The German Federal Criminal Office has the authority to add new websites and domains to the list. A website can for instance be added instantly if it is hosted outside of the European Union. A committee has been designated to perform spot checks on the list every three months.

The law itself was pushed mainly as a law to fight child pornography on the Internet. It was always denied that it would be used to censor websites for different reasons although some politicians have already mentioned that they would like to include violent video games or hate sites in the list as well.

Internet providers have the sole responsibility to provide the infrastructure and maintain the web censorship filters. This includes organizations like Universities but also some businesses with more than 10000 employees. The technique employed to filter websites that are on the web censorship list is simply blocking the domain name. Users who enter the IP can visit the site normally. (via Heise (German))

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Plans came to light recently that described a nationwide Internet censorship initiative in Australia to protect the children from the Internet. One could say that parents should take care of that but the Australian government does not seem to have much faith in Australian parents and decided that a far better way to protect the children would be to ban selected websites completely in Australia meaning if you are of legal age to view a website you might not be able to by normal means because of the censorship to protect the children.

One common denominator is always the vagueness of those plans. Questions like who will select the websites that should be banned, how will they be banned, who will decided what is appropriate, who will maintain the blacklist, what can be done about false positives or who will have access to it are not addressed at all.

Current plans favor the use of two blacklists, one for material unsuitable for children and one for illegal material. It is possible to opt-out of the first but not the second. No definition of illegal was given and it is likely that the blacklist will contain websites that might not be illegal but considered illegal.

Nationwide Internet censorship puts Australia right in the midst of elusive countries like China and Iran who censor the Internet for different reasons. Australians who want to fight this plan can head over to the No Clean Feed site for more information and calls to action.

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The Opennet website offers a form where users can enter a url and check if it is banned in a country. Not every filtered url is know and not every country of the world can be selected, I guess it would be an impossible task to keep up with every countries filtering efforts. Just take a look at Turkey and Youtube if you know what I mean, feels like they ban and unban the video portal every other day.

The main emphasize lies on countries that are known to filter the Internet heavily which amounts to a list of roughly 20 countries currently. The website offers a global Internet filtering map that displays the level of political, social, conflict / security and Internet Tools filtering for each country in the world.

The website offers additional research which is more valuable than the two tools that I described before. Extensive country profiles are available for selected countries which give a in depths analysis of the current filtering situation in that country with lots of sources at the end of each report. It is furthermore possible to read regional overviews, articles about the subject, book recommendations and general news.

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All forms are added as well in another layer, including search boxes and the like for instance. The Picidae test server is really fast and was able to deliver an image of Ghacks in just a few seconds, did not take much longer than loading the websites normally. The script is offered on the website as well and everyone may setup a Picidae server on his own dedicated server.

Even webspace owners can take part by offering an additional layer of protection. They can install a Picidae proxy that is connected to a Picidae server. This would mean that even if the server would be blocked it could still be accessed by using a Picidae proxy.

Picidae is especially useful when searching Google or other search engines in a country that is know to block certain search results. The Picidae script is able to query the search engines that are outside of your country which means that you will receive uncensored search results.

Read More:

Picidae Test Server
Picidae Server Script

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Whenever you try to access a website you type its url into the address bar. The url is then send to the DNS server who looks up the IP for that website and sends it back to your browser to be able to make the connection to the website. To censor one would simply return no IP or a different IP that redirects to another website. (something like, no no, this is no website that you should visit, bla bla)

This means that the website that you want to access exists of course but the information on the dns server was changed to prevent access. There are two options that let you access the website. The first would be to simply enter the IP address of the website that you want to visit instead of the url. You can use scripts that are freely available on the internet to lookup the IP of an url.

This method is only working if there is only one url that is using that IP. You are out of luck if many websites are hosted on the same server. The second method which is reliable and working for all occasions helps us in this case.

If you change the DNS server that your computer is using to lookup the IP you will receive the correct result. Let us say that you life in China and that China banned access to Wikipedia. Instead of using a Chinese DNS server you use one from the United States which has the information that you need to access Wikipedia.

OpenDNS, a free service, would be one alternative as would be the following list which I have taken from freerk.com

• dns2.de.net – 194.246.96.49 (Frankfurt, Germany)
• ns1.de.eu.orsn.net – 217.146.139.5 (Hildesheim, Germany)
• resolver.netteam.de – 193.155.207.61 (Alfter-Impekoven, Germany)
• sunic.sunet.se – 192.36.125.2 (Stockholm, Sweden)
• master.ns.dns.be – 193.109.126.140 (Leuven, Belgium)
• ns1.lu.eu.orsn.net – 195.206.104.98 (Belvaux, Luxembourg)
• merapi.switch.ch – 130.59.211.10 (Zurich, Switzerland)
• prades.cesca.es – 192.94.163.152 (Barcelona, Spain)
• michael.vatican.va – 212.77.0.2 (Vatican City, Italy)
• dns.inria.fr – 193.51.208.13 (Nice, France)
• ns0.ja.net – 128.86.1.20 (London, UK)
• nic.aix.gr – 195.130.89.210 (Athens, Greece)
• ns.ati.tn – 193.95.66.10 (Tunis, Tunisia)
• ns1.relcom.ru – 193.125.152.3 (Moscow, Russia)
• trantor.umd.edu – 128.8.10.14 (College Park, MD, USA)
• ns1.berkeley.edu – 128.32.136.9 (Berkeley, CA, USA)
• merle.cira.ca – 64.26.149.98 (Ottawa, Canada)
• ns2.dns.br – 200.19.119.99 (Sao Paulo, Brasil)
• ns2.gisc.cl – 200.10.237.14 (Santiago, Chile)
• ns.uvg.edu.gt – 168.234.68.2 (Guatemala, Guatemala)
• ns1.retina.ar – 200.10.202.3 (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• ns.unam.mx – 132.248.253.1 (Mexico City, Mexico)
• ns.wide.ad.jp – 203.178.136.63 (Osaka, Japan)
• ns.twnic.net – 192.83.166.11 (Taipei, Taiwan)
• ns3.dns.net.nz – 203.97.8.250 (Wellington, New Zealand)
• box2.aunic.net – 203.202.150.20 (Melbourne, Australia)

Changing the DNS Server is a matter of minutes. It depends on the operating system that you are using. In Windows XP you open the control panel and click on network connections. You right-click your connection and select Properties from the context menu.

Select the Internet Protocol (TCP / IP) and click on Properties in that menu. Click on use the following DNS server addresses and enter a preferred and alternate DNS server into the fields. Make sure you enter the IPs. Apply and close the menu and restart your computer. Once that is done you are using the new DNS server which should bypass the censorship.

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I can not recall a court ruling about the legality which should mean that the website itself is legal unless the case would be examined in court. Blocking a perfectly legal website is censorship in my opinion. Where is the difference to countries like China who block websites that express different kind of views about China ? The only difference I see is that this kind of censorship has purely economic reasons while the one in China is politically motivated.

Many European countries have their share of censorship which is not known to many of it’s citizens. Germany and France ban Nazi websites and sites that deny the holocaust and other countries most likely have their share of websites that simply get blocked.
Censorship does not get better if a democratic country uses it to suppress websites because of political or economic reasons. It simply does not feel right.

Why don’t they sue allofmp3 in Russia if they think the service is illegal ? Maybe because they do know that a Russian court would rule that it is a legal service ?

The best thing the big media companies could do would be to offer a similar service on the internet. That would of course mean that high pricing items would come to an end. Suppose they fear that more than to piss of a few more customers criminals.

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It mainly deals with the question if Search engines like google and yahoo should censor their searches for topics like “suicide searches” and deliver some handpicked anti-suicide sites before the other search results.

Both sides are represented in the thread, the people who think its ok if a search engine would censor such requests mainly argue by pointing out the moral aspect while the nay-sayers fear this might cause a precedence for more severe censorship.

I for one would prefer unfiltered search results but allowing for instance anti-suicidal sites to deliver ads for free somewhere on the page. when someone uses the keyword suicide. This should satisfy both sides.

It should be clear that the only authority that decides if something has to be banned should be the law and not a search engine.

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