British Prime Minister David “One is an Ordinary Bloke” Cameron’s porn filter is being used to purge the internet of a few sites that he does not want British people to see.
The alarm call was sounded by the German hacker site the Chaos Computer Club over the weekend which noticed that its site had been blocked in the UK.
Vodafone customers were also being stopped from accessing the ticket sales to this year’s Chaos Communication Congress.
The group claims that its sites were on a list which censors the open internet. These internet filters, authorised by Prime Minister David Cameron, are implemented by UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs) were supposed to stop porn from falling into the hands of children. But it appears that the list has been extended to include material deemed “extremist”.
Users can opt-out of censorship, or bypass it by technical means, but only a minority of users know how to bypass those filters.
Chaos points out that accessing its server directly via http://213.73.89.123/ appears to work quite well, thereby rendering the censorship efforts useless.
CCC-spokesperson Dirk Engling said that he saw this as proof that censorship infrastructure – no matter for which reasons it was set up, and no matter which country you are in – will always be abused for political reasons
