'Lundberg said that his organization was sorry for the mistake and has now adopted a new system whereby blocked sites have to now be approved by two employees instead of one, although why that was not the case already for such a serious process is up for debate. The other question is how at the flick of a switch do 8,000 sites suddenly get added to a blacklist – for whatever reason – without any kind of oversight. Denmark’s IT-Political Association is critical and has called for ISPs to cease cooperation with the voluntary scheme which operates without any kind of judicial review. “Today’s story shows that the police are not able to secure against manual errors that could escalate into something that actually works as a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet,” the group said in a statement.'

'The clear implication from [Adrian's] interview with Sean Sherlock is that the proposed measures will be lacking in any real detail, leaving it entirely up to the judges as to what types of blocking might emerge. (Possibly going beyond web blocking to also target hosting and other services.) This ambiguity -- as well as jeopardising fundamental rights -- will create intolerable uncertainty for businesses such as Google who might find themselves at risk of business threatening and unpredictable injunctions and will certainly deter others from setting up in Ireland.' -- this is much, much worse than I thought, particularly given the level of technical knowledge among Ireland's judges (if Mr. Justice Charleton's performance in EMI v. UPC is anything to go by).

well, this is bizarre -- it seems T-Mobile UK are blocking encrypted email submission and OpenVPN traffic in their mobile internet access products. Why? Who knows -- but at least filtering RST packets evades the block, as in the Great Firewall of China

'The Court judgement therefore goes well beyond saying what a court may decide, by means of an injunction: it also sets out the limits of Member States’ powers to legislate to draft ISPs as copyright police. It will be a crucial precedent in future arguments about the Digital Economy Act, in the UK, HADOPI in France, various blocking requirements in Italy, and numerous other schemes across the EU. As victories for ISPs in the copyright wars go, this one was comprehensive. It will be seen as a landmark ruling for years to come.' woot

'a simple parser of ARF compliant FBL complaints, which normalizes the email complaints and generates a 6-tuple n-gram version of the message. These n-grams are stored in a Redis database, keyed by the file in which they can be found. An inverse index also exists that allow you to find all messages containing a particular n-gram word.'

'access to websites containing words on the list would in theory be suspended and it would be impossible to create new ones containing them. However, it is not clear how and to what extent the directive will be implemented in practice. The TIB could decide to suppress or block pages for just one blacklisted word. ... The list, which borders on the ridiculous, includes words such as “etek” (skirt), “baldiz” (sister-in-law) and “hayvan” (animals). It poses serious problems for access to online information. If words such as “free” and “pic” are censored, countless references to freedom and everyday photos will be eliminated from the Turkish Internet.' Incredible (via Danny)

'Virgin and NTL [in the UK] blocked [del.icio.us] for years' due to a false positive -- joshua

'Internet blocking is ineffective. The current proposal lacks sufficient checks and balances, and may even require ISPs and telcos to break other laws to comply. It will inevitably result in innocents being tarred as offenders. Data Protection principles (such as “Adequate, Relevant, and Not Excessive” are being blatantly ignored to implement an ineffective solution. Far better is to shut down the shop by removing the images at source and invest time, energy, and resources into a more transparent effort to manage this issue.' well said

'Last year we revealed that the Department of Justice was working on secret plans to introduce internet filtering in Ireland. Now, despite a complete lack of any legislation, public consultation or democratic discussion, these plans have moved to the implementation stage.' wtf, this is just appalling lack of oversight

'Because it’s easy for a kid to find a site that isn’t blocked – or to “borrow” mum or dad’s credit card – it’s of no serious concern to the intrepid kid. It does suck if they want to find out how not to get AIDS though. So, we’re stuck with a situation that’s expensive for MNOs, embarrassing and annoying for consenting adults, and trivial for a child to bypass.'

O2 UK have just instituted a mandatory block for all "18+" content, which is only removed once the customer pays a UKP1 fee via credit card (which is immediately refunded). Twitter is *full* of angry UK O2 users right now

Adrian Weckler with a plea for the incoming govt regarding the attempt to rush through '3 Strikes' by the outgoing one: 'Such a law will have absolutely no effect on the practice of illegal filesharing. None. Zero. It hasn't worked in France. It hasn't worked in Britain. And it certainly won't work in Ireland. On the other hand, it may well send a signal to huge, jobs-creating digital IT companies that Ireland is a place that tries to legislate away personal digital freedoms.'

doh (via Graham Cluley)

from Malcolm Hutty, Head of Public Affairs at LINX (UK ISP organisation). insightful and a good summary of the state of the art in ISP-hosted filtering/blocking solutions.  The final few slides are especially useful

duplicate (fake) news sites created, possibly to put out fake stories; also interesting that international HTTPS was blocked.

Michele quotes Mr Justice Charleton's judgement: 'It is not surprising that the legislative response laid down in our country in the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, at a time when this problem was not perceived to be as threatening to the creative and retail economy as it has become in 2010, has made no proper provision for the blocking, diverting or interrupting of internet communications intent on breaching copyright. In failing to provide legislative provisions for blocking, diverting and interrupting internet copyright theft, Ireland is not yet fully in compliance with its obligations under European law.' Blocking, diverting and interrupting IP traffic? _wonderful_

DNSWL will charge for subscriptions to "heavy" users and anti-spam vendors

extensive. the NSFW words that Google Instant won't search for (via Waxy)

intriguing application of a Bloom Filter optimised for modern CPUs (2-level, with a cache-partitioned first level), providing massive speedups vs GNU grep or trie-based approaches like Aho-Corasick -- or possibly re2c, as used in "sa-compile". On the other hand, a perl implementation of Rabin-Karp, which is similar, didn't perform as well. Still, may be worth investigating

on "Haystack", a vaporous censorship-evading product aimed at Iran's internet surveillance, which as of yet is a site soliciting donations and a lot of press, and not a lot of techie details

Crazy suggestions leaked from the French anti-piracy authority. Mandatory host-based and router-based anti-piracy software and firmware with blocklists of suspect keywords, suspicious applications, TCP ports, protocols; detect suspicious apps installed; detect use of open wifi; detect use of anti-filtering/anti-blocking "workarounds" (ie. VPNs and Tor). Log all this to a dual journal, one of which will be encrypted using key escrow (presumably for use in prosecutions), retaining data for a year. Basically, a mandatory snooping infrastructure. Where would this leave Macs and Linux for French users?

apparently the IWF blocklist now lists them, in a typically overzealous false-positive-prone move, and O2 intercept and block IWF-listed URLs

Yahoo! anti-spam engineers talk about their extensive use of Hadoop and scale

it's the perfect 'gateway' to allow anti-filesharing filtering of the internet. 'Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of ”filters” is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.' Via TJ McIntyre

'it becomes clear that for some time now the Department of Justice has been proposing the introduction of internet blocking in Ireland – and has been doing this under the radar, without any public consultation or legislative approval. Indeed, it is clear from the list that the Department is not planning on introducing legislation but instead intends to introduce this new form of censorship without any legal basis, based on the now discredited Norwegian and Danish models.' This is very bad news indeed

Ireland's Dept of Justice is investigating setting up a "Great Firewall" filtering the country's internet, a la China and Australia. “Blocking involves censorship taken on no legal basis. There is no judge, no jury and no right to be heard if you are blocked,” says [DRI's TJ] McIntyre. “The chances are it also will be used in unaccountable ways by unaccountable organisations.”

version 0.94.x got end-of-lifed a year after the release of .95, to fix a bug that would increase bandwidth consumption on their mirrors. To mandate upgrades, the devs sent a kill-switch trigger to .94 installations in the field. chaos ensues, unsurprisingly

so, it seems the wireless ISPs don't have sufficient IPv4 space for their customers, and are filtering access to the internet via NAT; unfortunate side effect is that this breaks data retention as defined in the UK. wonder if the same applies here?

how the Great Firewall of Oz breaks so much more than the web browser

good call. but as one commenter notes: why isn't there an "unsubscribe from this list" button in the normal UI? now if I want to use this as a quick-unsub mechanism for mail I know is ham, I'm _forced_ to use "mark as spam" to get this shortcut, which doesn't make much sense