A Series of (Leader-Approved) Tubes

Wired's Mark Anderson hunkered down with internet sleuths and came out with this amusing snapshot of internet censorship in the third world. Surprise! It's incredibly shoddy.

Sometimes a censoring government tries to conceal its filtering behind spoofed web-browser error messages. [OpenNet Initiative] discovered that Tunisia, for instance, masks filtered pages by serving a mockup of Internet Explorer's 404 error page. These supposed error pages stood out, because ONI doesn't use IE.

"Rather than getting a page that says 'This page has been blocked,' you get a page saying 'Page not found,' designed to look exactly like the Internet Explorer 404 page," said Cairo-based ONI consultant Elijah Zarwan.