16 December 2008

Romanian censored sites (warning: about porn but SFW)

Recently Romania started to block access to some websites, deemed to have pornographic content and, in the Romanian style, the decision to block each site is not made by a judge, but by a government bureaucrat. The first batch contains 40 websites and only websites hosted in Romania (the law does not apply for sites hosted abroad).

And also in the typical Romanian style, the list of blocked sites quickly surfaced on the web.

censure
photo by Bogdan Manolea, published under CC-BY 2.0

At a quick scan on the domain names, almost all the websites seems to be porn but here is a notable exception: 220.ro is a crappy and dubious local YouTube clone with user generated content which contains some amount nudity (not sure about porn, since I use the site very rarely).

I leave open for the debate if the porn sites should be blocked or not (note: this is "adult" not "kiddie") and what is porn.

PS: the blocking is implemented at the DNS level, so affected are those using the DNS server provided by their local ISP.

2 comments:

  1. Can you confirm if any of these sites are indeed inaccessible?

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  2. Yes, for example adult-portal is still inaccessible using a DNS server from a local ISP. But many of them seems to work as the blocking was poorly implemented and easy to escape, just by changing the server's IP address

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