Danish Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident
torrentfreak.com
Censorship online is an emotive issue.
Some people believe that all information should be free and as adults it
torrentfreak.com
Some people believe that all information should be free and as adults it
The problem is not that the police made this mistake. The problem is that they actually have the authority to do this in the first place.
There are lots of people who have realized it, but they get derided for being extremists (and, many times, they are). Meanwhile, something that might be awesome has just come on TV, so I have to go...
The world is slowly sliding towards a semi-free market/totalitarian government like Singapore has.
Totalitarian states like China are moving towards a bit more free markets. Formerly free states like the US and western Europe are moving towards more totalitarian state powers.
The key seems to be as long as the economy is OK people don't revolt. Look at the Arab spring vs. how prosperous and peaceful Singapore is.
Wasn't freedom nice while while it lasted? I wonder what our grandkids' reaction will be when we try to tell them how things used to be.
Government is a constant tension between maintaining order/safety and allowing people to do as they like. It is a good thing that we have rules, and it's a good thing that somebody can enforce them; it's also a good thing to have as few rules as possible. Those two realities have to coexist, and it will never be a satisfactory "one or the other."
We're all aware when the balance swings a bit. That doesn't mean we need to... I don't know what you're suggesting; revolutionize? It means we need to push back politically, which we did with SOPA/PIPA, and find ways to maintain our own power, like circumventing the DNS weakness. We're not exactly lost in the wilderness here.
And I haven't even had my coffee yet.
As was mentioned before on HN the wonderful BBC documentary "The Century of The Self" delves into how the 20th century US democracy began controlling by pandering to consumerism/irrationalism (ie. the tie between big business/media and government), while our communist adversaries began governing by increasingly abject force. They're like two sides of the same coin. Is it bad/evil or did this need to happen? Think about what's happened in that timeframe... the automobile, airplane, radio, the depression, nuclear energy/weapons, two world wars, the computer, television, the personal computer, the internet, and everything the internet is beginning to mobilize. The change to the world in one century is absolutely mesmerizing.
I believe through globalisation these two sides are both merging and dissolving at the same time - that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's the world trying to work out inefficiencies in these respective systems; inefficiencies which could be seen as bugs in a system that invite corruption. When bugs are exposed and fixes begin to emerge, the pockets of corruption are going to fight back - as they should, because that's their livelihood at stake.
Information is more free than ever, and that is what truly sets us free. So they made this mistake. And it's been exposed, quickly. Think about all the nefarious things that happened in the cold war that took decades to come to light. Think about what happened in the Middle East last year; governments toppled, quickly. They tried to sneak SOPA under the public radar and look what happened.
While technically possible, the Internet is much bigger than any one government. It'd be nearly impossible for any one organization to take it away without massive consequences that would naturally lead to a reversal and a substantial loss of power.
I would imagine that the next step in Denmark is to put into place a means to prevent that from happening ever again. Therefore, the police (or whatever agengy) just lost power due to the (unintended) action they took.
In the long run a dictator doesn't gain respect and power for abusing his people and authority, he actually looses most of it.
Take a look at this paper examining obscenity law and computer networks, from 1997: http://michaelguth.com/jurimetrics.htm Note, for example, the case of Louis Gugliemi, who received a 25 year sentence for interstate transport of obscene materials in 1985. I don't know whether he made parole or not, but he was unable to get a court to reduce his sentence; chances are that he has been in federal prison from the late 1980s (after his appeals were rejected) until quite recently. In fact, it's just about possible that he's still in prison. It's unlikely he would be convicted today. Likewise, consider this 1985 submission to Attorney-General Meese's commission on pornography: http://obu-investigators.com/xuk/porn/meese/302-pornography-... which proposed vast prosecution powers for governments to stamp out pornography.
So while it's certainly appropriate to challenge governments' efforts to police the private sphere, those efforts need to be considered in a realistic context, not one that views the past through rose-colored spectacles. Overall I'm inclined to think that people enjoy considerably more freedom nowadays than they did a few decades ago.
I don't believe that true. You can see a recent obscenity case here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hardcore
They can demand all they want, but most govts give themselves rather wide immunity wrt such things.
They have the authority to block sites. They have procedures for doing so and have wide discretion as to what procedures to use. They made a small mistake in applying said procedures.
There's little/no chance that they'll be held liable, no matter how much damage you can show.
It may well have been a list of urls recently found baseless, in which case there wouldn't be an override function ready, but the list was white.
So that's already pretty weak, but then we find out it's implemented with a shared Windows folder.
sigh.
And that makes it better?!
Um, what large corporations? And on God's green earth, why?
>It is as secure as other methods.
No, no it absolutely isn't. In terms of highly available ways of sharing data, FTP is the least secure of all of them. And it's not even a close race.
How many of your clients are going to continue to want to do business with you when they come across a notice that you're serving child pornography off of your site?
And on a DNS note, I always have at least two alternative DNS servers memorized so that I can continue to get around when providers' DNS goes to hell.
(http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/03/16/3207/the-curse-of...)
Google/Microsoft and other big properties could even push this out as a 'Security Feature' to prevent DNS spoofing attacks. I understand that that would lead to banning of actual IPs by governments, but given the organization of the internet, that is a bit harder than mucking around with DNS.
Self-destruction by greed is the dominant gene in the DNA of our current economic system. Let's hope it proceeds smoothly, and doesn't take the planet with it.
Reality is a bit more complicated and nuanced than that.
I have my 90 day Facebook chip. FBA... someone has to make a site/browser plugin for that.
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EDIT: Is there a guideline against 'TL;DR' comments? When I've written them in the past, they've been upvoted.
Each blocked site lost:
- $X directly in business missed during those hours
- The trust of users who believed the warning
If they lost these things by arson or slander, the perpetrator might be punished. But since it was the government, they'll probably get nothing but an apology.
Any justice system will have some collateral damage: standing trial costs you time, money and reputation, even in a fair trial where you're declared innocent. But since the damage is so real and sometimes severe, we should REALLY force government to be careful how it applies itself. Warrants, oversight, auditing, judicial review, etc.
No bureaucrat should have a "ruin this business" button.
That's the way they're getting away with the lack of oversight: Make it "voluntary" ("or we'll tell the press you support child porn", nudge, nudge)
Edit: forgot some words
I prefer the commentary form of TL;DR which is a pithy remark that allows people who are already familiar with the subject to learn what biases or novel facts this article displays. For example, consider the fictitious article:
Are Human Ears High Resolution Signal Detectors?
which discusses a study of microphones, digital audio recordings and double-blind human subjects trying to distinguish signal in high-noise environments.
A useful TL;DR might be:
Human ears suck.
which might be a useful indicator of whether you're going to learn anything new from reading it.
Standing up for TL;DR's in general, not the OP's.