Belarusian Internet Censorhip of the Day -now without foreign domains!

[Takhisis]

These people are now giving themselves the power to fine people for accessing any website they don't like. What next? Cutting off the entire country's Internet connection like Mubarak?

Spoiler :

Belarusian Internet Censorship of the Day: A law recently enacted in Belarus bans citizens from conducting business with foreign websites.

It requires all businesses in the country to use the country’s .by domains, and requires Internet café owners to monitor their users to monitor and report any foreign commerce conducted online at their establishments.

The law also gives the government the power to maintain a list of banned websites and charge anyone who visits them with a misdemeanor. Individual violations of the law could carry fines of up to $125, and businesses who violate it could be shut down.

This could lead to foreign websites blocking access from Belarus, in order to prevent legal trouble if someone from the country visits them.

The government of President Alexander Lukashenko has a history of Internet censorship, blocking the websites of political opponents and protestors. Last year, 1,800 people were arrested for participating in “Revolution Internet,” a series of protests organized via social media.

Lukashenko has called the Internet “trash,” and threatened to “whack” online protestors.

The new law goes into effect on January 6th.

 

[Perfection]

Don't be a stinker, be a source linker!

 

[amadeus]

Makes me wonder why all the Russians nostalgic for the Soviet Union haven't all moved to Minsk.

 

[wolfigor]

These people are now giving themselves the power to fine people for accessing any website they don't like.

However I dislike their regime, in this case they are not (strictly speaking) exercising censure.

If we care to read the details behind the headlines we will see:

The Law requires that all companies and individuals who are registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus use only domestic Internet domains for providing online services, conducting sales, or exchanging email messages. It appears that business requests from Belarus cannot be served over the Internet if the service provider is using online services located outside of the country. The tax authorities, together with the police and secret police, are authorized to initiate, investigate, and prosecute such violations.

So if you have a company in Belarus you have to register it locally (with suffix .by) and not abroad.
Also the servers of the company have to be located in Belarus and not abroad.
This does not apply to foreign companies operating in Belarus.

What next? Cutting off the entire country's Internet connection like Mubarak?

If you want to see "good" internet censorship just look at any middle-east country: they are already doing it with minimal or no fuss from international media.
Due to work, I have some insight on the topic...

At the time of the "revolution" Egypt was building their infrastructure for what is euphemistically called "content filtering" for ALL internet connections in the country.... the revolution arrived before the system was ready (mostly due to Egyptian incompetence).

A Canadian company was providing the know-how and the engineers to implement the system at the main data centers of national ISPs. and at the national peering points (where all physical data and voice connections with the outside world pass through).

The system is rather sophisticated.

Spoiler :

For example every time a user connects to to a web page the system chek the URL against a black list of banned websites.
If the URL is not part of the black list the system Analise the page and categorise it with "tags" (e.g. normal, sex, politics, alchool, etc).
At this point according to a policy for such tags, the access to the URL is blocked or allowed.
At the same time the request is logged together with the identity of the user: de-facto they create a profile of each user that local authority can use even if they don't block the URL itself.

Such systems are already in place in most middle-east countries: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, etc.

It's funny how media and people here mostly complains about things happening elsewhere.

 

[The_J]

That's not really sophisticated, since it would also block neutral and anti sites ^^.
Rather simple. A good system would involve also a whitelist and more extensive connection recognition between the words. And AFAIK the science is not that far in this area.

And this time it happens in front of our doors. mmhh