Techdirt. Stories filed under "blacklist"

Russia Blacklists Cultural Wiki Without Explanation, Site Just Moves To Circumvent Block

Glyn Moody — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 07:33:32 PST

Techdirt has been following the worsening censorship situation in Russia for some time. Back in July, the country's parliament passed a new law ostensibly designed to "protect the children". It took only a couple of weeks before it was used to shut down the whole of LiveJournal for part of the country. That was apparently because a neo-Nazi blog had been found among the thousands of others hosted there -- an indication of just how blunt this new instrument of censorship is.

Now another popular site in Russia has been taken down, as Rick Falkvinge reports:

This Monday, the Russian Government placed a Russian Wikipedia clone on a censorship blacklist. The Russian Government maintains such a kill switch for "harmful sites" – motivated with protecting children from drug use, child porn, or suicide methods. In reality, as usual, give anybody such a switch and they’ll shut off things they plain don’t like.

The Russian Wikipedia clone Lurkomore has long been a Wikipedia-on-steroids in Russia. With the notability requirement for articles relaxed, Lurkomore had become an "encyclopedia of contemporary culture, folklore, and subcultures, as well as everything else".

Presumably there is something among the thousands of articles there that someone, somewhere has taken a dislike to, causing the entire site to be blocked. However, an article on the site Lenta.ru (original in Russian) says that the people behind Lurkomore still don't know what that was, and intend to appeal against being placed on the censorship blacklist in this way. In the meantime, they have moved the site to a different IP address, at lurkmore.to, where it can presumably be accessed even by Russian children -- thus neatly demonstrating the futility of this kind of hamfisted censorship.

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Russia And China Both Want To 'Protect Children'; Both Want To Do It By Increasing Censorship

Glyn Moody — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 15:51:00 PDT

As expected, Russia has passed a law that will allow Web sites to be blacklisted, ostensibly to "protect children". According to this AFP report, the very vague "harmful information" category has been narrowed somewhat, but future threats remain:

Russian newspapers said Wednesday the final version has specified a previously broad term of "harmful information", saying only child pornography, suicide how-to instructions and drugs propaganda can lead to website closure without a trial.

However, an expert on Russia's security services, Andrei Soldatov, said the bill would lead to creation of a mechanism for blocking foreign sites for the first time by forcing Internet providers to install special equipment.

As the UK experience shows, once the technology is in place to block child pornography, say, the calls to deploy it for things like alleged copyright infringement become more insistent.

China, of course, already exercises pretty tight control over all forms of media, but it seems it wants to lock down online activity even more:

China's broadcasting and Internet regulators have told Internet video providers that they must prescreen all programs before making them available, tightening state censorship of increasingly popular online drama series and mini-movies.

Prescreening all uploaded videos might seem a tall order, but it's already going on with some services: A woman working in the public relations office for Youku, China's most popular online video provider, said Wednesday the new decree had little impact on the company because Youku already has hundreds of prescreeners who examine all content uploaded to the site.
You can probably guess what justification China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) is using for this move: SARFT said this week in a statement on its website that the rule is in response to the rapid growth in online video programs, some of which it said contain vulgar content, excessive violence or pornography. It said the rule would protect younger people and promote high-quality online programs.
It's so nice to know that governments everywhere are united by this desire to protect children; pity they seem equally united in not caring about the erosion of people's rights through the ever-deepening censorship they apply as a result.

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Does Congress Really Want To Give China & Other Oppressive Regimes A Blueprint For Internet Censorship?

Mike Masnick — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:16:13 PST

Rebecca MacKinnon, from the New America Foundation, has an absolutely fantastic opinion piece in the NY Times today, explaining why SOPA/PROTECT IP represent the Great Firewall of America, and why it's the exact wrong approach. It notes that the bill doesn't just bring the "major features" of China's Great Firewall to America, but that it also strengthen's China's ability to censor. While she notes that the intentions are not the same, the "practical effect," would be:

Abuses under existing American law serve as troubling predictors for the kinds of abuse by private actors that the House bill would make possible. Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters that Diebold, a maker of voting machines, sent in 2003, demanding that Internet service providers shut down Web sites that had published internal company e-mails about problems with the company’s voting machines. The letter cited copyright violations, and most of the service providers took down the content without question, despite the strong case to be made that the material was speech protected under the First Amendment.

The House bill would also emulate China’s system of corporate “self-discipline,” making companies liable for users’ actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.

I'd argue it's even worse than that. We've already seen how countries like Russia have abused copyright law to stifle speech. Do we really want to justify that kind of activity? If SOPA/PROTECT IP is in place, any government around the world can put in place something similar, justify blocking access to just about any website by abusing copyright law to find some form of "infringement."

In the hearings today, the MPAA's Michael O'Leary somewhat stunningly suggested that repressive regimes that censor the internet are a model worth emulating in the US, since they didn't "break the internet." Perhaps he should speak to those who have had their speech blocked in countries like China and Iran to see how they really feel about that. And is he really comfortable setting up the same system here in the US? Is he convinced that it won't be abused, despite the long history of abuse we've seen by the members of the MPAA? Just last week alone we heard a story about how MPAA member Warner Bros., took down tons of content it had no right to, including some open source software it just didn't like.

Fact is: we've seen copyright law abused repeatedly, even by MPAA members, to stifle companies and speech they don't like. We've seen how repressive regimes use the same tools in their countries to stifle speech. Setting up such a system in the US would be an epic mistake.

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Time Magazine Says SOPA Is 'A Cure Worse Than The Disease'; Would Encourage Censorship

Mike Masnick — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:02:24 PST

It appears that more people in the mainstream press are beginning to recognize just how horrible the SOPA/E-PARASITE bill is when you look at the details. Over at Time Magazine's Techland blog, there's a post by Jerry Brito, saying that it's a "cure" that is "worse than the disease." The post notes that it won't do much to actually stop infringement, beyond at the margin, but the costs of doing so are quite a lot -- especially as the State Department is trying to convince others around the globe not to regulate the internet:

At a moment when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is urging world governments to keep their hands off the Internet, creating a blacklist would send the wrong message. And not just to China or Iran, which already engage in DNS filtering, but to liberal democracies that might want to block information they find naughty. Imagine if the U.K. created a blacklist of American newspapers that its courts found violated celebrities' privacy? Or what if France blocked American sites it believed contained hate speech? We forget, but those countries don't have a First Amendment.

It's good to see the mainstream press recognizing that this isn't just a fight about "foreign rogue sites" as the entertainment industry would have you believe -- but about massive regulation of the internet and free speech.

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US Chamber Of Commerce So Clueless It Thinks You Have To Be 'Anti-IP' To Be Against E-PARASITE Bill

Mike Masnick — Tue, 1 Nov 2011 05:13:23 PDT

Steve Tepp is the US Chamber of Commerce's (the world's largest lobbying group) point man on PROTECT IP/E-PARASITE/SOPA. His latest move is to try attacking anyone who points out the problems of E-PARASITE/SOPA. First up? Demand Progress, who dared to call it a "blacklist bill." According to Tepp, it's not a blacklist bill, because the lobbyists who wrote the bill (potentially including Tepp himself) were smart enough not to write "list" in the text of the bill.

Of course the bill doesn't actually say that there's a list. Just as the Chinese Great Firewall doesn't actually involve the government "listing" sites, but merely threatens ISPs with liability if they let bad sites through, E-PARASITE massively broadens the definitions of what's "dedicated to the theft of U.S. property" such that it now includes, more or less, the entire internet, and threatens sites with the equivalent of internet death: blocking from search engines, blocking from DNS (and more!), cutting off any funding sources. No, there's no "blacklist," there's just the threat of cutting off just about any internet site. On top of that, there's an awkwardly worded attempt to force every site to proactively monitor any infringement. Is that why the US Chamber of Commerce doesn't allow comments on its site? Or is it because it knows that no one actually believes the crap it shovels?

But Tepp's intellectual dishonesty is worse than just pretending that without the word "list" there's no actual blacklist. No, the really cheap move is to imply that only the "anti-IP crowd" is against this bill. This is the latest strategy of those who wish to massively regulate the internet so that it looks more like TV -- a broadcast medium, rather than a communications medium. They refer to anyone who points out the massive negative consequences of their legislative nastiness as being "anti-IP." You've seen it in Techdirt's comments for the past few weeks, with certain anonymous commenters throwing hissy fits about how I'm actually "pro-piracy," when I'm anything but. If you don't think this is part of the coordinated marketing campaign by the largest lobbying organization in the world, you're not paying attention.

So, Steve, let's be clear: being against this bill is not about being "anti-IP." It's about being pro-innovation, pro-internet. It's about recognizing the massive benefits of an open internet. It's about recognizing the massive benefits to the American (and world) economy that were created from an open internet that didn't involve misplaced third party liability.

The concerns of those about this bill have nothing to do with intellectual property and whether it's good or bad. It's about the collateral damage that such a vast change to the legal and technical framework that the internet has been based on for years will cause.

To brush those concerns away as being "the anti-IP crowd," is to show ignorance of what's at stake.

What we don't understand, Steve, is why you would seek to shut down the open internet, killing off more jobs than ever existed in the entertainment industry. We thought the US Chamber of Commerce was supposed to support small businesses. Instead, you're seeking to make any internet business nearly impossible, unless they've already hired a dozen lawyers. I guess if your goal is for full employment for trial lawyers, you're making headway. But, seriously, if you can't debate this subject honestly, don't be surprised when the next generation of businesses dumps the US CoC. Pro tip: pissing off every company of the next generation that might support your bloated organization is no way to build for the future. And don't think jobs "in the industry" will be waiting for you. Without the next generation of great startups that you're trying to kill off, the big content companies who pay your salary these days, won't have the new platforms they need to succeed.

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French National Assembly Approves Internet Censorship Law

Mike Masnick — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 16:05:00 PST

We were just talking about how Thai government officials were admitting that internet blacklists simply don't work, and along comes France's National Assembly to approve a law to set up a blacklist allowing the government to censor any website it doesn't like. The full law isn't passed yet, apparently, as it still needs to be approved by a variety of others before it becomes a law. There's also some hope that the French Constitutional Council would refuse to validate the law.

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Zombie Spam Blacklists Return From The Dead To Make A Point

Mike Masnick — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:20:50 PDT

I have to admit that I don't follow the "spam" world as closely as I used to, but I remember back around 2003, one of the hot topics was whether or not the various spam blacklists went too far at times. The anti-spam fighters behind those lists would often take a rather... inclusive attitude to putting IP addresses and address ranges into their lists, and plenty of giant ISPs relied on the judgment of those spam fighters by simply plugging in their lists. This often resulted in significant collateral damage, as perfectly legitimate emails would get blocked as coming from a "spam IP." Of course, those lists needed to change frequently, but at times, they would just suddenly disappear. That last link was about a popular anti-spam blacklist from Osirusoft that was shut down -- with its owners changing the settings to include all addresses. The idea was to make it clear to ISPs who didn't pay attention, to stop using the list, but in the meantime, think of all the damage?

It looks like that same sort of thing may be happening six years later. Michael Scott points us to the news of another long-abandoned blackhole list, called blackholes.us, that was abandoned a couple years ago -- but which some ISPs still rely on. However, whoever now controls the nameservers where blackholes.us used to be, apparently decided to set up a new "list" that (again) includes the entire range of IP addresses -- so every query is returned as being a spammer IP.

Again, the idea is to force ISPs to stop using that blacklist -- and perhaps you can make the argument that (unlike the Osirusoft situation) these ISPs have had two years to stop relying on the "zombie" blacklist, but it still seems unwise to create so much collateral damage, just to force the issue.

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Child Porn Blacklist Group Claims Its Approach Is Working, But There Are Lots Of Questions

Carlo Longino — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:21:00 PDT

The Internet Watch Foundation, keeper of the UK's child-porn blacklist that's used to block access to offending sites (as well as other innocuous ones), has released some new stats saying that it's seen a reduction in the number of child porn sites in the last year. However, sort of like the group's methodology, the figure has quite a few holes. The figure is apparently based on "domains known to the IWF", which is a fairly subjective, and hardly comprehensive, criteria. Also, given the way that the IWF has blocked the likes of Wikipedia and the Internet Archive, how many sites that aren't actually child-porn sites are included in that number? But perhaps more damning is the rest of the report, which highlights just how ineffective the IWF's blacklist really is at tackling the root of the problem. It's well-established that these sorts of filters don't work, despite the IWF implying it can take credit for reducing the number of child porn sites. The IWF says that less than one percent of the sites can be traced to hosts in the UK, and that a huge portion of the commercial sites it's found can be traced back to just ten domain registrars. This illustrates how non-filter solutions, such as working through these registrars to track down child-porn hosts and producers, promise a more effective solution to the real problem -- the production and sharing of the images. Trying to stop consumption via filters really just masks the issue, despite claims that by cutting off demand, the market will shrink. That might work, if the filters actually worked. The IWF does offer some suggestions for more comprehensive solutions to tackle the problem, but as long as it keeps "Public/private partnership involving service providers working through a system of self-regulation" -- basically its current model of getting ISPs to use its blacklist -- at the top of the list, it seems doomed to ineffectiveness.

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Inside The UK's Web Blacklist Keeper

Carlo Longino — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:22:00 PDT

The BBC's Rory Clellan-Jones (the same guy whose YouTube vid of a soccer match he filmed got yanked) has taken an interesting look inside the Internet Watch Foundation, the organization that runs the UK's child-porn blacklist. The piece does little to counter the negative press the IWF has received in light of its misguided blocks on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, with the group's CEO appearing to gloss over the failures because he doesn't "want to dwell" on them, instead trying to hide behind the moral cover of stopping child porn. But the group's efforts on that front don't appear to be particularly fruitful, either: one of its "analysts" who looks into complaints the group receives about images online says that few of the images it finds are in the UK, so it just reports them to sister groups in the countries where they are hosted, if such groups exist. The aim of the IWF -- to stop child porn -- is laudable, but its techniques, and their collateral damage, leave much to be desired.

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