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Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

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Re: Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

#11

Post by scurvy »

njs12345 wrote: post #6
alexchamberlain wrote: post #4

You can turn it off in the UK; right?

There is a system you can't turn off, although you're unlikely to run into it from day to day usage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...

Unlikely, but possible. Large web hosts end up on the list from time to time, and a lot of innocent sites are blocked in the process. It's an incredibly difficult process to find out what site triggered the initial block and to get your IP's removed from the list.

Yes, they use IP's. They don't do URL-level filtering. They use IP's.

Re: Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

#12

Post by lukasm »

jwr wrote: post #7

Poland censors nothing. So far. There have been efforts to introduce censorship, so far effectively countered.

No event so far, but the law is in place, meaning there is no clear definition if someone publishes on the internet is he/she a journalist. Some may use bullets that you offend head of the state, president or "blasphemy". Better off in a country which doesn't have any tools at all.

Over the years there was this notion that US is a role model of democracy and freedom which is a joke especially in a context of recent news.

Re: Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

#13

Post by Beltiras »

Iceland is relatively free of censorship. There are a couple of IP numbers filtered by way of court order (hosted images of minors in compromising positions), but sadly those filters have collateral damage (shared hosting sites on same IPs). Interior Ministry is in awe of the results in the UK and wants to do the same. Resistance to the ideas is pretty high since the general population has a pretty good idea of the entailments. (side note: a popular Icelandic blog and news aggregator, eyjan.is is blocked by the UK porn filters, bit of an irony really).

Re: Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

#14

Post by dvcc »

scurvy wrote: post #10
dvcc wrote: post #3

The US web is not really censored. DMCA is not censorship and COPPA is a violation of federal law for various reasons.

It is true that the US doesn't have a national framework for censoring the Internet. However, it does exist in patchwork form on an ISP level. Every major ISP censors and filters websites and IP's it deems to be harmful. A lot of times, there's confusion and a lot of innocent sites are caught up in the mix due to name based virtual hosting in webservers. Some would argue that anti-spam blacklists and droplists are ce…

I have not come across anything that was censored by my ISP in anyway. Only one such case was cited on Wikipedia, were Verizon blocked text messages due to a violation of ToS.

Could you provide any more information on ISPs blocking content?

Re: Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

#17

Post by opendais »

nailer wrote: post #9

Side note: I don't consider DMCA censorship - most of the time the content is available elsewhere, it's just that someone's nicked a copy from the original author (or whoever owns the rights). If I send a takedown notice to someone who's ripped off an article from my blog, people can still read the article on my blog.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130730/17572624008/rotol...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/eff-federal-judge-dont...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130814/09424724172/more-...

etc.

Re: Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

#18

Post by ThePhysicist »

Most parts of the European Union? Obviously there are some exceptions like the UK but overall there are few countries that have either the technical infrastructure or the legal framework required to perform large-scale Internet censorship (please correct me if I'm wrong). Of course it's difficult to draw the line between politically motivated censorship (which most people are concerned about) and legitimate, small-scale censorship of websites that contain illegal content. I don't consider content removal due to copyright issues (e.g. on Youtube) censorship, for example, but I'm of course aware that governments often justify the censoring of content through its alleged illegality. Before talking about the extent of censorship on the Internet it would be necessary to have a good definition of the term first, I think.

Re: Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

#19

Post by lmm »

njs12345 wrote: post #6
alexchamberlain wrote: post #4

You can turn it off in the UK; right?

There is a system you can't turn off, although you're unlikely to run into it from day to day usage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...

That system has blocked wikipedia before. Fortunately people made a fuss and that block was quickly removed, but accidental or deliberate censorship of a less well known site could easily go unnoticed for months or years.
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