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No opt-out of filtered Internet

Started by Abrojo, October 15, 2008, 02:10:48 PM

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Abrojo

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

Disturbing
 

Bradford C. Walker

That's a technical problem, which means that there is a technical solution to be had in breaking such a scheme.

StormBringer

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.
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Abrojo

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.
 

RPGPundit

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.  

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J Arcane

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?
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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.
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Engine

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?
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RPGPundit

what's "gladder", engine?

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Engine

Sorry; that'd be a difficult one to Google, wouldn't it? It's a Firefox addon, found here, 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.
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Abrojo

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.
 

StormBringer

Wouldn't is just be cheaper and easier to investigate and prosecute child pornographers?
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Abrojo

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.
 

Spike

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...
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Abrojo

#14
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.