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Censorship in the Netherlands

Today, a judge in the Netherlands ruled that two major national ISPs, Ziggo and XS4ALL, are to block 3 IP-addresses and 24 domainnames belonging to The Pirate Bay. Worse still, a Dutch lobby group for copyright enforcement, Stichting Brein, is allowed to provide additional domains and IP-addresses in the future, that the ISPs are also required to block. No neutral check of these additional blocks has been provided for.

To prevent this first act of censorship in the Netherlands and to show that this is not the way to deal with undesirable content on the internet, I propose that those of us who have this ability donate subdomains and IP-addresses to fight it. You can do this by creating a subdomain like piratebay.yourdomain.nl and then configuring your webserver to act as a proxy, routing traffic from the real Pirate Bay to users who may no longer be able to access it. Doing this only takes a bit of bandwidth, but not that much because The Pirate Bay only serves .torrent-files and not the actual downloads of course.

So here are the step-by-step instructions:

  • Create a subdomain like piratebay.yourdomain.nl in your domain management interface
  • Enable proxying in Apache (assuming that’s what you’re running for webserver) with: a2enmod proxy
  • Add the following virtualhost to your apache site configuration:
<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName piratebay.yourdomain.nl
  <Proxy *>
    Order deny,allow
    Allow from all
  </Proxy>
  ProxyPass / http://thepiratebay.org/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://thepiratebay.org/
</VirtualHost>
  • Restart the webserver; under Debian and Ubuntu the command is: /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
That’s it. You’ve now added one more domain and IP-address that Stichting Brein will need to get blocked to fulfil their role as the first Dutch Ministry of Censorship. Do be mindful that they may in fact do that, regardless of the collateral  damage they will be causing by blocking more than just The Pirate Bay. Other sites hosted on the same IP-address may also end up being blocked. But if you can suffer it, this gives us another strong argument against blocking on the internet: there will always be collateral damage and it’s just a matter of time until this aspect is used to someone’s advantage.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 11th, 2012 at 11:54 and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Censorship in the Netherlands”

  1. Bèr Kessels says:
    January 12, 2012 at 9:16

    Will ProxyPassReverse modify the contents of the passed-trough file? If not, is there a way to make absolute urls in the remote site (for assets, such as Javascript, CSS and images) as well as internal links, work?

    I have started a very simple reverse proxy in PHP (ugh!) https://github.com/berkes/ahoy Making it easy to deploy, and hoping people will install this on their spare servers :)

    Usefull for people who have no access to (or not the knowledge or skills to) change apache configuration, but do have access to any ol’ PHP-webserver.

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