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Re: AW: Italy orders ISPs to block sites

  • From: Patrick W. Gilmore
  • Date: Tue Mar 07 08:15:50 2006 
On Mar 7, 2006, at 3:56 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
I understand, that from an American point of view this kind of restriction
looks strange and is against your act of freedom, however here in Europe
gambling is a state controlled business that supports the state economy
and in most European countries gambling outside state controlled casinos
is simply illegal and forbidden by law.
Even in the US, this is true. Gambling in California is illegal (except
indian casions, long story), because Nevada has a powerful lobby in California.
That's an interesting comment.

The largest cardroom in the world is in California (Commerce Casino). And there are plenty of places to play poker.

The difference is that California has decided (properly, IMHO) that poker is a game of _skill_, not chance. And there are other games you can play at these cardrooms, but you play them against other players, not the house. And most online gambling sites either allow poker or sports betting. I guess you could call sports begging "gambling", but there is skill involved there too.

Not that things like "facts" matter to politicians, or even lawyers.... :-)


I don't question the validity of the law. That's between the Italians and
their government. I question the practicality of enforcing the law because
the way the internet and the international economies work, it is virtually
impossible to enforce this short of something like the great firewall
of China (which still allows SSH through for the most part, so...).
Bringing this back to Operational Content <gasp>, this is the big point. I honestly do no believe you can stop people from getting to sites they want to see without stopping Internet access as a whole. Even the Great Firewall Of China is essentially swiss cheese to anyone who wants to get around it. Fear of "meat-space" punishment is probably more important than the technology used.

Yes, most people use their ISP's recursive NS, but that's 'cause they're lazy. When it stops working, they'll use something else. Block $DEFAULT_PORT for filesharing, they'll find another. So unless you proxy 100% of the traffic (possible, but difficult), and watch for proxies outside your proxy (nearly impossible), people will get through.

Seeing governments try to legislate around technology they do not understand is ... amusing. If they want to stop this activity, making a law regarding routers or servers is not the way to do it.

IMHO, of course.

--
TTFN,
patrick