Web review

Since today (the law is in technical activation) italian users cannot reach more than 500 websites from their PCs. We’re talking about online betting and virtual casino sites. The law, from the italian ministry of Economy is well explained in this article (in italian). IPs of that sites are filtered by italian government.

Italian users that try to connect themselves, for example, to the famous 888.com online casino, will see this screen:

(click to enlarge)

I want to highlight my deep indignation for a law that gives the start to a dangerous way of censuring the Web and that puts Italy on a level of cultural freedom similar to China, where Internet is heavily censored by authorities. I’m astonished because, right now, nobody has started a petition to ask for an immediate deletion of this decision, and I want to catch this occasion to declare my availability for organizing it on raneri.it pages… make me know with comments if you’re interested.

By now, I want to inform everybody about the possibility to reach anyway the blocked site, with connections throught a foreign proxy. I think that it’s unquestionable that a simple visit to an internet site could be a crime and, furthermore, nearly every locked site gives the possibility to play with their services in “demo” mode, without betting real money. So if we want to visit these sites, avoiding blocks, there’s anything of illegal or immoral, of course. These are the methods:

• Throught any public foreign proxy server: wherever, on the Internet, it’s possible to find lists of proxies, available for everybody, for example http://www.publicproxyservers.com/ presents several pages of proxies. Setting a proxy in Internet Explorer is easy: Tools > Internet options > “Connections” sheet >”Settings” button > activate “Use a proxy server …” > Paste the address of one of that proxy serversand the relative port. Same operation is possible in other browsers, with similar commands. If the first proxy you’ll try will not work, don’t discorauge you: a lot of proxy change address frequently, so try others until you’ll find one that works, and maybe it’s good and fast;
• With Google: The function “translate web pages” of the famous search engine can be used in a… improper way to take advantage of it as a “quick” proxy. Just go to:
  http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=it|it&u=www.TheAddressYouCantAccess
  to “tunnel” the request of the page throught Google servers, and to get the blocked page;
• With special softwares, to automatically modify connection settings, everytime, to pass throught “free nodes” of the net, and to eventually crypt it to avoid interceptions. For these solutions I give you a link to the interesting page by Freerk, a german guy that simply says that he doesn’t agree with ideas of two neo-nazi sites that was blocked for German users, but at the same time that he finds unacceptable that the government can decide what citizens can or cannot see. Just think that him got angry about 2 sites (that are, in addiction, morally condemnables), what italian people must say about 500+ blocks?

This content was posted Thursday 23 February 2006 on 4:51 am in category Blog & Web News, Tricks. You can follow the comments in this article with its dedicated feed in RSS 2.0. Here you can leave an answer. Pinging is not enabled.