Out-Law newsletter says IWF "was wrong to lift its ban on a Wikipedia page"

[Florian Weimer]

* Richard Clayton:

> In article <877i51vdq4.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de>, Florian Weimer
> <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes
>
>>* Richard Clayton:
>>
>>>>So how do we get illegal content off the Internet if the criminals are
>>>>service providers themselves?
>>>
>>> The immunities that ISPs (and other intermediaries) are given don't
>>> apply if they're generating the content themselves
>>
>>If you tweak traceroutes and BGP paths (you can always make the path
>>longer; I'm not saying this has happened yet),
>
> There's a standard tool for rigging traceroutes ...  you'll find
> discussed in my PhD thesis :)

Nice.  It's been a while since someone played eristic dialectics with
me.

>> it will appear as if you aren't hosting or generating the content.
>
> If someone wants to know if you're hosting the content they won't do a
> traceroute !  They'll examine the source address of packets and then
> look that up in the databases maintained by the regional registries...

> Everybody looks at the traffic anyway ! (leastwise if they were paying
> any attention when they were trained [sometimes, in the UK, by me!])

Well, this certainly explains why UK law enforcement had so much
trouble of getting rid of illegal content which was injected into the
global Internet from a London data-centre.  After all, RIPE WHOIS said
it was hosted in Panama, so it wasn't their problem!

Unfortunately, this is not a problem specific to the UK, we've got it
as well, and so do the US.  Unwarranted trust in WHOIS databases
(which is promoted by your PhD thesis, by the way) is a huge issue.
Apparently, this will only stop after there's been a gross miscarriage
of justice. 8-(