In it's efforts to block access to a union website, Canadian ISP, Telnus also inadvertently blocked out another 766 websites, according to the OpenNet Initiative run jointly by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge University.
Blocked sites included those of an engineering company, a breast cancer charity and a recycling company. Because they chose to filter on the basis of the IP address, it resulted in this extensive "collatoral filtering".
Crude filtering can and does result in unnecessary censorship. In one case the ONI discovered that South Korean ISPs attempting to block access to 31 North Korean sites, also blocked 3167 sites hosted on the same servers as the sites targeted. This blog is regularly blocked, as crude filters assume that the treble x in the title means that it must be some sort of porn site. I've been at conference centres where I can't access my own blog in order to check something out because of this and even when I am successful at getting a block lifted, the next automatic trawl puts my b2fxxx ramblings right back on that black list again.
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