Some Of Australia's Tubes Are About To Be Filtered 339
Slatterz writes "The first phase of
Australia's controversial Internet filters were put in place today, with the Australian government announcing that six ISPs will take part in a six-week pilot. The plan reportedly includes a filter blocking a list of Government-blacklisted sites, and an optional adult content filter, and the government has said it hasn't ruled out the possibility of filtering BitTorrent traffic. The filters have been widely criticized by privacy groups and Internet users, and people have previously even taken to the streets to protest. While Christian groups support the plan, others say filters could slow down Internet speeds, that they don't work, and that the plan amounts to censorship of the Internet. At this stage the filters are only a pilot, and Australia's largest ISP, Telstra, is not taking part. But if the $125.8 million being spent by the Australian Government on cyber-safety is any indication, it's a sign of things to come."
Re:Just boycott the asses pleases (Score:5, Informative)
Mmm... no.
1) my ISP (iinet) has repeatedly stated [slashdot.org] that it is only taking part in trial to demonstrate how badly it will fail, so I wouldn't be sending them any message they didn't already know
2) there's no way I'm joining Telstra if I have a choice! Which of the good ISPs aren't in the trial?
Hong Kong is facing the same problem (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You know... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, who am I kidding, we're all lazy. And our general populous is just as ignorant as the American general populous.
I have not read TFA, due to the aforementioned laziness, but I think the summary misses some of the biggest news in regard to the filter trials: every damn ISP on the list (with the exception of iPrimus) are tiny little no-name setups that likely have customers numbering in the hundreds. Two major ISPs with large customer bases, Optus and iiNet, were excluded because, I would assume, their data would reflect poorly on the filtering scheme.
These "real world" trials are a sham, and Conroy's a bastard.
Re:Just boycott the asses pleases (Score:5, Informative)
I'm with iiNet, but there's no way I'm dumping them, and here's one reason why: http://www.iinet.net.au/customers/iinews/internet-filtering.html [iinet.net.au]
To summarise it, iiNet's only going along with the trial to demonstrate the futility of filtering. They're also currently fighting a court case regarding copyright infringement to maintain their user's privacy, instead of just rolling over like most other ISPs would.
If this is bad, what's YOUR excuse for....? (Score:2, Informative)
Don't like content filtering / tampering / snooping?
So what's YOUR excuse for...
Not having a PGP key of your own so people can send you secure emails / files?
Sending emails without digitally signing them (anyone can do it) and by default encrypting them to any/all recipients who will provide their keys for that purpose?
Complaining about "internet filtering" yet not even running the software to check and see whether YOUR internet / ISP is filtering / port blocking / et. al.? Last time I checked there were pretty pervasive problems with wholesale port blocking for both incoming and outgoing traffic on many ISPs. That's wholesale blocking / censoring / filtering of communications too. A "network neutral" internet provider should allow ANY protocol, on ANY port, IN or OUT without tampering with the connection (throttling, blocking, et. al.). Anything less is just accepting the encroachment of such filtering.
Willingly USING an ISP that does any kind of connection filtering / tampering?
Willingly USING webmail systems and similar ones where your private communications are left out on some 3rd party server, especially ones where they don't facilitate end to end message signing / encryption / access purely over HTTPS, et. al.? Sites like yahoo, hotmail insert ads into every message you send by modifying YOUR content / message. Sites like google/gmail snoop on the contents of all your email and basically sell that information to advertisers to profile you and intrude on you with ads. If you don't want your content to be modified, filtered, sold, snooped then make sure they cannot either understand or alter your communications and the problems will be mostly solved!
Willingly using software like SKYPE or MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger all of which go to great efforts to be able to be able to route your communications through THEIR servers and not offer any meaningful true verifiable end-to-end content encryption such that not even the service provider can intercept / filter your communications.
Most of the IM software that is "popular" indeed does all sorts of content filtering based on keywords, blocking URLs it doesn't want you to share, et. al. Content tampering / filtering of a private communication should be the end user's option, not the service provider's! There are alternatives out there that use open source software, publically documented protocols, and which offer true encryption / privacy support like SIP, JABBER, et. al.
Running a site that doesn't use HTTPS as its PRIMARY mode of communication, i.e. don't even ALLOW HTTP except as a deprecated option to satisfy very old cell phone browsers or such that aren't capable of SSL?
Using HTTPS, although they could block sites based only on the domain name, they couldn't easily look at or filter / tamper with the content of the communications themselves -- NebuAd insertion or whatever simply wouldn't be possible. Also one wouldn't reveal anything more than the domain name / IP address being contacted for HTTP, so even the rest of the accessed URL would be secure. Enabling HTTPS is a trivial change to almost any web site, and compatible with most any browser platform. Why don't we provide this as sysadmins and demand it as users. Why
am I not on https://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] now? In the old days the CPU performance cost for the crypto was somewhat of a factor for fairly high traffic sites, but now that CPUs/Network processors are much more capable, I very much doubt it would be a significant impediment for ANY site to offer. Is the privacy and security of your users not worth another 3% of your CPU load or whatever? Certificate cost? Ok, self sign (it's better than plain HTTP!), or use a public / free CA or whatever.
As others have said, it more customers demanded full open unmodified internet access from their ISP, it would be offered by more ISPs and ones that want to tamper with your data (NebuAd, DNS hijacking, content snooping / altering) or whatever either wo
Re:You know... (Score:4, Informative)
Needs to pass Parliament first (Score:4, Informative)
Re:p0rn is a problem: just not for horny geeks (Score:1, Informative)
The only reason Internet filtering works in schools and businesses is group mentality.
That is so wrong. Take websense and category based filters. From here, I can't even log in to /., let alone visit any site that isn't academic or news related if the site in question is older than 48 hours or so.
Once a filter gets large enough, it has enough data coming in to quickly block and site or service the settings would deem...inappropriate.
I mean, you can block the websense bot from categorizing your site using .htaccess - but damn do they have a lot of bots. And yes, they ignore the robots.txt file.
-Kyreas, who can't login due to a filter.
Re:Providers (Score:1, Informative)
Julie from Queensland With 2 boys approaching teenage years and a husband who works late into the night at times, we (and I say ÃweÃ(TM) on behalf of my husband as well) are glad for the peace of mind webshield provides. With pornography and all that it leads too, sweeping through families Ã" even strong families Ã" as it is channelled right into our houses, wreaking absolute heartache and havoc, we can only be glad for protection.
She means by this that she caught her husband watching porn. This made her hysteric and insecure (is he watching porn cos I'm ugly?).
Teenagers will find a way of looking at boobies and asses. We found in my days, and we didn't have internets back then.
Re:p0rn is a problem: just not for horny geeks (Score:3, Informative)
Who said ANYTHING about mollycoddling children? I certainly didn't. I merely pointed out that expecting the Government's Internet filter to protect them from the evil 1nt4rw3bs is madness. In my own very pissed off way I pointed out other things that you wouldn't expect the government to protect your kids from.
Re:Needs to pass Parliament first (Score:3, Informative)
Huh. (Score:3, Informative)
I wish.
That would at least be interesting. Instead we have a narrow-minded, suburban, mealy-mouthed motherfucker who is content to run around screaming ohmygodohmygodwhataboutchechildren rather than actually do anything valuable or useful with his office.
All his blathering about "rolling up our sleeves" has no meaning other than that he doesn't want his cuff-links to bruise his butt.
Although I heartily despise the asswipe he replaced, Kevin Rudd is a serious disappointment.
Re:p0rn is a problem: just not for horny geeks (Score:3, Informative)
ANSWER HER QUESTION. And TELL THE TRUTH. Damn, how hard is that? Coward.
I'm a software engineer. I write software, both closed source and open. I write it at work and I write it at home on my own time. I think that qualifies me as a geek. I'm also raising a 10 year old girl. Last week she wanted to know what a phallus is. Her mother and I were sitting on the couch together. "It's a man's penis," we said, after a second. "Oh," she says. That was all. Yes, she knows what a penis is. She's 10. She doesn't care.
This is the great truth that adults somehow forget. Pre-pubescent children do not have the hormones that make sex and sexual things of such raging importance to adults. Before the testosterone kicks in (yes, girls have it too), they literally do not care. Except for abstract curiosity, which is very quickly sated, sexual material is boring to children. They self-censor to an amazing degree. I've watched it.
Yes, we watch her web surf on her laptop. We don't lean over her shoulder or anything, but she uses her computer in the living room, like we do, and we generally know what she's looking at. If she clicks on a video on Youtube that turns out to be full of obscenities, she immediately clicks the back button. If she follows a link that ends up at a porn advertising site (something that happens only extremely rarely), again, she pounds the back button. Most of the time she's very careful to stick to sites that won't ever have porn links on them in the first place. She knows what naked people look like, and she doesn't want to see them. She just wants her web games and her music videos and her funny videos and her lolcats.
Anybody who pays attention to an actual child should know all these things. Lunatics who propound global censorship so they don't have to answer a question that is only awkward to them not the child are busy foisting their own prejudices and parochialism onto that child. "Think of the children" is rightly ridiculed on this site for the worthless cantrip that it is. Another poster in this thread said it best: censorship is radioactive. It contaminates everything it touches.
No, I won't spend 95% of my time manually censoring her internet. No, I won't spend a dime on a commercial closed source product that will censor her internet. Yes, a 7 year old (or a 10 year old) CAN filter their own content. They do it successfully and well, and being a parent that can stand aside and LET them makes me a GOOD parent, not a bad one. The content exists because the world exists. Parenting a child means teaching them ways to live in the world and deal with it successfully. The example we set as parents influences how they will treat it. We don't get excited about it when she encounters a naked person. We don't rant and rave and censor. We answer her questions honestly, and don't make a big deal out of it. It's not a big deal to her and she moves on with her life with nary a bobble.
All of this to an anonymous coward. Hopefully somebody who isn't a coward will read it...