Posts Tagged Belgium
“The Great Firewall of Belgium” active
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on April 21st, 2009
Since today, Belgium has got it’s own version of “The Great Firewall of China”. The biggest Belgian ISPs are blocking access to several web sites, often related to child porn.
The idea already existed for several months, but the implementation was probably accelerated after a Dutch guy recently created a website where he posted detailed personal information about child abusers in Belgium. While publishing such detailed private information is forbidden in Belgium, it was very difficult to take real action against the website, because it operated from abroad.
So now this website is not accessible anymore from most Belgian ISPs. People who try to access this website, get redirected to a web page which explains that the web site is not accessible because it is considered illegal in Belgium.
Technically, it’s not really a firewall. The redirection happens on the DNS level. Instead of returning the real IP of the server, the DNS servers now return the address of a server in Belgium containing the warning page.
While I agree (like every sane person) that things like child’s pornography are completely sick and should be severely acted against, I think that creating a blacklist of websites which people cannot visit any more is a very dangerous precedent. It’s not clear at all how it is decided to put a website on the blacklist. Currently this is not based on a judge’s decision after an official juridical procedure. Also how long will it take until someone makes a mistake in the list and blocks half of the Internet by error (which is not unrealistic, it happened to Google recently!), or worse, until sites of political dissidents are blocked? For this reason, I have decided to stop my internal Bind DNS server at home from forwarding its requests to my ISPs DNS and instead I let it do iterative recursion now. I read that many others are starting to use OpenDNS now, but this seems to have privacy issues by itself too.
Gold!
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on August 23rd, 2008
Only a few days before the end of the Olympic Games, Belgium did not yet have any medal yet and so this seemed to become one of the worst Olympic Games ever for our country. And then it happens: first silver in the 4×100m relay for women and today Tia Hellebaut won gold in the high jump (2.05m). It was 32 years ago that Belgium won a medal in athletics on the Olympic Games.
Olympic Games
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on August 12th, 2008
I currently enjoy watching the Olympic Games very much. Too bad for us Europeans, lots of competitions happen during night, or during the day in the morning and part of the afternoon, when I’m at at work. Luckily, there are great Olympic Games reports on television during the evening too here.
I’m afraid we don’t have to expect much Belgian medals. Mabye our biggest chance is Evi Van Acker in the sailing races. In swimming, we had already several national records, but no-one reached the finals up to now. In equestrian, Belgium got a ninth place (after being 2nd after the first test…). Tomorrow some Belgians participate to the semi-finals in rowing. In tennis we have Olivier Rochus and Rochus & Darcis in the tennis doubles still in competition. The football team will probably also make it to the quarter finals (tomorrow last match in the heats) and we hope to see some great results in athletics of Tia Hellebaut (high jump) and Kim Gevaert (100 and 200m sprint and 4×100m relay). Last Olympic Games, Belgium won 3 medals. As we failed to win any medal in judo now (although we were not far from it), it will be difficult to reach even that number this year…
Oh, and too bad this all happens in a country where people are not always “free”…
PS: for us computer scientists, this is nice: Windows XP crashed during the opening ceremony and produced a nice Blue Screen of Death on the roof of the Olympic Stadium
Political crisis, once more…
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on July 15th, 2008
Since yesterday evening, Belgium again does not have a government any more. The prime minister once again did not succeed negotiating a new state reform against the deadline of the 15th of July which he had imposed. Because of the state reform discussion, the country has not had a government worthy that name since the last federal elections one year ago: the number of real decisions taken, can be counted on one hand and several of them were even very controversial (for example, the Belgian army is going to take a more active role in the war in Afghanistan).
Currently, I’m ashamed to live in this country and I don’t feel like being Flemish, nor Belgian. Lots of political parties and a big part of the public (of both language groups: Dutch speaking Flanders and French speaking Wallonia) have radicalised and will radicalise even more in the future if things go on like this. Any rational discussion or compromise has become extremely difficult, even almost impossible, under pressure of extremists on both sides, even in traditional centre parties. It’s simply unacceptable that in times of economical slow-down, population aging, global warming, a lack of money on the Belgian federal state level and other problems, that federal state is blocked completely for such a long time…
Download Day
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on December 30th, 2007
Today was “Download Day” in Belgium. It’s a protest action against download limits on broadband Internet connections. In Belgium, about 90% of residential ISP customers are connected either via Belgacom (the old state telephone monopoly) or Telenet (the company which owns the television cable, only available in Flanders). Both ISPs offer fast broadband Internet access for a price of a little more than 40 Euro (about 60 USD). The Internet connection is fast (Belgacom: 4 Mbps and Telenet: 10 Mbps), but both ISPs have a download limit of 12 GB/month. If you download more than 12 GB/month, the connection speed is squeezed to about 3 KB/s for the rest of the month (actually it’s so slow that I have never succeeded in visiting web sites at this speed: most just time out).
While 12 GB is enough for people who just use the Internet for browsing the web, sending e-mail and chatting, it is way too limited for people making heavy use of the Internet. Regularly keeping my Mandriva Linux Cooker system up to date with such a limitation is terrible, especially because I am not the only one in the family using the Internet connection and people like to use the connection also for band-width heavy multimedia purposes (YouTube, audio and video livestreams,…).
The situation seems very different in our neighbour countries The Netherlands and France, where a broadband Internet connection can be found for about 30 Euro/month without any download limit, and in some cases even including telephone and television subscription.
Anyway, I am pretty sure the Download Day is a totally useless action. More than 8000 people signed the petition asking for more reasonable download limits and as a protest action, people tried to download as much as possible today, to show that it is easy to use all of your download quota on one single day. ISPs always argue that the number of people suffering from the limits is only a very “marginal” group. I am sure that tomorrow they will say that the amount of Internet traffic today was not significantly higher than all other days, and so they will see this as a proof that it’s a very limited problem. The action was in my opinion also completely destroyed by people downloading useless data: some people downloaded several different Linux distros which they will never try; others even posted links to files containing 1 GB of random binary data. If there are really people downloading such crap, they are actually proving that the download limit is high enough for their normal Internet use. The way some people commented on the forum, using stupid teenager slang language, also did not really help giving the issue an important and serious impression…
Nice try, but it was a total failure if you ask my opinion…
Belgium: a country without government
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on November 13th, 2007
It is already 156 days ago we had federal elections here in Belgium, but there is still no new government yet. The political crisis in this country has never been so serious: Dutch (Flemish) and French speaking (Walloon) politicians cannot find a compromise at all. A lot of trouble is caused by the electoral district called “Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde” (B-H-V). It consists of the bilingual Brussels region and some Flemish cities (of which Halle and Vilvoorde are the most well-known). The result is that people living in this part of the Flemish region (i.e. the Dutch speaking region in the north of the country), can vote for French speaking politicians in Brussels. A few years ago, the constitutional court decided that this was against the constitution, as Belgium is a federal country where political parties create separate lists for each province. B-H-V does not follow this rule, as it consists of the separate Brussels region and some cities of the Flemish province Vlaams-Brabant.
Flemish politicians have unilaterally voted in a commission in the parliament to split the district. All French speaking politicians refused to vote in protest of the unilateral vote by the Flemish majority. Because of all kinds of procedures, Walloons can still block the split now for almost two years.
Walloons now demand excuses from the Flemish politicians and they want guarantees that such kinds of votes will never happen anymore. The Flemish on the other hand still demand more autonomy for the regions, which the Walloons refuse. Until this matter is solved, both parties refuse to continue the negotiations to form a new government.
As is typical in this kind of conflict, the media have a very big influence. For example tonight the headline in all Flemish media was that the new president of the constitutional court said that any subsequent federal elections will be invalid if no solution for the B-H-V district is found. Of all the French on line media I checked (RTBF, RTL, Le Soir, La Libre Belgique) only the RTBF (French speaking official television) mentioned this.
In Wallonia and Brussels, lots of people are hanging out Belgian flags because they fear this will be the end of Belgium. In Flanders, there are not flags at all. Most Flemish people don’t really care too much whether Belgium will continue to exist or whether Flanders will become independent. However, polls indicate that most of the Flemish people are still in favour of more autonomy for the regions in the federal country. And probably most people in this country are getting tired of this crisis which won’t end. Let’s hope for a solution soon, whatever that solution may be: everything is better than the current standstill.
PS: Today I read in the newspaper something of our neighbouring country The Netherlands which made me laugh: they are thinking of creating a tulip shaped island before the coast, and apparently lots of politicians are in favour. Politicians are a very strange race, whatever country they are from :-)
Belgium: Time to call it a day
Posted by Frederik in Uncategorized on September 13th, 2007