VOIP & Port blocking

A leading VOIP provider, Vonage, has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about "an instance of portblocking... by a high-speed Internet provider." This is not the first time the issue of port blocking and VOIP has been raised. A port is a "logical connection" location used with TCP/IP and UDP protocols. Certain port numbers are assigned, by the IANA, to specific protocols or services. For example, port 80 is reserved for HTTP traffic. When you access a website in your browser you are actually conecting to a web server running on port 80. Port blocking by countries and companies for various reasons is not a new thing: Saudi Arabia blocks access to standard proxy server ports to counter possible circumvention of their national Internet filtering my own ISP, Bell Sympatico, blocks access to port 25 (SMTP) apparently in an effort to combat spam. There are reports that British Telecom blocks access to ports associated with VOIP. And Panama requires ISP's block access to ports associated with VOIP.

Netbar Crackdown?

A Red Herring story has just come out about the crackdown on Internet cafe's in China.

Beijing's crackdown on thousands of Internet cafes grew more from games of Counter-Strike than fears of counter-revolution... Chinese parents aren't that concerned their kids will join underground pro-democracy parties or learn the truth about human rights violations in Tibet, but rather that they'll get addicted to online video games. And that might lead to a Chinese parent's worst nightmare: kids playing hooky and getting bad grades.

I agree with the arguments presented in this article; it seems to me that there is this perception that net cafe's in China are teeming with cyber-dissidents when its mostly young people playing Counter Strike. However, it should still be noted that the increasing restrictions on net cafe's do prevent them from being used for anonymous communications and dissident activities.

As Nart Villeneuve of the OpenNet Initiative points out, crackdowns have made it harder for those who used Internet cafes for the relative anonymity they once provided.
"Should one seek banned information from home, there's always the possibility that this activity could be tracked to one's home," said Mr. Villeneueve. "ID card requirements and technical monitoring/filtering, with technology such as Net110, reduce the relative anonymity of the Internet cafes."

Alaska Filtering

The Anchorage Daily News is reporting that Alaska is using Websense to filter Internet access for State employees to save on bandwith costs. The article states:

For some reason, however, the software also blocks access to the Web sites for liberal political satirist Al Franken and liberal radio programs Air America Radio and Stephanie Miller but not the Web sites for conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly.

This is not (neccesarily) a liberal vs. conservative dynamic, but rather one of the inherent problems with filtering technology: categorization. In this case stephaniemiller.com, which does not host a live audio feed or audio files but is about a radio personality, is classified as Streaming Media and airamericaradio.com, which does have a "listen live" link and links to audio files, is classified as Internet Radio and TV while rushlimbaugh.com and billoreilly.com, which both have "listen live" links and links to audio files, are classified as News and Media. The end result is that categorization decisions taken by a private company (decisions that are not subject to review for these lists are the secret) determine what content employees of the state of Alaska can view. Ron Deibert put it best "ceding to commercial entities the responsibility of placing limitations on freedom of speech through tools that are sheltered from close public scrutiny because of intellectual property protections."

Why Block by IP address?

South Korea has an advanced Internet infrastructure. Yet when implementing Internet filtering South Korean ISP's have chosen to block by IP address. As a result, while trying to block 31 web sites they have actually blocked 3,167 unrelated domain names hosted on the same servers as the sites they intended to block. We've seen this type of over blocking in India, and previously, when filtering first started in Iran. Even China, with an advanced filtering system, still blocks by IP address (along with other mechanisms such as key words in URL paths). Also, when Pennsylvania state law required some of the world's top ISP's such as AOL, Verizon and Worldcom to filter they also implemented this exact form of filtering. The filtering in Pennsylvania had these exact unintended consequences (blocking content that was never intended to be blocked) which ended up being the main reason that legal action was able to reverse the law in that case. So why do countries continue to block by IP address?

Nepal: Internet Down, Total Censorship Imposed

Following a coup (or not a coup) Nepal's connection to the Internet has been intentionally severed. After King Gyanendra seized power, the army occupied Nepal's Telecom companies and Internet Service providers. Leading politicians have been arrested and total censorship has been imposed.

I tested 578 .np (Nepal) domains, retrieved from Google (site:.np) to determine if they were accessible. The results show that 278 .np domains, presumably hosted in Nepal, were inaccessible. The remaining 302 .np domains were accessible but an APNIC WHOIS lookup shows that they are not hosted in Nepal. It does appear that Nepal is cut off from the Internet.