OpenNet Initiative on South Korean Government Censorware Collateral Damage
The OpenNet Initiative recently had a study
"Collateral Blocking: Filtering by South Korean Government of Pro-North
Korean Websites"
http://opennetinitiative.net/bulletins/009/
"Tests undertaken by the ONI in December 2004 and January 2005 reveal that South Korean blocking extends to far more than the 31 web sites targeted by the orders. An additional 3,167 unrelated domain names hosted on the same servers as the blocked sites are also blocked. These web sites are completely unrelated to North Korea. This collateral blocking remains in place today."
The related Internet Censorship Explorer blog entry (not the report itself) was kind enough to mention in passing my much earlier cyberpatrol report on similar massive "collateral damage":
Blocking by IP address generally leads to the blocking of content that was never intended to be blocked since many thousands of domains can be hosted on a single IP. ...
Also, the same problem (or is it a feature?) has been documented in commercial filtering software as well.
Non-echo note: In fact, this is a big issue driving the internal
structure in creating the censorware blacklists. The overall
blacklists are often divided into bans by-name, and bans by-address.
I actually wanted to investigate this issue from the "inside-out" (i.e.,
from the blacklist entries themselves).
Sigh ...
