Secret website blocking proposals presented to Ed Vaizey

[RecQuery]

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/...king-proposals

Granted it's not the sort of thing this board usually gets all indignant over but I think it's appalling. BTW this won't block me or anyone else with decent technical knowledge from viewing what they want, it'll just block everyone else.

EDIT: On top of this BT and Talktalk have been denied their say on the Digital Economy Act.

What I find particularly annoying is that people who wouldn't even know what an ethernet cable looks like, say they understand the Internet and are telling the technical community how to run technology. BTW the DEA violates the EU eCommerce directive amongst other things.

[ducati]

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/...king-proposals

Granted it's not the sort of thing this board usually gets all indignant over but I think it's appalling. BTW this won't block me or anyone else with decent technical knowledge from viewing what they want, it'll just block everyone else.

EDIT: On top of this BT and Talktalk have been denied their say on the Digital Economy Act.

What I find particularly annoying is that people who wouldn't even know what an ethernet cable looks like, say they understand the Internet and are telling the technical community how to run technology. BTW the DEA violates the EU eCommerce directive amongst other things.

Your'e going to need to give us non compes types some background to this. Read the link and it seems some geeks are indignant. But I don't know why.

[RecQuery]

Your'e going to need to give us non compes types some background to this. Read the link and it seems some geeks are indignant. But I don't know why.

Hmm okay try these for background (The website blocking looks like a follow on or related measure):

http://www.digitaleconomyact.info
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...-third-reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Act_2010

[ducati]

OK got it now, the internet is just another media as far as I'm concerned, it is much more user oriented though, so open to all kinds of abuse. The thing is, it was invented by the military, not a bunch of hippies as they would tell you, so it should not come as a suprise that the brakes get put on to try to retain some kind of sanity.

On you go......

[RecQuery]

The precursor to TCP/IP was invented by DARPA via arpanet, which primarily drew from universities and really was a bunch of hippies, any subsequent development was done by basically a bunch of geeks and hippies. On a side note though, I fail to see how origins influence something like this.

Like I say it won't block anyone with decent technical ability it'll just mess with your average user.

[theone]

The internet was designed in such a way (As I know you, RecQuery, know, I don't want to teach my Granny how to suck eggs) that it is devoid of central control. Whether the reason for this was to avoid censorship etc is open to discussion, but either way, I think it's a good thing.

The internet, as I see it, and with its current architecture, can never be controlled by governments. Access to it, and influence to change it into a controllable form, can. I hope that doesn't happen.

<EDIT> Sorry, having read the links here I realise I was talking about a totally separate issue!

[RecQuery]

What you're saying is perfectly relevant to the discussion in general and while it's practically impossible to selectively block the internet, even if you cut the entire country off you could still use the landlines or a mobile phone to dial in to a hub in another country and route from there, or using a microwave or satellite link etc.

What I suspect they'll do is try to get ISPs to block stuff either using more restrictive transparent proxies, DNS filtering or domain seizures - ISPs and hosting companies aren't exactly happy about that though. Even if that happened the technical user could use Tor, proxies, SSH tunnels, DNS tunnels, ICMP tunnels, Freenet or GNUNet. That was just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are other ways.

Right now there are two blocking attacks to contend with, those uptight 'family values' people who don't want personal responsibility and those profiteering companies who don't want to adapt their revenue models. Any success they have will only affect the average user as I've said a couple of times.

Most technical people probably know all this already, I'm just trying to inform everyone else, trying to get people to oppose censorship and the erosion of civil liberties.