Web Censorship by Country (map) | Hacker News Reader

Web Censorship by Country (map)

yuxiyou.net

30 pointsorganicgrant10 comments

The graph seems wrong. For example opennet (where they got their data), says there is no censorship in Nigeria, but they mark Nigeria as being censored.

Australia is marked as 'under surveillance' (together with Russia and Turkey if I'm reading the map right). I don't know what this is meant to be.

Currently Australia does not have a mandatory filter (and given the political climate is unlikely to get one). Locally hosted sites which host material with high levels of sexual and violent content (which would be illegal under normal publication laws) can be given a takedown notice, but this is a paper tiger as the material can be moved to an overseas host. Australia has the normal range of laws against possession or distribution of material such as child pornography (and normal IP laws).

I don't know of anything currently in law which would materially distinguish Australia from Europe or the US; and in comparison to Europe we have fewer restrictions on, for example, Nazi material.

In Russia ISPs are legally required to block access to "extremist" materials from the publicly available list (in Russian: http://www.minjust.ru/ru/activity/nko/fedspisok/, most of entries are leaflets or books, but grep for "http" or "www"). The list is known to contain some technically-impossible-to-block entries so most ISPs probably resort to domain-level blocking by filtering DNS entries or filtering access by IP address. Some sort of gray area here.

When ISP reach certain size, they also must set up a special device to allow Federal Security Service to sniff the network traffic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM#SORM-2) for law enforcement purposes. I've never seen such hardware, but contrary to anecdotal evidence, it's just a specialized passive packet sniffer, connected to mirrored port.

Also, ISPs are required to keep access logs, and give them out on legal requests, but this is probably common virtually everywhere.

Officially, that's all (unless I forgot something, but hopefully I didn't). I don't know whenever the level of "unofficial cooperation" were ever estimated, but I suspect it to be fairly average, compared to the rest of the world.

They also have Venezuela marked as having no censorship. That has changed in recent years.

Yes, because this petition will change things.

Many comments can be made on the actual state of surveillance in many democratic countries...

These commenters can only comment on their perception. After all, perception is reality.

Many Chinese think life is grand, no idea about the level of examination their lives have.

Let us live our own lives as if everyone knew.

I'm very libertarian (private life should be private). But karma knows no bounds.

I tried to vote at the bottom but the button doesn't seem to be working.

The button is just a link element with an 'id="yes"', but no href or onClick or anything else.

there's also this, showing free developed countries that filter child porn. 3 other maps for other types of blocking too.

http://map.opennet.net/filtering-soc.html

god bless those poor iranian people!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com