From: Gary Howland <gary@systemics.com>
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 20:02:45 +0800
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject: Re: German prosecutors redouble attack on Net, subversive leftists
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9609042251.A15950-0100000@well.com>
Message-ID: <322E94B9.41C67EA6@systemics.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Declan McCullagh wrote:
>  
> The German Generalbundesanwaltschaft (Chief Federal Prosecutor's
> office) has "advised" the Internet providers to block access to
> http://www.xs4all.nl:80 and http://www.serve.com:80 due to
> supposedly illegal contents at the URLs http://www.serve.com/spg/154/,
> http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal//154/ and
> http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/angela1/radilink.htm.
> 
> The commercial ISPs have blocked the routes to the servers.
> Their statement (in German) is at http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901d.htm

I wonder how they are doing this?  We know that the Germans allow full
internet access (don't they?), so they can't be using a filtering http
proxy.  I guess they're blocking on IP number (and perhaps port).  It
might be a good idea for xs4all to gather up all of their spare IP
numbers, and alias the lot on their web site - this would increase the
number of blocked addresses needed.  It might also be a good idea to run
some proxies on unusual ports (eg. smtp, DNS, pop, ftp ports) (although
of course this will then need to be a dedicated proxy machine) - again
this would increase the size of the blacklist that the Germans must use,
and may involve some awkward router programming (for example, a router
might be configured to allow all DNS traffic - if a proxy is sitting on
the DNS port, then things get a bit difficult to set up).  Of course,
netscape probably won't allow use of these ports (it certainly doesn't
allow the use of port 79).

Gary
--
pub  1024/C001D00D 1996/01/22  Gary Howland <gary@systemics.com>
Key fingerprint =  0C FB 60 61 4D 3B 24 7D  1C 89 1D BE 1F EE 09 06