Free Speech and the Internet

Anonymous

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As the United Nations has said, access to the Internet is a human right. A report by the U.N.'s special rapporteur presented last month to the Human Rights Council in Geneva warns that this right is being threatened by governments around the world — democracies included.

The main concern is about oppressive regimes trying to squash political dissent — like China, which jails bloggers, blocks Web sites and filters the Internet to eradicate words, including "democracy," from the conversation.

The report also warned against overzealous attempts by democratic states to control or censor online communications. Stopping infringement of intellectual property or the distribution of child pornography is legitimate. But governments must protect citizens' rights to speak freely — anonymously when necessary.

In Italy, a court convicted Google executives because a user uploaded a video on YouTube depicting cruelty to a disabled teenager, even though Google quickly removed the offending content. Brazil's Congress is debating legislation that would require Internet service providers to keep a log of customers' online activity for three years, which authorities could access without a court order to pursue crimes such as calumny.

The French and British parliaments have passed draconian laws that would ban users from the Internet for illegally downloading copyrighted material. The United States Senate is considering an intellectual property bill that would allow the government or private businesses to take action against a potentially large array of Web sites for "facilitating" piracy, an excessively broad definition.


The U.N. has proposed sound guidelines to defend free expression: censorship of content online must be transparent and enforced only through the courts. Governments should not rely on private entities like service providers to censor content and should not hold them liable for user content. Counterterrorism should not be an excuse to bar expression, unless it is to prevent imminent threats.

With few exceptions, governments should not adopt Internet registries that require users to reveal their identities. And defamation — so often used as a legal tool to repress political speech — should be decriminalized. Finally, nobody should be banned from the Internet. It is a fundamental tool for enabling free speech.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/opinion/04mon3.html?_r=3&src=recg

Freedom of speech is a Constitutional Right in India and also one of the basic freedoms enjoyed allover the world discarding few countries. Today governments and other goal oriented organisations/ institutions try to stifle any critical response or opposition by using police or not even giving license to protest citing public safety and other such excuses. For eg. Saudi Arabia does not let people protest for woman rights such as mere womens right to drive and I'm sure there are many such other examples which can be put forward not only for countries like Saudi Arabia but also countries like India, China, Germany, Italy etc.

Internet is last bastion where people can talk freely today, express themselves and communicate with eachother. Censorship is nothing less than withholding information from a group of people for personal gain (or Government gain/control). Essentially, it is taking options and thoughts away from the people so that only one side of a story is seen.

 

Godless-Kafir

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This is moronic, they should catch the criminal who tortured the disabled teen, instead they ban the site that brought out to light!!! WHAT THE HELL!! Italy Taliban?
 

Anonymous

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A Guide To Bypass Internet Filters

Lately as we have seen many Governments have started slowly filtering internet with "undesirable" content. A sure way to gain public support by the Government is to state that these measures are block child pornography because no-one wants child pornography, its bad, never mind that such material is maintained in "closed circles" and a person would have to be actively pursuing access to it in order to obtain it which really nullifies any reasoning for the filters in the first place. The sort of material that the government is proposing to ban (child pornography, depictions of sexual violence and the like) isn't kept on websites for long periods of time. Many of the sites appear and disappear in hours - they are likely travelling salesmen that stop for a short time to sell something and then move on. Government knows about this but all this hue and cry is not to censor CP but free speech and ideas as lately the MSM is not as effective in spreading Govt. propaganda as before.

The MSM and Govt. have been spearheading war on Internet and few Govt. have already started imposing filters such as:

*Australian government to introduce Internet filter

*New Zealand implements country-wide government internet filter

*Venezuelan president calls for Internet regulation

I am sure slowly more governments will follow suit and restrict the internet. There are few easy steps to bypass this filtering. Of course, if you use those techniques to access content that's outright illegal, you shouldn't be surprised if the police come knocking. But given the high likelihood that content will get misclassified, either through human error or deliberate political attempts to block what's seen as undesirable material, these kinds of tactics are bound to become more common.

Bypassing Method
The filter works by simply blocking access to sites that are on a government blacklist. That blacklist will be a secret until the next time it's leaked (the original blacklist was leaked almost as soon as it was created! Here is the wikileaks link which is banned in Australia, naming websites which are already banned as of 2009. ). Now, I've noticed a lot of people have been saying that there are other ways to bypass web filtering, and there are. I am only mentioning the best method I know. Others you might want to try are:

Method 1# Some sites will be easily opened. Simply Google for something that's on the blacklist and rather than opening the link to the search result click the "Cached" link. This will direct you to a copy of the content that's stored on Google's servers as part of their index. Somehow, I doubt that the Australian government is going to block Google.
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Method 2#Alternately, you can sign up for one of the hundreds of free or cheap VPN services that are available. These create a secure connection between you and a proxy server that collects the content for you and sends it to you. The connection is encrypted and inaccessible to the government.
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Method 3#This one, as far as I know, will never be stopped.

in your command prompt, type

ping hackthissite.org

or anything else you wanna visit. Now you should have a load of info, including delay times and, most importantly, an IP address for the website. Simply type this IP address into the address bar, preceded by http://, and you'll be able to access the page!

For example: http://197.57.189.10 etc.
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Method 4#Using a translator, like Altavista's Babel fish, to translate the page from japanese of something to english. This will bypass the filtering and won't translate the page, since it's already in English.

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Method 5#Use a proxy. I recommend torproject.org but there are thousands of them available just google it. Another great tool is this URL converter

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Method 6#Another simple method which works with many filters is adding https instead of http. I dont know whether this will work on govt. filter or not, but what the hell just try it out.

Example:
Welcome to Facebook - Log In, Sign Up or Learn More

and

https://facebook.com

The difference is that the second one contains an S in the http segment.

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Method 7#There are few other methods too. I will simply post their links here since the data is too large:
*How to Bypass Most Firewall Restrictions and Access the Internet Privately
*Breaking into the World Wide Web | Escaping Internet Restrictions
*Delete Computer History
*Bypassing URL Filter
*How To Bypass Internet Censorship And Filters: A Guide To Circumvention Technologies And Anonymous Browsing

This article from Boing-Boing have some excellent links and sources to bypass the filters - Boing Boing's Guide to Defeating Censorware

The Govt. of Fiji blocked some websites and he people there have been using this website to gain access: www. L i n k I t .free.fr

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Method 8#There are free Internet Filter softwares available too, however, I have never tried them myself so cannot confirm how they work.

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Method 9#Simple method: Mods please note cannot include sources below due to privacy concern.
HOW TO BYPASS URL FILTERING:

This tutorial will show you how to bypass URL filtering.

*Note, this method does not work with Internet Explorer (and if you are using internet explorer i would suggest upgrading to Firefox)

Firstly, find the Ip address of the website you would like to access:
(I will use Google as our example.) You can do so very easily by going into CMD and typing: ping google.ca

1) Google.ca IP = 74.125.91.104

Take notice that there are 4 different numbers each separated by a period.
Convert each number into an 8 digit binary value. You can do so by using the windows calculator, setting it to scientific, and then pressing the DEC option. Type in your number (74) then press the BIN option and it gives you the 8 digit binary value. Now record this value and continue this process with the other 3 numbers.

2) 01001010 01111101 01011011 01101000 (This is the binary values of the above IP)

The next step is simple. Take the above binary values and convert that into a 32-digit value. Notice how there are 8 digits in each binary value. Well 4*8 = 32. Simply remove the spaces from the above number and you get your 32 digit value.

3) 01001010011111010101101101101000

Now we are at the final step. To access your blocked website, you must convert the 32 digit value into a decimal value. This mean that you will need to turn the number above into something that looks like 123,456,789 (just and example) The converted number does not need to be a specific length.

4) The number you get when you convert the 32-digit value is 1249729384.

If you have done this correctly, go to your web browser and in the address field type in Google It should take you to google.ca

PLEASE NOTE:
The last step is the most complicated because it is very hard to find a reliable online binary to decimal convertor. I would suggest researching on your own and playing with windows scientific calculator. The above address field may not work but this methodology of URL filtering is still valid.

COMMON ERRORS:
-Using Windows Explorer
-Using an a crappy online convertor
-Typing Errors and deleted numbers accidently.
* Note another method to find IP address is using this website Find IP address of a website - server ip lookup
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Hope the above information helped to some extent.
 

S.A.T.A

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The vast and immeasurable scope of internet as a tool of social mobilization has forced modern states to consider rewriting the old rules of social organization,democratic societies find the task more challenging than others.

There is a very thin line that separates the right to free speech and the right to defame,that has always been the case,however in the time before internet,free speech was exercised by people,often moderated by the thought that their standing in the society and the circle of intelligentsia would be jeopardized if the proverbial Rubicon was crossed.

The anonymity of the internet,robs the necessity of one to be accountable to the content of his speech,with no premuim on discretion,many times these days one cannot be expressing free speech without indulging in a bit of defamation or free speech is exercised solely with the purpose to defame.

Govt's have been lenient on account of Internet was still in its nebulous stage as powerful tool of social expression,now that is no longer the case,the genie is now out of the bottle and how we control it,preserving its salient character as a medium of popular communication and knowledge dissemination,without allowing it to degrade into a source of social anarchy, is the biggest challenge.

P.S:Governments will always want to control something as powerful a medium as the internet,to an extent there is no way to stop that or prevent it from happening.what we must ensure is that,even as the govt seeks greater control over the internet,they dont enslave it to their authoritarian whims.
 

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