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."

Comments

Re:Did anyone believe this law would not be abused

[gstoddart]

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.

Hmmm... which one is more likely?

[sirwired]

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.

Re:Hmmm... which one is more likely?

[Bacon Bits]

That's what I was thinking, too.

1,200 websites on one IP address? Looking at the list, I see things that are obviously gambling websites. The IP is held by a US-based hosting company (DimeNOC). I understand that yes, this is suspicious, but with 1,199 other potential causes for black holing an IP address, I'm not convinced that MFU caused government to impost a black hole request on an arbitrary (and, if summary is to be believed, incomplete) set of ISPs.

Re:Hmmm... which one is more likely?

[Zocalo]

The IP is held by a US-based hosting company (DimeNOC).

Well, there you go then; they didn't do their homework or were so desperate to save a buck or two they didn't care about their ISP's reputation. If you chose a cheap hosting deal on an ISP with a reputation for hosting spam, botnet controllers and other such sites while exercising an exceeding lax attitude to abuse reports, you can expect to have the odd issue like this. You get what you pay for applies to ISPs too - big surprise!

FWIW, DimeNOC is null routed here too, has been for sometime, and is unlikely to be unblocked anytime soon. No conspiracy required; the only traffic we ever saw coming from their IP space was spam, malicious or both, so dropping it at the border was a no brainer.

Re:Seems legit

[DeathToBill]

I love the assumption that the whole world has a DMCA just because you do...

Re:Did anyone believe this law would not be abused

[kasperd]

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.

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.

Re:Seems legit

[GumphMaster]

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.

Re:Seems legit

[SteveFoerster]

With the US exporting these laws

Well, something had to replace manufacturing!