censorship on the net

[ade]

posting this on a pragmatic note.
Europe | OpenNet Initiative

lately, many sites have become inaccessible....and i'm not talking about the real pervy stuff, just sites like this (although i do consider much and many to be perverse, but not all perversions are necessarily nasty). i wouldn't be surprised if, at some point in the near future, i will no longer be able to access this site.
what worries me most is the policy on personal expression, as in:
“Harmful” material, as defined in the plan, is that which might offend the values and sentiments of others and could pertain to politics, religion, or racial matters, and could also vary significantly between cultures.

while i have never had anything against filtering the sex-sites (thank god, they actually did it), i think they're going too far with banning 'harmful' material, and this site may eventually come under the umbrella of such vague ideas.

[kite]

say goodbye to any sort of ideas concerning dissent or critique.
i hopefully doubt they banned any support sites such as TBN (hopefully it's just a server traffic error or something), but just in case (and if they haven't already banned it) download and use TOR or some other internet freedom tool. it was developed with the idea of use for anonymous speak from within oppressive governments, but i guess great britan isn't too far from china now, is it?

[Samaki]

If it is blocked, leh file transfer over IRC? I'll do it for you, I don't have it now, but I can DL it.

[Abigail]

Well I've never been banned anywhere, but thats probably due to the fact that I'm a kiss ass towards authority.

All I can say is, contact the admins of said sites, then? I know there is one site, abdl related, that people have been having trouble accessing, so it may be a technical issue.

[kite]

if what ade posted to be the issue then it's not any sort of system admin, but great britain itself, blocking the internet.

[Lukie]

The only censorship I've ever encountered has happened quite recently.

News sites block access to videos to people outside of their domain. For example, there are some things on the BBC site and YouTube that I can't view. Same with some American sites.

Example: http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4E40261B140B1301 (any one of those clips)

The error message I get is This video is not available in your country.

[kite]

have you tried going through tor lukie?

[Peachy]

I get the "This video is not available in your country"-message on YouTube too for the link Lukie posted. THe same thing happens when trying to access the video archive on the proper BBC website. Reason? Our IPs are outside the UK, so we don't hold a British TV license. That means it's filtered by the host, not my ISP.

I also get the "This item is not available in your country"-message on Ebay when trying access auctions for Nazi stuff.

Other than that, there is no censorship of internet websites in this country. If the ISP tried to initiate any such thing, customers would run from them like rats deserting a sinking ship, not to mention the public uproar that would create. The government cannot censor anything, and neither can the country's biggest ISP, which is owned partially by the government. Reason? Our constitution says:

Article 5
[Freedom of expression]
(1) Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his
opinions in speech, writing, and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance
from generally accessible sources. Freedom of the press and freedom
of reporting by means of broadcasts and films shall be guaranteed.
There shall be no censorship.
(2) These rights shall find their limits in the provisions of general laws, in
provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal
honor.

That said, I can still access TBN.

Peachy

[DannyTheNinja]

And yet you still can't buy Nazi stuff.

There are still some things that are censored in Germany, mainly Nazi/Socialist related things. Whether they have the ability to censor that kind of thing on the Internet (say, some guy in Russia starts a pro-Nazi group) I can't rightly say.

--Danny

[kite]

that's just strange. it's like the 'scene not found' in nine inch nail's "i wanna f*ck you like an animal" video. it's just blacked over.
still hard to get my head around it.