Re: Child pornography blocking again

[Kraktus <kraktus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 26/01/2008, Dominik Schaefer <schaedpq2@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Kraktus schrieb:
>> Tor already has censorship hooks.  Tor nodes are already in
>> control of their own exit policies.  Certain ports are already
>> blocked by default.
> It is (technically and legally) a whole different thing to filter based on
> ports or to filter based on content.
> Content-based filtering will get you in a huge bunch of technical,
> administrative, legal and moral problems. In short: it does not work.
>
> One example: in some jurisdiction you will get a serious problem with
> liability, if you start to filter something based on content. In some other it
> would IMHO be blatant illegal and even punishable. You can only prevent this
> by being strictly neutral concerning the content through your systems.
>
> Dominik

Thank you for the legal warning.  To be clear, I am not suggesting a
program to examine packets and do some sort of incredible image
processing to figure out if a photograph is child pornography, or
anything that would involve packet sniffing, I just want to block
certain IPs and hostnames.  I'm not sure why this would be illegal,
since many ISPs and firewall software already do this, but I'll make
sure to do my research before I do anything, if I do anything.

I do not save logs except occasionally for debugging purposes, and
even then, they are scrubbed.  While unscrubbed logs might be
useful to law enforcement in some circumstances, I recognise that
I cannot help them catch bad people without also damaging the
privacy of good people.  Nor do I sniff packets.