Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Blocked

Some pages that pop up if you live in the Netherlands and try to visit a foreign torrentsite. In a nutshell : Some private company called Brein won a legal process in which the accused ISP's in the netherlands are obliged to block "any IP or Domain linking to" that particular site, whenever this private company requests so... Now we don't feel like typing ellaborate ins and outs of this lawsuit, but, the result is, were facing blocked pages on request of a private organisation.  Which can demand to have IP adresses and domains names blocked, without any further form of legal control. They send a list, ISP has to oblige.
Both ISPs signed appeal against the verdict, and several other dutch ISP's refuse to comply to block requests until this appeal has served. In the meantime our internet is being filtered. Since we rarely use torrents we could care less, but the 1st thought is : What's next ?

Take a breath, and think what precedent the above has put out. And what the possible consequences are. And you likely think, well, its just the Netherlands. Thats at least as far away as China, or Syria, or Iran from where I live. But mind the Dutch are were once living in one of the most liberate country's in the world. What happens there can easily happen to all of you. Also currently there are some serious bills blasted through US and EU parliaments, that can have severe impact on the internet as you know it today.

Anyways.If your dutch and blocked: http://fuckcensuur.nl/ there's your torrents back, and Here some other workarounds. (more Proxy's but also TOR and VPN providers). Not because we want to promote any form of piracy, but we will fiercly protest to this form of censorship.

Now we are not planning on Blogging on RL politics and legal systems, or write long rants on for instance SOPA PIPA ACTA -> for when you lived under some rock, or dont have a clue what all the fuzz is about, here's an understandable explanation.

But as a member of an active open source community, Red Dragon likes to demonstrate against this "Censorship" thats actively taking place here, and possibly about to take place on the rest of our beloved "free" internetz. Without being "blocked". Whilst we still can.....

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