14 DAY TRIAL // Finland has a very strict non-child pornography rule that makes all the sense in the world. At least their heart's in the right place, because their mind seems to be wondering about. Over 1,700 legal websites are being censored by the authorities, and among them lapsiporno.info, a site who was used by its owner to publicly criticize the censorship program.
The list was not made available by the officials, but Matti Nikki, the protester, has found about one thousand of them and put together a link, later to be adopted by the Electronic Frontier Finland for further testing and studying. According to Tapani Tarvainen, EFFI's chairman, out of the 700 browsed so far, only two host inappropriate images of children, the rest falling under totally different (and random) categories: an online doll store, a Thai Windows advice forum and a computer repair service, to name just a few of the examples he gave.
The system the authorities use is deeply flawed, up to the point at which if one user posts one inappropriate link, that is enough of a basis to shut the whole site down from turning up for Finnish users.
"Without knowing any details, a good guess is that the police suspect that having a clickable link to a web site allegedly containing child pornographic images is equivalent to aiding the distribution of such images," the EFFI said in a blog post, commenting on Nikki's site being banned.
The censorship can be easily avoided by simply changing the DNS setting of an operating system or router to force the Finnish ISP's official Internet protocol address to be substituted with OpenDNS. However, that isn't the big problem, Nikki said. A workaround is available at any time, but what truly matters is that the official authorities have expanded the reach of the law beyond its original meaning, The Register reports.