Re: ACM TechNews; Monday, November 13, 2006
On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 02:30:19PM -0500, technews wrote:
> Read the TechNews Online at: http://technews.acm.org
>
>
> "A Sneak Peak at a Fractured Web"
> Wired News (11/13/06); Anderson, Mark
>
> The OpenNet Initiative is putting together an unprecedented report on
> government censorship of the Internet, with the help of about 50 cyber law,
> free speech, and network specialists from nations where censorship is known
> to occur. Transparency of censorship practices vary: from Saudi Arabia
> where blocked sites are listed and users are urged to recommend sites for
> censorship; to countries such as Tunisia where the government uses "Page
> not found" messages made to look "exactly like the Internet Explorer 404
> page" to hide their censorship practices, says Elijah Zarwan, an ONI
> consultant from Cairo. Some government utilize denial of service (DoS)
> attacks, carried out by a third party, that allow them "some plausible
> deniability," says Nart Villeneuve of the University of Toronto's Citizen
> Lab. While DoS attacks primarily target opposition party sites, commercial
> motives also exist for censorship: the United Arab Emirates grants a
> monopoly to its telecommunications provider, therefore the government
> blocks VoIP citing legal reasons. Attempts to prevent, or get around,
> censorship include Web applications and browsers that hide a user's IP
> address and emails sent from ever-changing addresses. While China was the
> first nation to censor Internet material, many dictatorships have followed
> its lead in the past five years, says Reporters Without Borders' Julien
> Pain, who praises the ONI project. However, the project has its risks:
> even project manager Rob Faris recognizes the danger that the project will
> provide valuable information that enhances governments ability to censor
> content, such as revealing Web sites that governments would want to block
> but had not known about.
> http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,72104-0.html
>
Anybody care to hazard a guess about how many of these censorship tools
are open-source free software?
-- hendrik
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