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Comment by dpifke | Hacker News Reader

Someone came up with a Firefox add-on to automatically use alternate domain names when one tries to access one seized by the US Government:

http://torrentfreak.com/firefox-add-on-undoes-u-s-government...

I'm reminded of the John Gilmore quote, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

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John Gilmore was talking about Usenet, where that was actually true; if some intermediate netnews server started deleting articles that contained bad words, people using other news servers wouldn't even notice unless they got their only newsfeed from the censoring site. (Later on, this became a problem, as it was impossible to censor spam as well.)

The internet is not like Usenet in that way. Its design is full of central points of failure: root nameservers, TLD nameservers, DNS registries, BGP, and AS and IP allocation, among others. Some newer network protocols like BitTorrent are indeed capable of routing around censorship and other forms of damage, but older ones like the Web are not.

I've written a bit about some thoughts on how to fix that, but I still haven't done much: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe...

The quote is still quite valid when applied to the culture of the Internet, however. People create tools ranging the gamut from Tor to MafiaaFire to circumvent and prevent censorship from occurring, even with systems that are anything like robust.

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