muzzy's Journal: Lapsiporno.info

Woah, I forgot there was a journal in slashdot until I logged in to comment a post about my site. Anyway, I've been censored by the Finnish Police for what they claim is a "child porn portal".

I have written a description of the site and the events in English. To summary it, I published a fairly large portion of the secret censorship list and pointed out that 99% of the sites listed are not child porn. I asked what was the deal about it, and the police confirmed they don't only block child porn sites but also sites that link to them. However, the law regarding the lists only permits them to add actual child porn sites to the said secret list. I figured I'd provoke them a little and added a feature to my list, to turn all entries into clickable links. In the next list update, my site was in the list too.

A lot of people seem to have zero tolerance towards publishing the secret list even if it only has few actual child porn site addresses in it. The police is among these people, and they're suspecting me of aiding the distribution of child porn now. Funny enough, they only started suspecting me a few days after the censorship lists were updated and sent to operators, and only after they came under some heavy critic for blocking my site.

Now, I agree that there's no value in publishing links to child porn sites, but I recently spotted one address in the list that I had reported almost over a year ago to authorities. Why was the domain still active? It was in the censorship list in several countries, but it looked like nobody had bothered to try to get the domain down. This commercial child porn site was still operating as usual, and selling its illegal material despite being in the censorship list. So, what use exactly is the censorship, if nobody bothers to actually try to take down the illegal sites?

I've also noticed that Inhope's hotline services such as those run by Save the Children Finland are worthless as well, it seems to only exist to generate statistics for lobbying. The sites reported don't actually shut down. Heck, one of the sites I've reported has had their domain name registration expire while I've been waiting for the site to go down. The said site was distributing gigabytes of illegal videos and they later renewed their domain name and continued as if nothing had happened... Seriously, are police authorities using censorship to justify that they're doing "something" while they actually let the illegal sites stay up and running?

Ohwell. I could keep ranting about this forever, but that's all for now.