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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."
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.