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Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
[Rotten.com is certainly in poor taste, which I believe is the point, but illegal? Heavens. Now some Germans will no longer be able to get their daily dose of Bonsai Kittens, hosted at rotten.com. (http://www.politechbot.com/p-01715.html) As silly as this proposal is, this is not the first time a German government has moved to require its ISPs to block access to purportedly offensive content. In early 1996, if memory serves, Germany required ISPs to block webcom.com, a large California ISP that happened to host a holocaust-revisionist website run by Ernst Zundel. (http://www.mccullagh.org/image/5/ernst-zundel-1.html). T-Online blocked Zundel's "Did Six Million Really Die?" screeds hosted at webcom, and lots of innocent webcommers in the process, but the German politicos reportedly backed down after mirror sites sprouted. (http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/z/zundel-ernst/press/canadian-press-0296.html). --Declan] ********* From: soylent@rotten.com To: declan@well.com Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 16:06:59 -0700 Subject: New German law requires ISPs to block rotten.com and 3 other sites Legal authorities in in Dusseldorf have required that all ISP's in the German state of Nordrhein-Westfalen block access to rotten.com under a controversial new censorship law designed to target "illegal content". This is an article on the subject, in German unfortunately. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/hod-15.10.01-000/ Of four sites ordered blocked in the United States, three of them are Neonazi, and the remaining one is rotten.com The 56 ISP's in Nordrhein-Westfalen are required to block access at their routers. Some Germans remain skeptical as to whether this action by Nordrhein-Westfalen is legal or technically enforceable. But it is the first time sites in Germany have been ordered blocked in this manner. Tom soylent@rotten.com / Rotten Staff ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------