so we have US DMCA influence. What better way to deal with crime than to make studying even more difficult to afford...
Actually, it more-or-less does, at least in where Title 1 is concerned. The DMCA itsself is just the US's implementation of requirements agreed to internationally in a 1996 WIPO treaty, in which signatories agreed to pass laws criminalising circumvention of copyright protection technology. Similar laws exist in Europe (Via national implementations of the European Union Copyright Directive), Canada, Australia, and much of the rest of the world. WIPO is a big organisation.
The notice-and-takedown provisions (Title 2) were not, AFAIK, required by any WIPO agreement and as such are not so universal outside of the US.
They are present in the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, Article 17.11. Curious how much of that document is about restrictions and not freedom.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Completely off-topic question regarding your sig:
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Did you ever solve your mousey dilemma? If not, Bluetooth v2.1 solves it by default (if you're careful about avoiding interception during the pairing process.) The bigger question is how you determine which version of Bluetooth stack a vendor's mouse supports?
John
yes, there is. the ACMA maintains a (secret) black-list of domain names and IP addresses which contains "prohibited content" which is used in filtering software. Some ISPs voluntarily use that list to block access.
The ACMA's secret blacklist has leaked on at least one occasion in the past.
In Nov last year, the Australian Federal Police started sending mandatory block notices to ISPs.
more info here:
http://www.acma.gov.au/scripts/nc.dll?WEB/STANDARD/1001/pc=PC_90102
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia
With the US exporting these laws
Well, something had to replace manufacturing!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org