8 ms·

Danish Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident

189 points by websagir 15y ago

Censorship online is an emotive issue. Some people believe that all information should be free and as adults it

orbitingpluto 15y ago
Legally, there should be libel issues. How many of your clients are going to continue to want to do business with you when they come across a notice that you're serving child pornography off of your site? And on a DNS note, I always have at least two alternative DNS servers memorized so that I can continue to get around when providers' DNS goes to hell.
- ukd1 15y ago
  The Google ones are easiest; 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4. You can get away with just the first, if you're feeling lazy.
eblackburn 15y ago
As a grad I accidently changed hundreds of mortgage expiry dates from UK to US format (rectified immediately). Lesson learnt. Switching Facebook off for 5.5 million people trumps though!
- DanBC 15y ago
  "Fat Finger" errors are surprisingly common in finance. (http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/03/16/3207/the-curse-of-the-fat-fingered-trader/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/03/16/3207/the-curse-of...)
ypcx 15y ago
"By Accident" - read: global government successfully tested internet dissent suppression software in real environment and on real people. Small details, like the laws allowing them to actually use it (or not, as in the case of MegaUpload where they did not need it) will be provided soon. Mass media will report that these laws "were applauded by the general public, which now feels more protected from the threats of internet terrorism." Self-destruction by greed is the dominant gene in the DNA of our current economic system. Let's hope it proceeds smoothly, and doesn't take the planet with it.
franksmith66 15y ago
How illogical is this....LOL
billybob 15y ago
TL;DR - police in Denmark made a mistake that resulted in visitors to many sites being told that the site is blocked for possibly having child porn. --- EDIT: Is there a guideline against 'TL;DR' comments? When I've written them in the past, they've been upvoted.
- billybob 15y ago
  Let's see, how much damage was done by this? Each blocked site lost: - $X directly in business missed during those hours - The trust of users who believed the warning If they lost these things by arson or slander, the perpetrator might be punished. But since it was the government, they'll probably get nothing but an apology. Any justice system will have some collateral damage: standing trial costs you time, money and reputation, even in a fair trial where you're declared innocent. But since the damage is so real and sometimes severe, we should REALLY force government to be careful how it applies itself. Warrants, oversight, auditing, judicial review, etc. No bureaucrat should have a "ruin this business" button.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    According to the article, it's a voluntary scheme, so presumably the right target of a lawsuit would be the ISPs who chose to blindly trust this data, not the government... That's the way they're getting away with the lack of oversight: Make it "voluntary" ("or we'll tell the press you support child porn", nudge, nudge)
- natep 15y ago
  It could be that your TL;DR has exactly the same content as [the first paragraph of] TFA, so it adds nothing to the conversation, the way a good summary of a complex topic would. Edit: forgot some words
  - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
    That's kind of the very definition to "TL;DR". Personally, I think they are an atrocity, because if everything useful in an article could be distiller to a tweet, it should have been a tweet and not an article that made it to the front page of HN. I don't downvoted them, though (unless highly inaccurate), because they may provide use to some people in deciding whether TFA is worth spending their time on.
fluidcruft 15y ago
The authorities are just going to end up developing a whitelist of high-profile sites not to block. This is unfortunate because even high-profile sites deserve to be subject to the same laws and levels of scrutiny everyone else must tolerate. Once there's a whitelist mechanism law enforcement will just be even more cavalier.
- sesqu 15y ago
  From the article, it sounds like the whitelist is exactly what was blocked. It may well have been a list of urls recently found baseless, in which case there wouldn't be an override function ready, but the list was white.
yaix 15y ago
I hope that all 8000 accidentially blocked sites will demand being paid for damages. If each site gets a million in damages, it would be a nice reminder for the governments world wide that censorship is a bad thing.
- pavlov 15y ago
  I don't think a Danish court would order the Danish government to pay a million dollars to a foreign company for damages due to mistakes made by Danish officials. That's just not how it works in a small country...
  - oellegaard 15y ago
    Definitely not. Furthermore you must be able to proof that you actually lost the money according to Danish legislation, so you will have a hard time sue'ing for millions of dollars for a short outage caused by an accident.
    - geoffw8 15y ago
      ...unless of course you are Google, and actually lost out on a substantial amount of money.
- anamax 15y ago
  > I hope that all 8000 accidentially blocked sites will demand being paid for damages. They can demand all they want, but most govts give themselves rather wide immunity wrt such things. They have the authority to block sites. They have procedures for doing so and have wide discretion as to what procedures to use. They made a small mistake in applying said procedures. There's little/no chance that they'll be held liable, no matter how much damage you can show.
feralchimp 15y ago
> NITEC is responsible for maintaining a list of sites which they want to be made unavailable to Danish citizens. Each day the country’s Internet service providers retrieve the list and then apply DNS blockades across their infrastructure. So that's already pretty weak, but then we find out it's implemented with a shared Windows folder. sigh.
- fabricode 15y ago
  In order to prevent this kind of censorship in the future, a motivated individual just has to drop the ip address / hostname of the computer sharing the folder into the folder itself. Problem solved.
- sp332 15y ago
  The article says "retrieved" from a "folder". It doesn't even say whether it was Windows, or on a server somewhere. It could have been FTP or something.
  - pdeuchler 15y ago
    "It could have been FTP or something" And that makes it better?!
    - fraserharris 15y ago
      FTP is still the standard for file transfer in most large corporations. It is as secure as other methods.
      - sp332 15y ago
        FTP has no security at all. Usernames, passwords, and data are all sent in the clear, in plain text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftp#Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftp#Security
      - drivebyacct2 15y ago
        >FTP is still the standard for file transfer in most large corporations. Um, what large corporations? And on God's green earth, why? >It is as secure as other methods. No, no it absolutely isn't. In terms of highly available ways of sharing data, FTP is the least secure of all of them. And it's not even a close race.
rickmb 15y ago
So when exactly are we going to wake up to the fact that governments in the "free" West have over the past two decades implemented measures with respect to freedom of information, communication and privacy that in the decades before that we've consistently denounced as totalitarian police state tactics when it came to communist nations? The problem is not that the police made this mistake. The problem is that they actually have the authority to do this in the first place.
- bh42222 15y ago
  Since it happened slowly, over decades, with real help from external forces like terrorists, and we did not "wake up" then, we certainly are not going to suddenly wake up now. The world is slowly sliding towards a semi-free market/totalitarian government like Singapore has. Totalitarian states like China are moving towards a bit more free markets. Formerly free states like the US and western Europe are moving towards more totalitarian state powers. The key seems to be as long as the economy is OK people don't revolt. Look at the Arab spring vs. how prosperous and peaceful Singapore is. Wasn't freedom nice while while it lasted? I wonder what our grandkids' reaction will be when we try to tell them how things used to be.
  - smokeyj 15y ago
    "Grandpa Grandpa! Tell us that story about using Google without a Search Authorization Form again!"
- pfraze 15y ago
  Please don't use the words "wake up" or put quotes around the word 'free.' It's bad writing. Government is a constant tension between maintaining order/safety and allowing people to do as they like. It is a good thing that we have rules, and it's a good thing that somebody can enforce them; it's also a good thing to have as few rules as possible. Those two realities have to coexist, and it will never be a satisfactory "one or the other." We're all aware when the balance swings a bit. That doesn't mean we need to... I don't know what you're suggesting; revolutionize? It means we need to push back politically, which we did with SOPA/PIPA, and find ways to maintain our own power, like circumventing the DNS weakness. We're not exactly lost in the wilderness here. And I haven't even had my coffee yet.
smokeyj 15y ago
I can hardly keep up with what's politically correct these days. Isn't censorship for oppressive regimes and the sort? I thought Europe was supposed to be progressive..
- rmc 15y ago
  Don't believe everything you read in newspapers. US Left Wing newspapers & media will cherry pick countries and places which can imply that the EU is a paradise. Reality is a bit more complicated and nuanced than that.
- gsmaverick 15y ago
  It's nothing new (see: German laws regarding denial of the Holocaust).
MattJ100 15y ago
It begs the question what the list of 8000 "legitimate" sites is for...
- strictfp 15y ago
  Maybe for the whitelist ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656682 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656682)?
orbitingpluto 15y ago
As a total aside have you seen what teenagers post on their Facebook pages? I've made comments to underage teenagers in my list that their pages are a little sexually creepy. I have my 90 day Facebook chip. FBA... someone has to make a site/browser plugin for that.
guimarin 15y ago
I don't understand why google or microsoft even doesn't distribute a list of their IP addresses for their online properties with Chrome/Windows respectively. That way you could get a pop-up that said, 'google.com is no longer resolving, fall back on the hardcoded list?' Then a check-box for never asking me again. Google/Microsoft and other big properties could even push this out as a 'Security Feature' to prevent DNS spoofing attacks. I understand that that would lead to banning of actual IPs by governments, but given the organization of the internet, that is a bit harder than mucking around with DNS.
- simonbrown 15y ago
  You think that would make sense to most Chrome/Windows users?
- vegardx 15y ago
  You never want to hardcode anything like that. You use DNSSEC instead. Right now the adoption is slow, but things are speeding up. With DNSSEC you would be able to authenticate that you are indeed getting the proper DNS reponse from your name servers. Combine that with SSL and you could be pretty sure that you are indeed talking to the right Google. Now we just need some form of fingerprinting like SSH has.
dendory 15y ago
As long as they insist on breaking DNS there will still be easy solutions for us geeks, like using caches local IP lists. Just hope they don't start blocking actual IP traffic based on deep inspection.
- vegardx 15y ago
  Why not just set up your own resolver? If they start to filter out root servers they literally break the Internet, which is bad if you're in the business of delivering said Internets.
- ukd1 15y ago
  I doubt they'll end up using deep packet inspection for everyone, as far as I understand it's just too expensive at the moment. Maybe this will change though.
redridingnews 15y ago
My concern, now that we know that it is THAT easy to block websites, I wonder how many more sites can be blocked in the next couple of months due to accidents. It is all automated, no human oversight after one guy presses the button to censor. Especially if none of those 8000 sites file a charge.
mvip 15y ago
Haven't we had enough of these kind incidents to realize how slippery the censorship slope is? Censorship is pointless. People who want to circumvent the censorship will do so regardless. This just goes to prove that (by accident or not) censorship will be abused.
Porter_423 15y ago
Couple of days ago USA Government was trying to pass a bill in Senate named SOPA and PIPA bills.And now Danish Police has been censoring Google,Face book and 8000 sites?So what about freedom of information,communication and the freedom of press?My question is "Is this was just an accident or they were just obeying the order of their government?" If yes then it is surely a stupid thing.
Joakal 15y ago
Here's a good read of how Denmark originally intended to censor child porn went on to censor many other areas including piracy, sites that didn't pay taxes, etc: http://ww.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/nqytz/censorship_what_happened_in_denmark/ http://ww.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/nqytz/censorship_what...
vegardx 15y ago
Good thing DNSSEC will put an end to all this madness with DNS-filtering and spoofing. It's not working as intended and should never have been installed in the first place.

189 points by websagir 15y ago

Censorship online is an emotive issue. Some people believe that all information should be free and as adults it

Legally, there should be libel issues. How many of your clients are going to continue to want to do business with you when they come across a notice that you're serving child pornography off of your site? And on a DNS note, I always have at least two alternative DNS servers memorized so that I can continue to get around when providers' DNS goes to hell.

ukd1 15y ago
The Google ones are easiest; 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4. You can get away with just the first, if you're feeling lazy.

eblackburn 15y ago

As a grad I accidently changed hundreds of mortgage expiry dates from UK to US format (rectified immediately). Lesson learnt. Switching Facebook off for 5.5 million people trumps though!

DanBC 15y ago
"Fat Finger" errors are surprisingly common in finance. (http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/03/16/3207/the-curse-of-the-fat-fingered-trader/ http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2007/03/16/3207/the-curse-of...)

ypcx 15y ago

"By Accident" - read: global government successfully tested internet dissent suppression software in real environment and on real people. Small details, like the laws allowing them to actually use it (or not, as in the case of MegaUpload where they did not need it) will be provided soon. Mass media will report that these laws "were applauded by the general public, which now feels more protected from the threats of internet terrorism." Self-destruction by greed is the dominant gene in the DNA of our current economic system. Let's hope it proceeds smoothly, and doesn't take the planet with it.

franksmith66 15y ago

How illogical is this....LOL

billybob 15y ago

TL;DR - police in Denmark made a mistake that resulted in visitors to many sites being told that the site is blocked for possibly having child porn. --- EDIT: Is there a guideline against 'TL;DR' comments? When I've written them in the past, they've been upvoted.

billybob 15y ago
Let's see, how much damage was done by this? Each blocked site lost: - $X directly in business missed during those hours - The trust of users who believed the warning If they lost these things by arson or slander, the perpetrator might be punished. But since it was the government, they'll probably get nothing but an apology. Any justice system will have some collateral damage: standing trial costs you time, money and reputation, even in a fair trial where you're declared innocent. But since the damage is so real and sometimes severe, we should REALLY force government to be careful how it applies itself. Warrants, oversight, auditing, judicial review, etc. No bureaucrat should have a "ruin this business" button.
- vidarh 15y ago
  According to the article, it's a voluntary scheme, so presumably the right target of a lawsuit would be the ISPs who chose to blindly trust this data, not the government... That's the way they're getting away with the lack of oversight: Make it "voluntary" ("or we'll tell the press you support child porn", nudge, nudge)
natep 15y ago
It could be that your TL;DR has exactly the same content as [the first paragraph of] TFA, so it adds nothing to the conversation, the way a good summary of a complex topic would. Edit: forgot some words
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  That's kind of the very definition to "TL;DR". Personally, I think they are an atrocity, because if everything useful in an article could be distiller to a tweet, it should have been a tweet and not an article that made it to the front page of HN. I don't downvoted them, though (unless highly inaccurate), because they may provide use to some people in deciding whether TFA is worth spending their time on.

fluidcruft 15y ago

The authorities are just going to end up developing a whitelist of high-profile sites not to block. This is unfortunate because even high-profile sites deserve to be subject to the same laws and levels of scrutiny everyone else must tolerate. Once there's a whitelist mechanism law enforcement will just be even more cavalier.

sesqu 15y ago
From the article, it sounds like the whitelist is exactly what was blocked. It may well have been a list of urls recently found baseless, in which case there wouldn't be an override function ready, but the list was white.

yaix 15y ago

I hope that all 8000 accidentially blocked sites will demand being paid for damages. If each site gets a million in damages, it would be a nice reminder for the governments world wide that censorship is a bad thing.

pavlov 15y ago
I don't think a Danish court would order the Danish government to pay a million dollars to a foreign company for damages due to mistakes made by Danish officials. That's just not how it works in a small country...
- oellegaard 15y ago
  Definitely not. Furthermore you must be able to proof that you actually lost the money according to Danish legislation, so you will have a hard time sue'ing for millions of dollars for a short outage caused by an accident.
  - geoffw8 15y ago
    ...unless of course you are Google, and actually lost out on a substantial amount of money.
anamax 15y ago
> I hope that all 8000 accidentially blocked sites will demand being paid for damages. They can demand all they want, but most govts give themselves rather wide immunity wrt such things. They have the authority to block sites. They have procedures for doing so and have wide discretion as to what procedures to use. They made a small mistake in applying said procedures. There's little/no chance that they'll be held liable, no matter how much damage you can show.

feralchimp 15y ago

> NITEC is responsible for maintaining a list of sites which they want to be made unavailable to Danish citizens. Each day the country’s Internet service providers retrieve the list and then apply DNS blockades across their infrastructure. So that's already pretty weak, but then we find out it's implemented with a shared Windows folder. sigh.

fabricode 15y ago
In order to prevent this kind of censorship in the future, a motivated individual just has to drop the ip address / hostname of the computer sharing the folder into the folder itself. Problem solved.
sp332 15y ago
The article says "retrieved" from a "folder". It doesn't even say whether it was Windows, or on a server somewhere. It could have been FTP or something.
- pdeuchler 15y ago
  "It could have been FTP or something" And that makes it better?!
  - fraserharris 15y ago
    FTP is still the standard for file transfer in most large corporations. It is as secure as other methods.
    - sp332 15y ago
      FTP has no security at all. Usernames, passwords, and data are all sent in the clear, in plain text. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftp#Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftp#Security
    - drivebyacct2 15y ago
      >FTP is still the standard for file transfer in most large corporations. Um, what large corporations? And on God's green earth, why? >It is as secure as other methods. No, no it absolutely isn't. In terms of highly available ways of sharing data, FTP is the least secure of all of them. And it's not even a close race.

rickmb 15y ago

So when exactly are we going to wake up to the fact that governments in the "free" West have over the past two decades implemented measures with respect to freedom of information, communication and privacy that in the decades before that we've consistently denounced as totalitarian police state tactics when it came to communist nations? The problem is not that the police made this mistake. The problem is that they actually have the authority to do this in the first place.

bh42222 15y ago
Since it happened slowly, over decades, with real help from external forces like terrorists, and we did not "wake up" then, we certainly are not going to suddenly wake up now. The world is slowly sliding towards a semi-free market/totalitarian government like Singapore has. Totalitarian states like China are moving towards a bit more free markets. Formerly free states like the US and western Europe are moving towards more totalitarian state powers. The key seems to be as long as the economy is OK people don't revolt. Look at the Arab spring vs. how prosperous and peaceful Singapore is. Wasn't freedom nice while while it lasted? I wonder what our grandkids' reaction will be when we try to tell them how things used to be.
- smokeyj 15y ago
  "Grandpa Grandpa! Tell us that story about using Google without a Search Authorization Form again!"
pfraze 15y ago
Please don't use the words "wake up" or put quotes around the word 'free.' It's bad writing. Government is a constant tension between maintaining order/safety and allowing people to do as they like. It is a good thing that we have rules, and it's a good thing that somebody can enforce them; it's also a good thing to have as few rules as possible. Those two realities have to coexist, and it will never be a satisfactory "one or the other." We're all aware when the balance swings a bit. That doesn't mean we need to... I don't know what you're suggesting; revolutionize? It means we need to push back politically, which we did with SOPA/PIPA, and find ways to maintain our own power, like circumventing the DNS weakness. We're not exactly lost in the wilderness here. And I haven't even had my coffee yet.

smokeyj 15y ago

I can hardly keep up with what's politically correct these days. Isn't censorship for oppressive regimes and the sort? I thought Europe was supposed to be progressive..

rmc 15y ago
Don't believe everything you read in newspapers. US Left Wing newspapers & media will cherry pick countries and places which can imply that the EU is a paradise. Reality is a bit more complicated and nuanced than that.
gsmaverick 15y ago
It's nothing new (see: German laws regarding denial of the Holocaust).

MattJ100 15y ago

It begs the question what the list of 8000 "legitimate" sites is for...

strictfp 15y ago
Maybe for the whitelist ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656682 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656682)?

orbitingpluto 15y ago

As a total aside have you seen what teenagers post on their Facebook pages? I've made comments to underage teenagers in my list that their pages are a little sexually creepy. I have my 90 day Facebook chip. FBA... someone has to make a site/browser plugin for that.

guimarin 15y ago

I don't understand why google or microsoft even doesn't distribute a list of their IP addresses for their online properties with Chrome/Windows respectively. That way you could get a pop-up that said, 'google.com is no longer resolving, fall back on the hardcoded list?' Then a check-box for never asking me again. Google/Microsoft and other big properties could even push this out as a 'Security Feature' to prevent DNS spoofing attacks. I understand that that would lead to banning of actual IPs by governments, but given the organization of the internet, that is a bit harder than mucking around with DNS.

simonbrown 15y ago
You think that would make sense to most Chrome/Windows users?
vegardx 15y ago
You never want to hardcode anything like that. You use DNSSEC instead. Right now the adoption is slow, but things are speeding up. With DNSSEC you would be able to authenticate that you are indeed getting the proper DNS reponse from your name servers. Combine that with SSL and you could be pretty sure that you are indeed talking to the right Google. Now we just need some form of fingerprinting like SSH has.

dendory 15y ago

As long as they insist on breaking DNS there will still be easy solutions for us geeks, like using caches local IP lists. Just hope they don't start blocking actual IP traffic based on deep inspection.

vegardx 15y ago
Why not just set up your own resolver? If they start to filter out root servers they literally break the Internet, which is bad if you're in the business of delivering said Internets.
ukd1 15y ago
I doubt they'll end up using deep packet inspection for everyone, as far as I understand it's just too expensive at the moment. Maybe this will change though.

redridingnews 15y ago

My concern, now that we know that it is THAT easy to block websites, I wonder how many more sites can be blocked in the next couple of months due to accidents. It is all automated, no human oversight after one guy presses the button to censor. Especially if none of those 8000 sites file a charge.

mvip 15y ago

Haven't we had enough of these kind incidents to realize how slippery the censorship slope is? Censorship is pointless. People who want to circumvent the censorship will do so regardless. This just goes to prove that (by accident or not) censorship will be abused.

Porter_423 15y ago

Couple of days ago USA Government was trying to pass a bill in Senate named SOPA and PIPA bills.And now Danish Police has been censoring Google,Face book and 8000 sites?So what about freedom of information,communication and the freedom of press?My question is "Is this was just an accident or they were just obeying the order of their government?" If yes then it is surely a stupid thing.

Joakal 15y ago

Here's a good read of how Denmark originally intended to censor child porn went on to censor many other areas including piracy, sites that didn't pay taxes, etc: http://ww.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/nqytz/censorship_what_happened_in_denmark/ http://ww.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/nqytz/censorship_what...

vegardx 15y ago

Good thing DNSSEC will put an end to all this madness with DNS-filtering and spoofing. It's not working as intended and should never have been installed in the first place.