The web site of W3C, w3.org or w3c.org, was briefly censored (Google Translation) by at least some of the local ISPs. For an unknown reason the URL was mistakenly entered into the Federal Police’s censor database. Some of the Finnish ISPs use the database to filter out questionable content such as child pornography. The censor database is itself already highly questionable and largely ineffective, as online activist Matti Nikki writes:
For example a document that goes by the name “Railaksen Selvitys” and dated 2005-12-16 lists several critical problems and unanswered questions regarding the censorship. These problems are listed in the very beginning of the document and include things like effectiveness of the filtering solutions, the problem of collateral damage when censorship affects more material than it should, freedom of speech, what kind of crimes the censorship should exactly target, etc. Most of these went unanswered and the problems are seen with the current implementation of the censorship. Some of the issues were only addressed partially, for example the freedom of speech regarding reception of illegal material was touched but the police has now been found censoring even sites that do not contain illegal material themselves. What is being practiced now isn’t what was planned.
This isn’t the first time that a site has been wrongly blocked; at least for a period in the past the Lapsiporno.info site protesting against the filtering, maintained by Matti Nikki, was blocked. (NB. ‘Lapsiporno’ is ‘child pornography’ in Finnish, but the Lapsiporno.info site has nothing to do with pornography, or indeed any other sordid materials)
I missed this last week, Venezuala has joined Brazil, South Africa and India in the opposition of OOXML.