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Dismal Failure of Internet Filters In Australia
An anonymous reader writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), the department responsible for implementing the insane Internet regulatory framework put in place by the current government, is about to drop a number of Internet Filtering packages due to their ineffectiveness. The full article is available here. There is also news that the Minister for Communications, Senator Richard Alston (whom The Register has labeled the Worlds Biggest Luddite :) ) is awaiting a review of the law with possible changes to follow. Be afraid Australia, be very afraid!"
The head of the Internet Industry Association, Peter Coroneos, said mandatory filtering had been ruled out because "...We feel the decision is best left in the hands of parents."
Seems too obvious. Parents responsible for their kids. Anyone in the US government listening?
No doubt the review of the "Internet Decency" laws will include a clause that you may not be naked whilst your computer is connected to the Internet. It'd be on par with their past efforts.
The reason why Australia's filters are failing would be that: any computer saavy college student knows where all the latest proxy servers are, and soon disseminate them all over. There are many web sites that have lists of working proxies located overseas, outside the government's control, and new ones are found far faster than the government can block them.
Let's hope (probably dimly) that China will soon follow Australia's suit in dropping them.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
As a youth of Australia i am getting more and more appaled by my own country, it seems like where turning into china but at least there not going to war. I am scared of the day when i wake up and go to google.com to see it blocked. I think its time australia wakes up and realise that we have to make our own decisions. I just hope they do this soon.
I'm a geek deal wit it
In fact, dont expect them to work more than about 1/2 the time, in that way you might be pleasantly suprised.
I base this claim on the observation that no one has been able to block spam to a severe degree. It would seem that most of the filtering for both spam and the netnanny type filtering would work on the same princibles.( except for that skin tone filtering, but thats just pure evil, though cool).
When I can block 90% of the spam in my mailbox then I will become concerened for the ausies.
On a serious note: I will become concerned for everyone the day that a governing entity becomes satisfied with its censorship practices.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
The media obligingly jumped on the Save The Children bandwagon (as is their want), the politicians followed along, and the result is the current mess, where instead of pulling the plug on the current abomination of a scheme, the politicians are openly contemplating making it even worse. All because of a rather shabby report from a group of publicity-hounds (personal opinion).
Actually I think you'll find 95% of them are MARKED as region 4, but play any discs. All sony DVD players are these days (have been for quite some time). most places will not stock (or admit to stocking) reigon-free DVD players I've spoken to a sony rep as I was worried my player wasn't region 0, and he said no worries, and he was right. Show me one place that sells dvd and won't stock sony?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Not every slashdotter is an unwashed ex uni student who thinks it's a good idea to open the doors to anybody who rocks up in shitty clothing.
...
And, thankfully, not all Australians are parochial, inbred, racist rednecks like you. A lot are though, judging by the success of dullards like Pauline Hanson amongst morons like yourself.
Personally I've been quite happy with the way the government has handled the refugees.
That's only ignorance. A good, free education for everyone will fix that right up in a couple of generations
They're detained so they (don't often) get away while their status is determined, and the real refugees are allowed in, the rest shipped out.
Even extreme right wing psuedo-Nazi politicians in Germany were astonished that we are putting people in concentration camps like this. I think they were envious.
And don't tell me it's not racist. If it wasn't, we would be rounding up all the British backpackers that are currently also "illegals" at Bondi and putting them in camps out in the desert. But we're not. Why not, exactly?
I jumped ship on a temporary basis and it's articles like this that make me glad I'm in Switzerland and not oz.
.... she still can't get ASDL. No cable either. Not even cable TV. Cable duopoly that has limited reach in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, which has stalled to a crawl?
... News LTD won't get all the $$$, so forget it. You are a disgrace Alston, Howard the Coward and the whole damn Liberal party. Wankers.
Pros:
- Great wads of legal cash at obscenely low tax rates
- No Alston, Howard the Coward and team.
- 1.5 hours flight to Amsterdam
- Good quality, high potency nearly-legal mull
- No Eddie McGuire
- Unlimited-download (but speed capped) ASDL
Cons:
- Howard the Coward doing his best to ruin Australia's reputation
- No MCG, PoW, Espy, ABC cricket broadcasts
- 7 Franks (~$Au 7.5) for a can of VB.
It's pornography and gaming (gambling and games) that have driven the use of the Web and the uptake of broadband. Email, USENET, ftp and even various chat protocols have been side attractions.
Alston is single-handedly driving away any hope of Australia being a content provider (and earning $$$) instead of being a content consumer (and watching the $$$ flow overseas).
Get a clue Alston, being a consumer of technology does not earn you any real $$$, not does it drive innovation. Anyone can be a consumer. Time has not only stood still under your stewardship, but gone backwards.
My fiance couldn't get any broadband in a middle sized city (for Australia), Ballarat. This was 3 years ago. She recently moved back there for our son's schooling and guess what
Here's a policy you can use for free: Local cable cooperatives with content providers paying for access. Oh
OK, I wandered off-topic for a while. But this guy wouldn't have a clue about the internet if it walked up to him, whacked him on the head with a clue-by-four, presented a business card and said: "Hi, I'm a clue". (Clue number 2: Free (as in speach) internet, increased parental supervision to stop nasty porn sites for youngsters) Of course, making people do hard work, actually raising their own kids, will never win votes.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
I work for an Australian ISP. Filtering of p0rn is a pain since it involves ISPs supplying to customers and supporting software which is (as the reports says) unreliable and not very effective. Not to mention that it can be very expensive. The current regulation is fairly simple in that the ISP just has to provide a link to download filtering software and customers can decide if they want to use it.
However the suggestion that porn would only be available to customers who were over 18 and opted out is pretty easy to handle.
Due to credit laws most ISPs only accept customers if they are 18 years or older so all an ISP has to do is make sure every customer opts to have unblocked Internet.
To get around this rule an ISP could just have as part of their signup a couple of boxes that say:
[ ] - I am 18 years old or over
[ ] - I wish to have unfiltered access to the Internet
People who don't accept the unfiltered part will have no access to the Internet at large. Instead when they login they would be presented with a online version of the above form which would convert their account to normal.
Existing users can be handled the same way, their Internet access is completely blocked until they fill out the option.
Obviously this is a bit of work for the ISP and will cause some expense but it's 100 times easier than implimenting real filteing for all customers, let alone dealing with the flack when some "filtered" custome r manages to access porn or is unable to get to a site they like.
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.
When a filter would be offered that blocks annoying mail from Korea, mail about penis enlargments, pop-up advertisements about such things, and access to counter sites etc, I would immediately opt-in.
It seems that the Australians are obsessed with filtering X-rated material, but often such authorities have no problem with violence, spam, fraud etc.
When they go through the trouble of installing filters, at least allow some more filtering criteria so that everyone can make his own choice.
What exactly is that page you're talking about? Not that one with .cx in url, I hope.
Lol. I'm wanting to GIMP that one and close the hole with my guitar embedded "to the hilt".
Also, I'd like to point out that anything with a .cx isn't automatically evil. Check out ecasound. If you setup your filter to filter out domains with .cx in it, then your musically-inclined kid might well miss out on the leading open source audio application.
Like what I said? You might like my music
I think every ISP should offer some type of filtering to their customers, but it should be a business decision to do so on their end, certainly not a law - part of a value added package.
It wants mandatory filtering by internet service providers (ISPs), but with those aged over 18 able to opt out.
But I am not following this statement - how many people do you know under18 who live on their own and can afford monthly internet access? (I read this as basically, everyone gets mandatory filtering, but just about everyone is eligible to opt out - so why bother?)
We monitor what our child does, in fact the computer is in our living room so we know what she is doing. At the same time, all it takes is a trivial error to expose her to pornographic material. For example, type whitehouse.com instead of whitehouse.gov. This bit me the other day. She wanted to buy something for her "American Girl" doll. So we sat down at the computer. Unfortunately, I typed americangirls.com instead of americangirl.com.
Frankly I don't care if people have access to pornography. More power to them. BUT I do wish there was some simple way to separate pornography from everything else. E.g., a XXX domain. That way anyone who wants it can get it. At the same time, I just install a simple filter and I don't have to worry about trivial errors like I had with americangirl.
Frankly, I don't believe this is too much to ask. For example, I go to the book store and they put the porno mags on the top shelf, where my child is unlikely to make a trivial error and pick one up. In essence, that is all I'm asking of the internet.
Labor, the main opposition party, has already announced that they will block this. Neither the Democrats or Greens are likely to support it either. If so, it's dead in the water.
Not to mention the fact that there's a whole lot of Australians who like their net pr0n, and they won't be happy if the government actually implements something that stops them getting it.
Oh, and Alston is a complete fuckwad. I know a staffer for another minister, and even he thinks Alston is a dickhead and that his staff don't have a clue about their portfolio.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
We used squid as a filter on our local school district's 'Net connection for years. In order to make it work right we set the Cisco border router to not allow any connections to port 80 from any machine other than the squid box. Then we set up the squid box as the default gw for all the machines, set the squid box to port forward port 80 to port 3128 and "viola!".
For the first few weeks we just looked through the logs of what the middle school boys were trying to access and added them to the filter list. It was simply amazing how these kids could find porn! But after a few months we got most of it into the filter list (a *long* list). Then we set squid up to notify one of the teachers whenever anyone went to a denied site. The teacher could just saunter over to the offending computer (every computer in the school is reverse DNS'ed) and tap the kid on the shoulder. Zero tolerance for porn in the classroom meant that even middle schoolers finally learned.
Of course, a school district is not the same as an ISP much less an entire country. Filtering out a 12-year-old's access to porn is important (IMHO). Filtering out an adult's access to anything is Orwellian.
But since squid *does* work, I'm just glad no one in Oz has noticed.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!