Parody not politics

[GaryOwen]

[Ghost]

hahaha, good one!

[ShotMagnet]

'I don't even know if I can trust the sham of an election, now that I know who's going to win...'

Would that the Onion would let me write for them.

For that matter: Vote Shot!; He doesn't suck.

Shot

[Tacbat]

I wanna know what the cure for awakeness is...

[[]_--__[]KITT]

Youtube has been banned by my government.

They must be running out of things to do...

Where do I get my free porn now?? :decu:

[Kingtiger]

_--__[]KITT;151480']

Where do I get my free porn now?? :decu:

Redtube.com :sonic:

[Ssnake]

Youporn.com

[Ssnake]

Besides, how do they "ban" a web site. They can manipulate the regional domain name service, but you could always pick a DNS server in your internet settings from a different country, or you type in the IP address of Youtube directly: 208.65.153.238

The alternative would be to enforce a national proxy server. In which case you could define your own proxy server somewhere abroad. There are also anonymizers, but they usually cost response time and have rather limited bandwidth.

[Captain_Colossus]

Besides, how do they "ban" a web site.

Probably in the in the same sense that prohibitions on anything don't actually disappear the offending material- drugs and controlled substances, elephant and rhinocerous ivory, a certain class of weapons, child pornography- but the 'ban' means sanctions enforced once the perpetrator is caught with them.

[AllenInWV]

Besides, how do they "ban" a web site. They can manipulate the regional domain name service, but you could always pick a DNS server in your internet settings from a different country, or you type in the IP address of Youtube directly: 208.65.153.238

The alternative would be to enforce a national proxy server. In which case you could define your own proxy server somewhere abroad. There are also anonymizers, but they usually cost response time and have rather limited bandwidth.

Your techspeak makes my head hurt.

[Ssnake]

Probably in the in the same sense that prohibitions on anything don't actually disappear the offending material- drugs and controlled substances, elephant and rhinocerous ivory, a certain class of weapons, child pornography- but the 'ban' means sanctions enforced once the perpetrator is caught with them.

Well, that's the other approach, of course. However, in some countries - including some parts of Germany (thanks to federalism) - authorities attempt to deny access to websites by manipulating the DNS entries. (In the specific case, it was a US nazi web site under the disguise of a Martin Luther King biography web page, just in case you were wondering). So it's not forbidden to access the site, yet they're trying to lock out the "unwashed masses who don't know how the interweb works". But simply by using the IP address you can bypass this measure simply because IP addresses don't need a DNS resolution (the domain names were invented because they're easier to memorize than IP addresses, but they're an add-on to the internet, after all).

The alternative is to be seen in countries like China where all internet traffic gets routed through state-run proxy servers who then filter out whatever today's party line considers "too dangerous" for the minds of the people. In this case decentralized anonymous proxy networks are the solution. Every proxy server forwards an in-going web address to one out of a group of other proxies, which do the same (the user can specify through how many cascades a site request should go to ensure his anonymity). So each proxy only knows the previous proxy's request, and the address of the proxy server to which the incoming request was forwarded. Ultimately, if you had access to all server logs of the entire cascade you could trace back a web page access to a specific user, but since the servers are ideally located in different countries there's only so much that a state can do about this.

Unfortunately, the fact that criminals are also using these services to disguise their activities, these anonymizer services have come under pressure in the past years, and authorities also attempt to sue the operators of peer to peer anonymizer proxies as conspirators of those criminals, which undermines the network since fewer people are willing to set up such a proxy of their own.

Yet, at least in principle, the system works. So if you're living in an oppressive state with a thought police that penalizes bans the possession of certain digital CONTENT, once that they seize your computer you're in trouble. But until then it's difficult if not impossible to connect your computer with the access of outlawed material. Unfortunately that works for Freedom for Tibet web sites as well as for child pornography, or islamist jihad websites with bomb construction blueprints.