>The court order targets a total of 57 domain names, including various mirror sites. The academic publishers had asked the court for a more flexible blocklist, which they could update whenever new domains would become available, but this was denied. If the publishers want to expand the blocklist, they will have to go back to court. This ensures that there remains judicial oversight over local website blockades. Also, a request for a specific IP-address block was denied.
So a DNS level block... This should help to educate some French users on what a DNS is, and steer some of them away from using their ISP provided DNS servers.
Its always DNS first and everyone says "lol, just change your DNS" and then they start doing real blocks. Optus in Australia did an IP level block of 4chan recently.
How? 4chan use Cloudflare. They don't have a dedicated IP, do they?
I would be surprised if Optus actually managed to do SNI filtering for the entire country without screwing it up.
Edit: Huh, seems like they do have a dedicated IP. At least both Robtex and Securitytrails report them as the only tenant on their IP. But you can /etc/hosts 4chan.org to a different Cloudflare IP, and CF will still SNI-route it to the real site. That would defeat any IP address-based block.
If I remember correctly, Cloudflare assigns different IPs to different sites, so you can use blocking by IP, but of course in this case you will also block other sites using the same Cloudflare server.
What ISP are you on? BT blocks libgen but NordVPN seems to work just fine.
Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.
I guess this is the point where you leave the general public behind. Lucky you.
Which fits fantastically in the discussion over at the San Diego Streetlight surveillance and the "Software engineers social responsibility"[1] vs. the fact that it will get worse if you make it mainstream.
Hopefully projects like Streisand [1] continue to be worked on - they automate a lot of the hassle of setting up services like this. Ideally they will eventually be easy enough for your grandpa to use.
Unfortunately the minor ISPs are almost 3-fold slower in most places, while being just as expensive. My options are between Virgin, which has speeds of up to 362mB fibre for £42/month, and the next best BT, which is 67mB for £39.99/ month. At uni, unless I wanted 30mB for a 7 person household, my only option was again Virgin.
It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value for money.
I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day. I suffered Virgin for a couple of years and it was hell.
Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.
They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.
Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.
We switched service providers 3 times during that year. We started with a 30mbit connection through PlusNet, then 60 with EE, then 300 Virgin. The only one that was usable was Virgin Media. I wish that wasn't that case, but it simply was. Internet was a contentious topic in our house, but having 7 people either playing games, watching HD movies, or streaming simultaneously knocked most ISPs down swiftly.
I'm with Uno Broadband who sell BT fibre lines (so upto 70 down/20 up) for around £40 a month with no blocks or restrictions and a static IP. No download limits to speak of either as I can easily hit 2TB download a month.
To be annoying - milli Bels of speed? I've never seen anyone write it like this before, it's MB for megabytes, and Mb for megabits, mB is a different unit altogether.
This is what Merkel meant with "Neuland"(engl. uncharted territory) in 2013.
In Germany she is heavily mocked for not understanding the Internet. Of course, it's the bright populace of high class forums such as Facebook and r/de who know better than the Physicist Chancellor of a G7 nation...
In reality, she meant it is legal Neuland. That authorities and courts had little established ways of enforcing laws online, that even heavily illegal acts were difficult to process and prosecute.
Now we are getting there. The law catches up with the Internet. If we want a free Sci-Hub and free content sharing, then it's the law that we have to adapt. Because governments already adapt their procedures - the online Wild West is over.
Kind of feels like "civilization" creeping into the Old West.
Thing is, it's the fact that is a legal "Neuland" that it's a great place.
What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
This would break phone usage.
The same apply to internet, except that it can do even more. The only ways to make sure theses criminal activities doesn't happen would be to limit how it can be used which break everything.
> What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
Somewhere out there someone read this and thought "wow that's a great idea"
Isn't this what the "dark web" is for? True, some sites have been taken down but as I understand that was more due to poor opsec than a flaw with the technology itself.
I for one have no faith in educating the government as long as companies with multi-million-dollar lobbying budgets are free to sway politicians to legislate in their favor. Happy to be convinced otherwise, though.
not really. as a citizen of somewhere you'll always be subject to laws. dark web could help people evade the law a little longer but won't make it legal, as such law abiding citizen will not want to have themselves associated with it for the fear of repercussions down the road.
the only long term solution is to change the laws, not to work around them, but we don't have the economic power to balance the lobbies anymore.
4chan is a relatively popular anonymous image board, based on a Japanese language image board (2ch) but with mostly English language users. It's administration are known to be quite lax with content; if it's not outright illegal to host they'll generally let it slide in their NSFW boards. To use a recent example, their Adult GIF board right now, while flooded mostly with pornography, is currently housing uncensored footage from the recent mass shooting.
Thanks to the lack of user accounts needed to use the site, pretty much everyone checks their social filter at the door, and it's earned some unfavorable comparisons. Given its reputation I'm not surprised to hear it's the subject of censorship.
There's a huge irony here in that major news outlets in Australia including Rupert Murdochs SkyNews all showed uncensored footage, some of it autoplaying and profited from doing so.
Blocking materials is the incorrect way to deradicalize people. I would further argue that by blocking it, the material is made to seem more scarce, and even more desirable for those who would otherwise not have been interested if it hadn't been blocked!
Outreach from social workers and societal safety net is the best way to prevent radicalization. I see legalization of drugs as an example.
I think there are many good reasons to block that video that have nothing to do with radicalisation. For a start this is footage of the deaths of dozens of people who, along with their families, have a right to privacy.
New Zealand and Australia recently went on a "do something" tear regarding the mosque shooting. Sites where the video or manifesto was posted got blocked, including 4chan. And yes, you read that right, New Zealand made it a crime to distribute a specific piece of text data.
Who cares about what that guy wanted or didn't want. The question is whether we should let people distribute his manifesto for the sake of freedom of expression or if we consider it to be dangerous and worthy of a ban. The opinion of the guy who committed this heinous crime is frankly irrelevant IMO.
If I was to commit some atrocities tomorrow and write a pamphlet outlining my motive and calling for others to do the same thing while adding a note saying "look, they'll try to censor this!" will you, out of principle, argue that my manifesto shouldn't be censured because that's what I would've wanted? If so, why?
> The question is whether we should let people distribute his manifesto for the sake of freedom of expression or if we consider it to be dangerous and worthy of a ban.
Speaking as a us citizen, that is crazy talk. Why should the government be let to decide what is "too dangerous" for me to read? It seems incredible that first world democracies still engage in that kind of censorship.
What you describe is the USA way, but it's not how it's done in many (most?) places around the world. There are plenty of things you could say in the USA that would be illegal hate speech in most of Europe. Conversely showing a female nipple is taboo in the Land of the Free, while it's mostly not a big deal in western Europe. This is actually the source of many problems with the governance of the web since most high-profile websites tend to conform to American codes (which means that you can't post "the origin of the world" by Gustave Courbet on Facebook, but you can post racist comments all day long).
Obviously the risk is not that reasonably educated HN readers could stumble upon this manifesto and start a massacre, the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people. People become radicalized on the web, actually the shooter himself kept spouting "memes" straight from /pol/ and other alt-right websites. Similarly many Islamist terrorists who carried attacks in recent years also radicalized online, feeding on propaganda websites and fake news.
Does banning 4chan or the manifesto achieve anything? I'm not sure. But dismissing any attempt to curb this very real problem as "crazy talk" is not really constructive criticism.
> the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people.
You can literally make the same argument against fox or Breitbart. Or cnn, nyt, wapo as the president continuously tries to. He should remind you why the government should have limited powers.
And yes, the general fear of sex and sexual is maddening and counter productive.
I have no issue at all drawing a line between Breitbart and a mass murderer manifesto. I find this "slippery slope" rhetoric rather disingenuous and non-constructive. With this type of argument you can shoot down any law, any power given to the government. "First they force you to wear seat-belts and the next thing you know you live in communist dystopia".
I guess it makes sense if you're a libertarian/anarchist or something in this vicinity but if that's the case this discussion has been rehashed millions of times before and I don't think we'll find a common ground here.
I would rather live in a country where fifty people are shot by a madman every year than one in which 3,395 people are arrested every year for "offensive" online comments, which was the UK in 2018. If these restrictions were being imposed by an outside power we would gladly spend fifty lives a day in a war to prevent it. Principles are more important than comfort. Praise Talos.
As a French citizen, this is nothing new in principle: we already had law that forbid negationist material and so on. That makes nothing for social peace of course, it only brings more weight to the "see how they try to hide you the truth" bullshit.
But this seems to clearly intensify. We now have laws passed "to regulate things against Fake News during election period"[1], in a climate of already large distrust of population against politics.
It's really unclear how this plain censorship is not replaced with a mandatory warning, which would give the opportunity to let people judge by themselves (or at least decide to trust the authority that the material doesn't worth their attention).
Just because something is not illegal does not mean that society need to be tolerant of it. E.g. I she'd no tears for the neonazis who lost their jobs after being outed in Charlottesville [1] (though I don't support through name and shame that brought it about). However, I don't think it's correct for the government to censor their writings.
Another instance, I think fox and Breitbart are scourges for their disinformation campaign (not that they're "conservative" or have an "agenda", the wsj is also conservative and has an agenda), but making them illegal is a line too far. It provides too much power to a government who already has too much.
You're giving a lot of credit to a meme-spouting serial killer. It's not like as if it was step 34 of his master plan, he merely got a gun and started shooting at innocent people. I'll take my chances and keep ignoring him and not giving him a platform.
In my opinion his main objective was to get attention and put his nauseous ideology in the spotlight. I don't know if banning it is the right solution but frankly I won't waste my time playing devil's advocate for a mass murderer.
"First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
> I'll take my chances and keep ignoring him and not giving him a platform.
Hopefully society will not do that.
The content might be repulsive but we are better off knowing how they think than allowing only them to know the contents.
Crazy manifestos are probably just like weapons in this regard, ordinary people won't care to get one if they are illegal, bad guys will.
As a kid I got a good explanation of how badly certain ideologies failed even if they looked reasonable.
I also got an intro to safe handling of guns, especially the part about never ever pointing a gun at anyone, loaded or not, except in wartime. I was quite young then but it sticks, like a whole lot of other stuff from my childhood.
I'll try to give that to the next generation together, together with an explanation of how insanely stupid such manifestos are - and a crash course in unarmed fighting (disable or confuse opponent, get away).
Young people should know what exists or it will take them by surprise.
> "First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Definitions of "terrorist" differs and while I and you can agree on this and many others I really really don't want to have more power than necessary in the hands of any government.
Read history and you'll see that most cruelties in the last few hundred years were commited by states against their own citizens, not by random blokes with weapons.
The "this is what they wanted" argument is always something that rings alarm bells in my head; it sounds like the "it's a slippery slope" wolf in sheep's clothing.
Why are you taking his word at face value? What he really wants is to spread his propaganda. He is just trying to use reverse psychology to make you do just that.
They wanted to block the diffusion of the video showing the Mosque shooting and the distribution of the killer's manifesto. Since it was being spammed on 4chan rather relentlessly they decided to pull the plug on the website basically.
I wonder if they'd also block, say, Wikipedia for linking to working IP addresses, or sites like https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go that automatically redirect you to them.
Does the link have to be directly to the illegal content, or just to a domain that supplies illegal content somewhere on the domain? The SciHub homepage is not itself illegal content.
You mispelt give up the entire internet. If every country dictates how every server in every other country is supposed to function then it will be pretty much impossible for anyone to operate.
Any filtering gets to happen inbound to that country unless you want to only view content that is legal in turkey, Israel, Pakistan,Uzbekistan, south africa, Russia, the US and insert another 60 names here.
We already have a way to handle different DNS results for different sub sections of the populace. They can run their own DNS servers and mandate that their users use them blocking alternatives if they so desire.
Returning different query results bases on the IP of the query sender is not magic. Couple that with location bases routing to thw nearest instance of a DNS server responding at 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 and you have nice and reasonably reliable segmentation based on the user's location. Nothing about that tech is magic and most of it is likely already implemented. So your doomsday scenario does not hold.
They would definitely obey yes, they have offices in Paris.
In France they regularly have to filter some results too since companies don't hesitate to sue for libel against negative results on first page.
yeah people keep touting "internet routes around censorship" and other platitudes with no grounding in reality, meanwhile European are already under illiberal regimes where the information if thoroughly controlled by the wealthy and the powerful.
we are literally at the point where European citizens need to engage in doublespeak on certain topics for the fear of harassment from people abusing the legal system, and it's getting words faster by the day
The court order is aimed at ISPs and it's trivial for the latter to proxy all DNS traffic on their edge and NXDOMAIN court-ordered domains regardless of the resolver used.
DNS is hard coded on my Orange Livebox. This is new.
And changing the DNS under my Ubuntu box was far from trivial. It is only possible to change the secondary DNS in the connection UI. I had to use a reduced version of DHCP (IP address only) and change /etc/resolv.conf.
So a DNS level block... This should help to educate some French users on what a DNS is, and steer some of them away from using their ISP provided DNS servers.