“Starting December 4th, Wikipedia administrators noticed a surge of edits from certain IP addresses. These IPs turned out to be the proxies for the content filters of at least 6 major UK ISPs. After some research by Wikipedians, it appears that the image of the 1970s LP cover art of the Scorpions’ ‘Virgin Killer’ album has been blocked because it was judged to be ‘child pornography,’ and all other attempts to access Wikimedia foundation sites from these ISPs are being proxied to only a few IP addresses. This is causing many problems for Wikipedia administrators, because much of the UK vandalism now comes from a single IP, which, when blocked, affects potentially hundreds of thousands of anonymous users who intend no harm and are utterly confused as to why they are no longer able to edit. The image was flagged by the the Internet Watch Foundation, which is funded by the EU and the UK government, and has the support of many ISPs and online institutions in the UK. The filter is fairly easy to circumvent simply by viewing the article in some other languages, or by logging in on the secure version of Wikipedia.”
Wow. This is terrible. For years, it has appeared that child-porn legislation would be extended into widespread censorship, but it is finally happening in a quasi-public way. The Internet was built to withstand nuclear Armageddon, but there’s one thing it can’t survive: politicians.
Fox censors Sally Fields anti Iraq war statement at the 2007 Emmys during her acceptance speech for winning for her role in the ABC drama Brothers and Sisters.
Comcast is perfectly within its right to filter the Internet traffic that flows over its network. What it is not entitled to do is to impersonate its customers and other users, in order to make that filtering happen. Dropping packets is perfectly OK, while falsifying sender information in packet headers is not.
Comcast lowers its bandwidth bills by spoofing TCP RST packets. The net effect is that if their customers run normal TCP/IP stacks, the customer’s computer will think the remote host has disconnected. Right now, they use this on Bittorrent traffic, but the same technique is used in China to perform per-keyword HTTP-over-TCP filtering, too. One solution, presented in this paper, is to hack your TCP/IP stack to ignore, or at least be smarter, about spoofed TCP RST packets.
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