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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!"
For example, he'll happily accept a freebie high end digital plasma screen TV for vital research.
Perhaps Saddam should also try chucking our Prime Minister a similar gift in return for more favourable consideration.
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What would really be more effective in assuring the Australian people don't think impure thoughts would be to implement the Orwellian idea of removing certain words from their vocabulary, such as "freedom," "liberty," etc. Hey, it worked with "Fosters."
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.
Press release from the EFA (Australia's version of the EFF):
--------
Media Release: 3 March 2003
Censorship laws contribute to youth access to violent pornography
Australian censorship laws contribute to the problem of youth access to
pornographic material of the violent and extreme kind, Electronic Frontiers
Australia (EFA) said today.
The Australia Institute recently surveyed 200 youths 16-17 years old and
found that "teenagers view X-rated videos more than Internet sex sites",
although the sale of X-rated videos is illegal in all States.
"Apparently, Australian laws prohibiting sale of X-rated videos have failed
to prevent youth access to this type of video. It's even less likely that
government attempts to prevent access to content on the world-wide Internet
can be successful," said Irene Graham, EFA's Executive Director.
"Australian laws already empower the Australian Broadcasting Authority to
enforce deletion of any X-rated material found on Australian hosted
Internet sites and The Australia Institute's report does not suggest that
the laws have failed in this regard."
The Australia Institute said a "distinction needs to be drawn between
'mainstream' pornography (in commercially available X-rated videos) and the
proliferation of violent and extreme material on the Internet".
"Australian Internet censorship laws go far beyond the realms of community
standards and practicality," said Graham. "Mainstream pornography
containing sexually explicit X-rated material without the slightest
indication of violence, coercion or demeaning depictions, and also R rated
material that is not sexually explicit, is banned in the same way as
depictions of rape, bestiality and so on. Mere nudity, like a Playboy
magazine centre-fold, is banned. As a result, adults and teenagers seeking
mainstream pornography online, visit overseas sites where they are very
likely to be exposed to violent and extreme pornography."
EFA said relaxation of Australian Internet censorship laws would be more
successful in minimising access to violent and extreme kinds of pornography
than would more restrictive legislation.
"The laws should be changed to permit on-line provision of Australian
X-rated material, a category that has long prohibited violent and extreme
pornography," said Graham. "This would allow the small proportion of
Internet users who seek pornographic material online, whether adult or
teenage, to access strictly regulated Australian sites. At present, they
have no option other than to visit overseas sites that also contain
horrific material and that are not, and never will be, subject to
Australia's censorship laws."
EFA considers that minors' access to pornography online is a matter of
serious concern. However, given the global nature of the Internet, more
restrictive Australian laws would be no more effective than current laws.
... and then there were none
And we have the best gun laws. :-)
Seriously, the censorship laws do nothing.
The data caps are the biggest issue with Internet access in Aus at the moment.
ISP's are almost defined based on the amount of data available.
At the ISP I used to work for in Perth, Australia we decided the best solution was to provide a page or two on our website explaining how software filtering works, then provide all the alternatives and let the clients decide, so I wrote:
. ht ml
http://www.iinet.net.au/support/softwarefilters
it fulfilled the requirements of the legislation and explained the limitations of each type of flitering quite clearly - without affecting our customers or business.
Our government is way too incompetent to implement any effective forms of censorship. Just look at their recent record on things like refugees, Iraq and the like. They can't even lie very well :)
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
From the article:"ISPs don't want people using very effective filters," he said. "They want people to be downloading as much information as possible - that's how they make their money."
....which is why they cap the bandwidth avalable to their customers
"We feel the decision is best left in the hands of parents." He said the opt-out clause "could work" but feared routine filtering could seriously slow down the internet.
They should go with an opt-in policy instead. Those willing to stick their heads in the sand and let others make decisions about what they can and can not read should stand up and ask for it by name instead of forcing the everyone else to bail out of such a scheme.
--
Freeper Logic
It's kinda weird. In the US a naked tit causes so much trouble it has to be pixelated out of TV shows. Here nobody is bothered by tits.
But we have this peculiar web censorship law to (try to) stop us seeing tits online. As far as I can (dimly) remember it was an offering to an ultra-conservative state senator to get him to vote for the privitisation of our telephone monopoly. We got the dud law, and he voted against privitisation. Oh how we laughed. Not!
I always thought it would just fade into obscurity over time, but now with Howard crawling up the bum of Dubbya, I expect every crackpot US idea to be imported, and none of our own crackpot ideas to be discarded. Sigh.
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.
Be afraid Australia, be very afraid!
Now they won't be able to see the vids of their New Zealand neighbors with their sheep.
The ISPs are merely compelled to provide approved filtering software to their customers at cost.
No one is actually forced to filter content. As the article says only 17% of parents have actually bothered to install such filters.
Some groups are promoting mandatory filtering and some are dead against it which is pretty much how you'd expect things to be.
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For months people got around the filters by changing the way they entered the web addresses (use IP addresses instead of domain names until that ceased to work; use the integer encoding of the IP address until THAT ceased to work, etc.) They fixed that. Then they went through well-known proxies like anonymizer.com and made proxies out of well-known services like babelfish.altavista.com. They fixed that. Eventually proxy access on well-known ports will probably be blocked at the border to stave off the unknown proxy usage, but that doesn't do anything about the ports that are unknown. Then they can start filtering things that look like web traffic on non-standard ports, but SSL gateways and VPN software can always get past that until they decide to block encryption.
My point: there will always be ways around filters on the Internet, because at any point there aren't, we've no longer got an Internet. There are sufficient business interests in maintaining the Internet as a useful tool to keep the book-burning impulses of even the most ardent censorship advocates in check.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Thankfully those of us lucky enough to live in Australia don't need the Internet, 'cause Telstra and other broadband carriers certainly won't let us have it!
Filtering the Internet is unnecessary. All we need are a few more users, and the tiny bandwidth available to the entire nation will be spread so thinly that it'll be like the good old days of 9600 baud modems. Sure, pornography will get through, but by the time a download has finished, even young teens will then be old enough to vote.
The World's Biggest Luddite is barely worthy of being called a moron (well, only if you were comparing him to a particularly stupid moron), so no doubt he'll implement another completely unworkable solution which will win him votes with people who think "Something must be done!" and the rest of us will long for the next election so that we can vote this peanut out.
Still, we only have to give him some sort of bribe, like the digital television he accepted for research purposes (as did the PM). It's so much easier when the top pollies are on the take. All we have to do is work out the right size bribe...
"ISPs don't want people using very effective filters," he said. "They want people to be downloading as much information as possible - that's how they make their money."
Weird, I always thought internet providers made money from people who pay their monthly fees but don't download a lot, and they actually loose money on those who download gigabytes a month..
Anyone care to explain how an ISP makes money because their users download a lot ??
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I beg to differ! The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is against reigon-coding DVDs because of the anti-compeditive aspects of it, but walk into any place selling DVD players in Australia and I guarentee you that better than %95 of them are reigon-coded. Because of ambiguity regarding the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act (Australia's version of the DMCA) and whether this makes reigon-free DVD players illegal "circumvention devices", most places will not stock (or admit to stocking) reigon-free DVD players.
That Australia filters all printed media. If you want a copy of the NY Times or internation herald tribune it takes an extra 48 hours for them read it and send it off. On a side note: In Malaysia they do sensor the information that is writen about Malaysia however it only takes them 6 hours after the paper is released. So you get the morning paper that afternoon. (paper printer in Singapore)
"You win again Gravity!" -Futurama (Zapp)
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).
What some people don't realize, and it is probably due to their lack of understanding of technology is that in the case of internet filtering you can only limit access to certain sites but not prevent _all access to everything that is deemed inappropriate on a moral scale. Just like crime, you can prevent some but not all.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
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!
Filtering is a good idea, but mandatory filtering is not. Let people filter what they want to filter; any other route is doomed to failure.
As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
HOWEVER... there's nothing to stop a parent from being that kind of fool, and I'm not entirely certain that you can legislate that anyway. If somebody wants their kid to think sex with goats is OK, and attend his high-school graduation in a Gimp suit, have at it... (but I'll tell you what, their kid will only date one of my kids over my slowly-cooling, twitching corpse).
Leave the filtering to the parents, if they so choose. As long as it's in the privacy of their own home, and as long as it's not kiddie pr0n, I'd say let adults download what they want.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
From Article: It wants mandatory filtering by internet service providers (ISPs), but with those aged over 18 able to opt out.
It seems they want to regulate content mainly for minors and people who want regulation.... Nothing really wrong with that.The head of the Internet Industry Association, Peter Coroneos, said mandatory filtering had been ruled out because "some families just don't have an issue with it".
Dosent seem doomsday here......."We feel the decision is best left in the hands of parents." He said the opt-out clause "could work" but feared routine filtering could seriously slow down the internet.
"Be very afraid. huh"
Classic example of sensationalism... where it is not required
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As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
As a parent myself, I have to disagree completely with you on this point. I think that education is the key to raising health kids capable of adjusting to their environment. Censorship is not education. It is, in fact, anti-education. I do not censor the internet from my kids (of course, neither of them are old enough to read, quite yet, so they don't use the computer anyway) and I have no intention of doing so. I've gone out and looked at the stuff on the internet that you would censor, and I'll admit that I don't want them to see it. However, consider this: Kid downloads kiddie porn. Says "Daddy, what's this?" I say "That's why you don't talk to strangers." Easy enough, right?
Sure, I make it sound easy, but as with all parenting issues, it's a lot more complex than that. The point, though, is that you never get to talk about the hard stuff if it never comes up. My parents practiced censorship on me, and I found myself at 18 ready to take on the world, but unprepared for the world as it really is.
Leave the filtering to the parents, if they so choose. As long as it's in the privacy of their own home, and as long as it's not kiddie pr0n, I'd say let adults download what they want.
Luckily, I agree very strongly with this. :) So you won't hear me trying to actually legislate my ideas of parenting. :)
Like what I said? You might like my music
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.
My favourite bit is the "opt out" of filtering for over-18s - as much an admission of the intent to masturbate as calling down to the front desk of the Hilton and saying "Yeah, hi, how do I get porn on this TV?"
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.
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