The European Commission is calling for a massive internet filtering effort

[calucifer]

It's gone very quite here, come on folks with announcements like the title of this one, idons is going to be needed sooner rather than later.

By the way the full title which the forum title isn't big enough to hold is
"The European Commission is calling for a massive internet filtering effort in order to block illegal filesharing." (linky) or the original report.
I know the headline is to prevent file sharing, but once it's in place ..... Then porn, then anything the EU disagrees with, then ....


Some questions, for those more knowledgeable than I

• Is the primary method of censorship to use DNS filtering?
• Are there other methods and how effective are they?
  

[bug1]

DNS filtering is a way of preventing new users from easily discovering sites, its like boarding up the front door to someones house, you can still get in (windows, back door), but visitors might not bother.

Deep packet inspection is used for censorship, but its expensive due to the CPU resources required, e.g most email is checked against only a dozen or so rules AFAIK. Its easy to censor static sites because they can just check the URL against a blacklist, but with dynamic content the URL doesnt mean much so they have to look at the actual data.

A distributed name system will keep the front door open, which means if there are attacks behind the scenes then the project might be able to redirect traffic coming through the front to a different system without users noticing.

Or if the distributed name system is used with a distributed service (cloud computing is the in thing apparently) then there is no centralized way to shut down the resource, they effectively have to stop everyone or nobody.

[delomoney]

It starts with illegal filesharing and then pretty soon it will be anything they don't like. this isn't good for the internet, the internet thrives because its free and accessible to anyone, unlike TV and Radio!