Australian Censorship Bypassed Before Live Trials

newt writes "The Australian Government is planning to conduct live trials of as-yet-unspecified censorship technology. But as every geek already knows, these systems can't possibly work in the presence of VPNs and proxy servers. PC Authority clues the punters in." Maybe the ISPs secretly like encouraging SSH tunneling — and making everyone pay for the extra bandwidth used. Not really; Australia's major ISPs, as mentioned a few days ago, think it's a bad idea.

Re:Not very good blocking software

[compro01]

My college uses websense, but Tor goes right through it, and with ready-packaged stuff like xB Browser [xerobank.com] and OperaTor [archetwist.com], it's readily available for practically anyone as long as you can grab the program once (long live the sneakernet).

Re:Not very good blocking software

[morgan_greywolf]

Any decent blocking software also blocks all the popular proxy lists and proxies too (and it constantly updated). Software that does this (like Websense [wikipedia.org]) may not be impossible to get around, but it makes it damn hard (and I know, this is what my school uses and even with my knowledge it's still hard to find a proxy).

Bypassing Websense:

1. Have a PC running on a high-speed Internet connection on the other side of the Websense proxy.
2. On that PC, you need to run OpenSSH and an HTTP proxy server, say at mypc.example.com. In this example, I my proxy server will be using port 8080. Run SSH on Port 443 (works every time) on this box.
3. Using PuTTY or Plink or one of the front-ends for plink, forward 8080 through an SSH connection to this PC from the inside of the Websense firewall. Putty and Plink can tunnel right through the proxy connecting to port 443 just like an HTTPS connection would do.
4. Set your browser to use the proxy on localhost at port 8080
5. Done. All Web accesses will go through the SSH proxy and all of this data will be encrypted as a result.

I will leave the details as an exercise to the reader.

Doesn't seem 'damn hard' to me at all.

Re:Not very good blocking software

[0100010001010011]

I use my dreamhost [dreamhost.com] shell at work to get around work's s filter. Especially since in the last week they really tightened down the firewall.

I suppose if you had the extra cash $10 a month for no filtering might be worth it. There are plenty of other ssh enabled hosts out there.

Re:Uh.

[Starayo]

Heh, the only sites located in Australia I visit are the occasional TV network / job site / council site. Everything else, including a large amount of sites operated by Australians, are located outside the US, because:

a) You need a registered business to have a .com.au address
b) Hosting within Australia costs a ridiculous amount of money, like anything to do with the internet in Australia

Now of course this is only speaking for myself, but the average internet user I know doesn't use many Australian sites at all, rather they use their facebook / myspace / other crappy social networking site, youtube, stuff like that.

SSH/VPN is a crap answer

[Anonymous Coward]

and where do we exactly tunnel to egh ? for free ?
everybody is so quick to point out SSH/VPN but its useless unless you have an exit point

Re:The old saying still holds

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically the quote is "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." [toad.com] In the context used, "the Net" was intended to refer to USENET. You had the right meaning, just the wrong words.

Re:Uh.

[tabrisnet]

On any kind of WAN link, it's a savings. It only costs you something on a 100mbit LAN link. The basic problem is that if you hit the CPU limit before you hit the bandwidth limit, compression (or encryption) will suck. But if you can hit the bandwidth limit first, then you will get a reasonable savings.

I've so far found that on a reasonably modern CPU, you need to be pushing in excess of a 10mbit ethernet, but less than a 100mbit ethernet, for it to hit the CPU limit first.

Reasonably modern CPU being defined as, approximately, a 1GHz Athlon or higher. My Thinkpad R51 (1.6GHz Pentium-M) caps out at ~2Mbyte/sec if compression or aes128-cbc is used (arcfour & no compression lets it hit 4-6Mbyte/sec [very very slow hard-drive]).

On a much more modern system, with compression disabled and arcfour encryption (and the MAC cranked down to the hmac-md5), I cap at approximately 40Mbyte/sec.

We should have seen this coming

[Dracophile]

The ALP's position on this before last year's federal election was that the proposed filtering system was optional; you could opt out of it. However, on 2 November, just weeks before election day, ALP candidate for the seat of Kingsford Smith, Peter Garret, told 2UE journalist Steve Price, "once we get in we'll just change it all [smh.com.au]". Now that comment was in the context of climate policy, but I guess now we know that it has a somewhat broader application, because the ALP's position has changed post-election to a mandatory filtering system.

Given that there are ISP plans that offer the sort of filtering that the ALP wishes to force on everyone in the country, and that the government already offers client-side filtering packages [netalert.gov.au], free of charge, this post-election flip-flop is nothing sort of treacherous, and if they go ahead with it I suspect that a lot of Australians will be waiting for the ALP at the next poll with metaphorical baseball bats. I, for one, talk to my friends and family about this issue. It's a vote-changer for me, and I take time to make sure that my friends and family understand how this affects them.

Memo any ALP apparatchiks that might have found their way to Slashdot: This is a vote-changing issue. There are many of us who are extremely displeased with the pig-headed way in which the Minister has pursued this matter. The ALP stands to lose many votes over it. There are few votes to be won because nearly all of those you hope to gain over this filtering proposal already go to religious candidates and you have stuff-all chance of changing that. Summary dismissal and form letters that don't even address the issues are no longer good enough. Ignore the users of the internet at your electoral peril.