No opt-out of filtered Internet
Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government's pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say.
http://www.infoworld.com/news/feeds/08/10/13/No-opt-out-of-filtered-Internet.html?source=gs (http://www.infoworld.com/news/feeds/08/10/13/No-opt-out-of-filtered-Internet.html?source=gs)
Disturbing
That's a technical problem, which means that there is a technical solution to be had in breaking such a scheme.
Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;256909That's a technical problem, which means that there is a technical solution to be had in breaking such a scheme.
My guess? There are already about 40 potential solutions out there waiting for this exact problem.
yeah will have to wait and see the details like, for example, how hard they enforce, etc.
However its disturbing things are heading this way.
On top of it all, there's no way this program will work in any but the most brutish of ways, censoring stuff that is neither illegal nor even "questionable", just because it has certain keywords or whatever.
Its a fucking joke.
RPGPundit
I thought all you Aussies were supposed to be all tough and manly and whatnot? What the hell is with all the censorship freakouts over there?
Quote from: J Arcane;257111I thought all you Aussies were supposed to be all tough and manly and whatnot? What the hell is with all the censorship freakouts over there?
Currently the way to score tough and manly kudos is to loudly proclaim how much you are against pedophilia. Which is all very well, but freedom of access to the internet is pretty serious collateral damage.
There are a number of technical solutions that should work just fine; Gladder is my personal solution to filtering and firewalling, but any sort of proxy should bypass the filter, yes?
what's "gladder", engine?
RPGPundit
Sorry; that'd be a difficult one to Google, wouldn't it? It's a Firefox addon, found here (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2864), that's really just a convenient front end for proxying. I'm sure there are better ones, but I stumbled over this one and have been using it since, without discernible problems.
It's a tad bit unknown, in that article they said one of their primary goals in the first phase of testing is to check for ease of circumvention.
In theory:
It would be possible to make proxies irrelevant. Considering the sacrifices in speed they are willing to put, they could resort to packet sniffing in which case a proxy wouldnt be enough unless you encrypt end to end with the proxy.
But even if normal proxies do work to bypass their content blacklist, they can just blacklist the known proxies. Yes some people would still be able to get out with private proxies or not-as-known proxies, but the vast majority of people would still be locked in. We can assume that if a good proxy becomes known enough to be a problem, then the government will know about it too and be able to block it. They could also in theory blockade means for people to know proxies, Pages with proxy listings, etc.
Like i said, it all comes down (as usual) to how many resources the government wishes to spend in terms of extra equipment to do the sniffing and traffic shaping plus manpower to research appropriate blacklist contents, react as fast as possible to changes, etc. If this just a political move then its doubtful their blockade will do much.
in practice:
Of course, in practice its almost impossible they can do an effective blockade to a motivated person but still, they can probably block average users and thats bad enough. And worst of all, the direction this shows.
When a necessity like this appears, companies like Cisco start investing into R&D to cover it. Just like p2p made traffic shaping popular enough that Cisco eventually made it possible to filter and cap p2p with hardware cheap enough that ISP's in countries like Uruguay can afford it. This is extremely relevant since a hardware solution is what makes it fast enough so its possible to apply in practice.
Wouldn't is just be cheaper and easier to investigate and prosecute child pornographers?
probably, not to mention probably more realistic. The little i have read leads me to believe some people are juggling responsabilities, Internet is a very cool thing to blame after all.
Though i guess you could argue that this is "better" ideologically since it is a proactive move. Thats about the only advantage i can think of.
With the amount of resources they would have to invest to make this actually work decently, they could very well track (even through internet) and find several of the actual criminals.
In my opinion it is just sort of a political stunt that will end up "blocking" a few 60 year old folks who grab their porn from yahoo, and for about 20 minutes till they find their way around it. Even at this level though it worries me it becomes a trend and more r&d gets allocated to content sniffing because eventually, a practical efficient solution might be found.
And of course, this does nothing to stop the guy who invests in a sattelite uplink and gets all of his web access from out of the country... right?
I say this because I have been looking at the technology as a means to avoid loss of internet connectivity when I make my semi-regular sojourns to backwater countries where internet is less than common... its easily affordable if you have the need for it and I can imagine it would be easily explainable for people living outside the major urban areas.
Then again, maybe I'm smoking crack, I am after all something of a luddite. These internets, they make no sense to me...
It would depend on how the ISP handles it. You might go up to the satellite but then come down back in Australia to go into internet from there. Basically the satellite ends up being just a communication means between a far away consumer and the ISP in the urban area but still inside Australia and therefore still have to deal with the blacklist when you head out.
Another issue is that there are also lots of different sat connections available that though might not look very different from a consumer PoV but the underlying technology can change how easy or difficult it might be. For example will be it downstream by satellite but upstream through modem? etc etc
There are tons of variables, you really would have to go in a case by case.
Although they did say they dont plan on giving the opt-out to consumers. So who knows, perhaps ISPs end up being forced to drop connection technologies that cant be controlled or something. At this point i think the problem is the idea itself since we really dont know (or at least i dont) specifics on the law ISPs will have to abide to, technology used, etc.
Quote from: J Arcane;257111I thought all you Aussies were supposed to be all tough and manly and whatnot? What the hell is with all the censorship freakouts over there?
Yes, we are. But the sorts of people elected to government are not. They are the bland and inoffensive middle class, with a few upper class morons thrown in to keep them company, and the occasional genuinely loopy one in the Senate.
In addition, our federal capital lies in a valley separated from the rest of the country by a drive of several hours, with no rail link, and no reason to be there except for government. So it's rather easy for the elected representatives to lose touch with reality, to misunderstand what the real problems of the country are, and even if they do know, to not have the right solutions.
I have no doubt that the filter will filter out mostly harmless sites, and be easily stepped around to find the genuinely nasty sites. It's not like sexual deviants and terrorists aren't willing to make a big effort in their "research" already. Like DRM, filtering annoys the honest users and does not at all inconvenience the dishonest ones.
Quote from: StormBringer;257243Wouldn't is just be cheaper and easier to investigate and prosecute child pornographers?
The government is less concerned with deviants, and more with potential terrorists. You know, bomb recipes and shit like that.
The fact is that most would-be terrorists are pretty stupid and ignorant, and are more likely to harm themselves than anyone else, for example this guy (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/16/2392467.htm). So they want to minimise the chances of their getting information which could make up for their ignorance.
Not that it's really an issue for Australia, since we don't really have any terrorists. We just have a few people who talk big but do nothing, and a few people who are sorta distantly related to some foreign terrorist, have done nothing but we lock them up anyway before releasing them a while later with red faces, like this guy (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/16/2392967.htm).
But the government likes to feel busy, and since they have no clue about the country's actual problems, they focus on this nonsense.
From what I've heard, the initial test run of this software demonstrated that besides everything else, it will slow down the speed of the internet service by 75%. Jesus fuck.
RPGPundit
I hear false positives are on the order of - if I recall correctly - 10,000 out of 1 million. Also not good.
Quote from: Engine;257947I hear false positives are on the order of - if I recall correctly - 10,000 out of 1 million. Also not good.
LOL, why not just say 1 in 100? :teacher:
Quote from: CavScout;258004LOL, why not just say 1 in 100? :teacher:
I wondered about that at the time! The only thing I can think of is that they ran a million-item test, and the false positives ran about 10,000. Still, as an "error rate," wouldn't "1 percent" be as accurate?
Quote from: Engine;258638I wondered about that at the time! The only thing I can think of is that they ran a million-item test, and the false positives ran about 10,000. Still, as an "error rate," wouldn't "1 percent" be as accurate?
Not to mention easier to write. :p
Or I could have been completely wrong on the error rate (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/24/0224239), anyway. Ouch.
hah well this one backfired before they could implement it. blacklist got leaked before blacklisting and people are mass visiting the soon to be banned sites. Also the list had sites that nobody cant understand why they are getting banned like christianity, abortion, etc. Seems like obvious one happened, several people in the censorship comitee used this for their personal ideology agenda.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1888011,00.html?xid=rss-business
The blacklist of 2,602 websites was leaked, and the Communications Minister said, "it isn't the real blacklist, and leaking it is irresponsible." The ACMA echoes this position (http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_311669). No, that doesn't make sense to us, either.
The problem is that if you want to ban specific websites, you either release their names and addresses, in which case your ban index acts as a helpful index for paedophiles and terrorists, saves them doing research; or you keep the list secret, which means nobody can actually block it for you.
So the idea was to give the list to ISPs, who would then block it for the government. Of course in any ISP at least a dozen people would have to see the list, and we have dozens of ISPs in the country, so there's no way the list can remain secret.
The first leaked list contained many websites which were completey harmless - a Queensland dentist, for example - and quite a few which are technically illegal, but which Australians wouldn't be happy with banning. For example, Aussies in general are not going to object to the banning of sites for child pornography and instructions on making explosives in your kitchen. But some little old lady on YouTube talking about voluntary euthanasia and how to get drugs to knock yourself off painlessly?
It's also problematic that some webpages on some sites are banned, but not the site itself. For example, zombiesurvival.com has a few pages on how to make explosive devices (I don't recommend following their recipes, which are flawed to say the least). These pages are on the banned list, but the site as a whole is not. This makes it relatively easy to accidentally commit a crime by accessing prohibited content; and of course makes it technically more difficult for ISPs to comply.
After the leaking, the government did a quick cleanup, removing the obviously absurd ones, leaving them with 1,172. An article talking about it is here on wikileaks (http://www.wikileaks.com/wiki/Australian_government_secret_ACMA_internet_censorship_blacklist%2C_18_Mar_2009). I warn that the list of banned websites is there, with no images. Most of the websites are child pornography or bestiality. Others are violent pornography with rape themes or the like. Still others provide instructions in criminal activity, like making explosives, identity theft and so on. You can be pretty sure none of it is safe for work, let alone your marriage or relations with law enforcement.
In Australia, it is an offence punishable by fines of $11,000 a day and up to ten years imprisonment to publish even a single link from the list. As for clicking on the links, accessing child pornography is a crime, though the position of access to material like "how to make blasting caps" on zombiesurvival.com is a bit murkier, depending on your intent and so on.
At this stage, the banned pages list is supposed to be being trialled by 6 ISPs. At least one of them has pulled out - my own ISP, iinet, discusses the issue here (http://www.iinet.net.au/customers/iinews/internet-filtering.html); since that article, they have withdrawn from the trial.
I note, looking at that list, that there's a lot of stuff on that list which is clearly NOT illegal pornography, but clearly offensive to the morals of someone on the list.
I notice that some of the chan sites are there; those don't carry child pornography of any kind (at least none that I've ever seen does), but do have a ton of pictures of penises, really tasteless humour of the worst kind, and sarcastic fringe-material like "pedobear" which is pretty freaking offensive humour but is certainly not legitimate child porn of any kind.
Also, I noticed Abbywinters was there, which is actually a totally legal, brilliant porn site featuring adult women who are not your standard "porn sluts" but tend to look more like regular every day girls (with a kind of hippy-indie bent to them), mostly engaging in lesbian activity that seems much more genuine than the usual "two sluts with big hair pretending to be turned on with each other" variety. And to top it all off, unless I'm mistaken Abbywinters is not only entirely legal but its MADE IN AUSTRALIA.
The idea that these guys are targeting "child porn" is clearly a cover. They're targetting porn, period, because the people involved in making this list are a gang of reactionary fanatics, Australia's own answer to the christian coalition who want to make sure no one else should be allowed to get their rocks off, to anything. To these assholes, there's no difference between getting off on raping little boys or getting off on two utterly consenting 19 year old women engaging in tasteful heavy petting on a suicide-girls-esque site.
RPGPundit