Report [France] The government can filter the Internet

[sqrage]

The exchanges were stretched to the Assembly on Wednesday night, where the atmosphere was reminiscent surrounding the adoption of anti-piracy law Hadopi. In a packed chamber just a few technophiles MPs from all sides were fighting against a legislative machine that seems to have somewhat excited. Section 4 of the Bill Loppsi 2, text tote on Homeland Security, was finally adopted. It will allow the government to filter the Internet using a blacklist issued by the Ministry of Interior, without the intervention of the judiciary. A measure that the government justify the need to better fight against child pornography sites and cybercrime in general.

The opposition as a whole have adopted a posture anti-Loppsi and the majority is not met behind the text of the government. "There is no left-right divide on this issue," said Laure de La Point.fr to Raudière, UMP member of Eure-et-Loir. Strongly opposed to Internet filtering, as well as a handful of MPs from all sides technophiles, it deems "inefficient" even if "all members are naturally agree with the objective consensus" to fight against child pornography. Still it did not vote against this article.

The ministry will provide the blacklist

The exasperation is shared by Lionel Tardy, UMP alone (Haute-Savoie) who voted against Article 4. The sites are pedophiles, according to him, "a very small audience, but extremely motivated, unfortunately, who will not hesitate to do the research necessary to find these sites." "The filtering of any kind, there will be nothing." According to one who had already opposed the web laws, "we must act at the source, where are the servers. It is possible through international agreements, since we know the countries that pose problem ".

More.

 

[Slapshot136]

so what technology are they using to filter the internet and what can you do to get around it?

 

[phyrex1an]

so what technology are they using to filter the internet and what can you do to get around it?

The presence of a distributed blacklist indicates that the filter is dns based in which case using a dns server which doesn't use said blacklist is enough. Check for example opendns or google dns (note that these services might also be subject to censoring).

If the blacklist is ip based, or your isp does deep packet inspection of dns requests, then you can either get a vpn (or setup one yourself) from an isp which doesn't do these kind of things alternatively use a darknet (like tor).

The problem with these filters are that they are so easy to circumvent that they can't have an effect on the problem they [officially] want to fix and at the same time they open up a gigantic can of possible abuse.
The only conclusion I can come up with is that either the policy makers (and their advisors) are completely incompetent or they only setup these system so that they can abuse them. Well, I guess that the ones selling the filtering software and hardware might have something to do with this too...

 

[sqrage]

>>The problem with these filters are that they are so easy to circumvent that they can't have an effect on the problem they [officially] want to fix and at the same time they open up a gigantic can of possible abuse.

I wouldn't really consider that a problem.


>>The only conclusion I can come up with is that either the policy makers (and their advisors) are completely incompetent or they only setup these system so that they can abuse them. Well, I guess that the ones selling the filtering software and hardware might have something to do with this too...

I doubt that because the tech savvy people will be able to circumvent it anyway, but laymen wouldn't have any idea where to even begin. Then again I guess with more advertising they would get a huge boost in sales. Though if they're going as far as censoring websites I wouldn't doubt that they'd censor the adverts of such products.

 

[Hatebreeder]

>>The problem with these filters are that they are so easy to circumvent that they can't have an effect on the problem they [officially] want to fix and at the same time they open up a gigantic can of possible abuse.

I wouldn't really consider that a problem.


>>The only conclusion I can come up with is that either the policy makers (and their advisors) are completely incompetent or they only setup these system so that they can abuse them. Well, I guess that the ones selling the filtering software and hardware might have something to do with this too...

I doubt that because the tech savvy people will be able to circumvent it anyway, but laymen wouldn't have any idea where to even begin. Then again I guess with more advertising they would get a huge boost in sales. Though if they're going as far as censoring websites I wouldn't doubt that they'd censor the adverts of such products.

I think this is a reaction to all the "-Leak" sites that have been giving alot of countries problems.
However, with such technology, they're able to do something similar to what the Germans did back in 1940-ish. They censored everything and silenced everyone who they thought was a threat and have done alot of pro-nazi propaganda.

I know this is unlikely to happen. However, this is as bad as taking away your ability to be anon and thus is a roundabout to control people's activities on the net.

Honestly, I have no clue how I'd override this filter other than giving a proxy server a go.
So, yeah, internet won't be a free place much longer, no? =P

 

[sqrage]

>>So, yeah, internet won't be a free place much longer, no? =P

I don't think it's as simple as that. The people can always start their own internet which is not regulated by the government. And as Phrex pointed out, there are open DNSs out there such as the one provided by Google.

I truly believe Google has people's freedom in mind and if something similar happened in the U.S. Google would try their best to open up something that allows freedom of information back onto the internet.

 

[Ninja_sheep]

Well, phyrexian said pretty much everything.
It's so easy to get around those blockades with just free software.

 

[Icyculyr]

Gah, here it comes. Obama already passed a bill that says he can "turn off" the internet in the US, literally, OFF. All the control, evil government = bad.