Everything you wanted to know about online censoring and filtering

By Michael Lithgow, May 26, 2008 Comments (0)

Even wonder what you’re not getting access to on the internet? New technologies and new powers that be are increasingly capable of filtering websites from online use. A new book from MIT Press Access Denied gives the skinny on internet censoring strategies and motivations. From a review at neural.it:

Ten OpenNet Initiative (ONI) researchers were involved in this seminal report for a few years, focusing on general internet filtering strategies and motivations, and analyzing the filtering conditions and legal/ethical tactics state by state .. Every sensitive country has its own mix of motivations and consequent strategies. So, showing a warning or a disguising error web page is a political choice, directly reflecting the government policies, as well as using passwords, IP classes or entire services (Skype) as the censorship technical targets. Scanning the different filtering politics is like viewing a social and political atlas, revealing what a formal territory fear most. And the resulting patterns constitute a contemporary geography of mute networks.