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.

Comments

[andy]

What the hell is ONI? Some of us are too lazy- or just don't care enough- to click on the link. Thanks in advance for clearing that up.

[jf]

ONI is the One Nostril Initiative, which is fighting to end the domination by the more conventional dual-nostrilled totalitarian governments.

[zeiner]

What the hell is ONI?

At first, when Weigel referred to ONI I thought it was the Office of Naval Intelligence (google ONI that is the first link).

From the ONI website - The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions...Our aim is to excavate, expose and analyze filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion. We intend to uncover the potential pitfalls and unintended consequences of these practices, and thus help to inform better public policy and advocacy work in this area.

[Larry A]

I wonder if the report includes penalties. There's a difference in whether the 404 applies to the site or the webmaster.

[Qbryzan]

What the hell is ONI?

I believe it is a form of Japanese Demon