[p2p-research] Fwd: Blackout Europe: Telecoms Package dangers to open EU internet lähetti sinulle viestin Facebookissa.....

[Andy Robinson]

Frightening but easily beaten.

This is Sarkozy's little mutant brainchild, looks like the EU has rejected
it yet again, this is about the fourth time it's been dragged up in EU
circles and it's been soundly defeated every time.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/news/2009/03/30/EU-Rejects--3-Strikes--Rule-for-Illegal-File-Sharers/p1

If it ever were implemented, all file-sharers would have to do is switch to
encrypted file-sharing to get around it.
e.g.:
http://www.filetopia.com/
http://www.zultrax.com/p2p/features/encryption.htm
no doubt there are dozens of others out there already.

More worrying perhaps, given that this one is a non-starter, is the proposal
for EU-wide blocking of suspect sites.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2009/04/02/eu-proposal-could-force-uk-isps-to-block-child-abuse-sites.html
This is already operated by some governments and by most ISP's in a lot of
the EU (including Britain, Finland, Denmark), and the system is so
unaccountable that it leads necessarily to abuse.  While it is only meant to
filter out illegal porn, it's been subject to mission creep pretty much
everywhere, both official and unofficial.

Official:  "terror linked" sites and "hate" material are among the supposed
targets to which it's quickly extended.  Peer-to-peer is another obvious
target.  PirateBay has been added to the blacklist some places, Denmark and
Italy for example.  They also tend to quickly add sites which expose and
criticise the lists.  For instance, parts of Wikileaks are blocked in
Australia.  Future targets are likely to include dissident political sites,
hacking information, etc.

There have previously been proposals for EU-wide blocking of sites which
"advocate violence", such as our colleague Chris Knight.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article610812.ece

Unofficial:  cracked sites with dodgy temporary redirects (such as happened
to ZMag), or large hosting venues with problems on one page, are taken down
by mistake, will not know they are on the list as it's secret and hence have
no actionable right to appeal.  In Britain, the scale of web censorship was
recently revealed when the Internet Watch Foundation, an unaccountable
private body which oversees blocking for 95% of IP's, ended up effectively
blocking editorial access to Wikipedia over an album cover on one page.  In
Finland, the global IP assigner was briefly blocked.  In Australia, the list
of banned links (precedent to their great firewall) was shown to include a
US anti-abortion campaign site, several local businesses whose sites had
been briefly hacked, pages on Wikipedia, Lolcats, etc.  There was even talk
of prosecuting the people who published the list!

These kinds of firewalls are technically easy to circumvent for people with
computer knowledge (using proxies, private networks etc), so their main
effect will be stifling free speech and visibility of dissent, making it
hard for example for a random interested citizen to find out what anarchists
think.  China and Iran have been doing it for ages, but their net users are
very savvy and their censorship too obvious to go unnoticed.

bw
Andy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090405/b111da53/attachment-0001.html>