Re: information about cenzorship in Slovenia

["cesare VoltZ" <voltsz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hy Matej,

I'm just curious about how Slovenian Goverment (technical issue) had blocked the gambling site. I'm asking this because in Italy the law enforcement blocked the site only reconfiguring the original site on all public DNS where consumer (ADSL and dial/up) are authenticate itself (so: the DNS specified by DHCP from AAA to CPE).

So, the site www.foo-bar.com (supposing gambling site) are 1.2.3.4 IP resolved by DNS and every DNS in the world are resolved correctly. In Italy that name are resolved instead in 
11.22.33.44 that is a anti/gambling site directly on lawenforcement facility.

I see two big issue about this solution:

1) when a computer authenticate on internet (dial in from ADSL or dial/up) the DNS address cam be other one, only specified it by manual configuration (on my computer I've a DNS server that use all root server around the world). In special case, with easy configuration, can be a foreign DNS.
2) the gambling site can be rename the site name (transforming from "www.foo-bar.com" in "www.f00-bar.com").

I agree with your comment about that, internally in Europe, gambling site is legal. The same about buy a car, make a insurance, using a bank. But Im see that there are many interest about making this only on a paper... :)

Cesare

On 9/16/06, Matej Kovacic <matej.kovacic@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

I would just like to let you know that Slovenian government (Slovenia is
a member of European Union since last year) a week ago decided to block
two on-line gambling sites, because they do not have a licence to
operate in Slovenia.

There are several problems with this, the major is that Office for
Gaming Supervision sent a simple letter (not an official order!) to
ISP's to block the site (what about "mere conduit" doctrine???) and
major ISP's just did it. It is also funny, that European Court of
Justice ruled in 2003 that across-border gambling like that is legal,
because EU has free movement of services enacted (see case Gambelli). My
personal opinion is that this cenzorship is illegal in many ways, but
the problem is that ISP's dont want to oppose governemnt and they simply
don't care about their users's rights.

But this also opened a great possibilities to inform people about Tor as
an anti-cenzorship tool, and of course I did it. :-))

So I just wanted to let you know that illegal cenzorship is not just
something which is happening in China. And I hope a lot of people in
Slovenia know about Tor now and see it as good anti-cenzorship tool.

BTW, we had similar example of cenzorship before (see
http://matej.owca.info/privacy/PHR04_slovenia.pdf, page 7 - udba.net case).

bye, Matej