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Teen Hacks $84 Million Porn Filter in 30 Minutes
An anonymous reader writes "Tom Wood, a Year 10 Australian student has cracked the federal government's $84-million Internet porn filter in just 30 minutes. He can deactivate the filter in several clicks in such a way that the software's icon is not deleted which will make his parents believe the filter is still working. Tom says it is a matter of time before some computer-savvy kid puts the bypass on the Internet for others to use."
They said it'd take at least 10 years because they used the same cryptography in Blu-Ray!!!
"We got Skynet by the balls now" sums it up quite nicely.
-- My Sig is a P228.
Keeping a teen from porn is like trying to keep Vervet monkeys out of the fields.
Unless you are willing to shoot them, it is a lost cause.
...was because all the other people were typing one-handed?
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Give me half that and I'll re-do their filter so some 15 year old can't get around it....
Seriously, if you're going to spend that amount of money, you'd be farther ahead putting in a router that the government controls that can be continually updated. You also get cross-platform compatibility as a bonus!
What, me worry?
Tom Wood sounds more like a porn star's screen name.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Could it be that throwing tax dollars at moral problems when not everyone agrees on whether or not said act is immoral is not the best idea?
icon is not deleted which will make his parents believe the filter is still working
Isn't this what's important to parents? They only need to feel good, other technical details are useless.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
So now we find out the government has been secretly using teen workers as hackers. Not only is "teen workers" an irony but this could be constituted slave labor. They are faced with the proposed fear of work and so crack the filter as fast as they can. Oh wait ... it's a porn filter ... okay added incentive I admit.
When are people going to accept that teenagers are sexual beings too.
i a#Secondary
According to wikipedia he should be around the age of 15/16
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Austral
When I was 15 I remember becoming sexually active with girls and having "needs"
No filter can stop teens from getting off, no matter how many millions of dollars you throw at it.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Any filter with a password means you can sneak the "frklg" keylogger onto your own computer, go to any site that the filter filters that it shouldn't and have the owner of the filter disable it temporarily by putting in the password. Almost all filters have this weakness. Of course some keep a log of times it was disabled and stuff but who reads that lol. I'm thinking this one has a disable password on it too and most kids know about keyloggers
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
...if you're interested, skilled enough to find the crack and willing to risk it, chances are pretty slim you'd stop them anyway. Porn filters are only good for stopping those not really motivated.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The header links to a ad-laden, news light article. Here's a link to a better story with a tad more facts: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22304224-421, 00.html
Then it can be broken.
The only way that could even have a prayer to work is at the ISP level.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22304224-421, 00.html
The summary: A 16 year old student wanted porn. He got it in 30 minutes. The government tried to fix the filter. The 16 year old student wanted more porn. He got more in 40 minutes. 16 year old says the porn filter is waste of money.
And how do you propose to determine an image is underage?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Information (panties) wants to be free, those clever teen velvet monkeys are everywhere. Mostly though I keep thinking of a line from the Movie Akira (the English version) "If humans think something is possible, eventually they find a way to do it, like it's instinctual." (I am not going to Google the exact wording but the upshot is the same. A motivated kid is impossible to stop.
And it would have works except for those damn kids.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
According to the article's picture, John Conner hacked the filter? I wonder if his mother, Sarah, knows about this. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
A national database of naked children, duh!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Until Christians are brought to a bloody justice, it'll have to do,
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
The simplest and cheapest way to stop / reduce a kids ability / opportunity to access porn, an other such nefarious sites, on the Internet is to put the computer in a well traveled place in the home, say beside the kitchen and not up in there room where they cannot be supervised directly.
Its called 'parenting' and it really works.
Rebuttals featuring 'special cases' will be ignored.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I've never heard of a more appropriately-named government project. $84M for a continually-updated filter that a kid (sounds like a smart kid, but a kid nonetheless) can break in less than an hour.
Why can't America's politicians up and admit to their schemes, too? Imagine it: the PATRIOT Scheme, the Communications Decency Scheme, and so on.
I'm fairly sure that if they took all the porn off the Internet, there'd only be 1 website left, and it would be called Bring Back The Porn.
The problem of teen access to internet porn is self-limiting. The boy will eventually go blind and then what's he gonna do? Digitized braille porn?
These filters do not work for several reasons. One is that porn is hard to recognize for software. There is no AI that can do it. A second reason is that internet filtering only works at a chocke-point, for example the giant chinese firewall, with its attached civil servants that issue the warrants. (We had a talk about this thing here by some chinese guy. Of course the warrant-writers were omitted, but it was obvious they were there.) You can tunnel through firewalls, for example with SSL or SSH.
For years security experts generally predict these efforts a time to be broken of at most a few weeks. The basic problem is that the approach is wrong and that it is both pushed by incompetent politicians (incompetence of the 2nd order: they do not know they are incompetent.) and companies that promies effective solutions, but in truth only want to earn a lot of money and know their solutions will not really work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
What is this? This looks like a random blog entry from some random, anonymous person with no references to any actual reporting, whatsoever. What a shitty Slashdot "article".
I don't respond to AC's.
(....although some would say that's 2 minds more than I actually possess. But I digress...)
I applaud any successful circumvention of anything that restricts information to those who want to see it. But at the same time I'm starting to think that we shouldn't be shouting from the housetops about it -- this kind of publicly announced hack is just fuel for the fire to the folks that would ban all even remotely sexually material from the Net. It just gives them the chance to say "well, see, filters don't work worth a damn -- therefore, we must make it illegal for any explicit material to be on the Internet." Can't you hackers just keep your little mouths shut, let the moralists THINK that the filters work (while you quietly and discreetly circulate the hack), and let their ignorance be our bliss?
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
I'm surprised they've never tried to make a porn filter that blocks access based on whether you're typing one-handed.
I mean, they can detect cat-like typing, after all...
So 'young adult' , and 'teen 19' would also be filtered, even tho its currently legal.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They should make a filter that required you to provide world peace, cure cancer or something. Put all that horny teen energy to some use
What?
What the hell did they spend this money on?
Assuming just HALF of it was for developers, that's:
42,000,000 / 60000 = SEVEN HUNDRED developers making $60K a year!
What the hell were they doing? Picking their noses?
I'm sure a small team of even five developers can come up with an effective filtering solution for a small fraction of that cost.
Why is it that governments are willing to overspend so much? Is it a case of "we have a ton of money, so let's be lazy and just throw a bunch of it at a problem so we don't have to shop around"?
Arrrgh. Morons.
...I'd say let the kid do whatever the f*** he wants.
spoiled brat...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Can someone explain why a filter would cost $84 million?
What is funny to me is that $84 million of aussies' hard-earned tax money is spent on keeping people from beating off at work.
--- sig moved for great justice.
It's not like the grandparent simply can't take away his computer privileges if he does something he shouldn't, like uses Tor to try and cloak what he's doing. This isn't a situation of plausible deniability, the kid can't say "Well you can't prove anything, so you can't do anything!" Sorry, it's the parent's computer and network, he can revoke all access if he likes.
The idea here is allowing the kid access and giving them trust, but letting them know if that trust is abuse the access can and will be taken away.
It's about time that someone gets angry over our children being subjected to low quality porn. Hopefully these new filters will fix that. Won't somebody think of the children!
In my opinion this is one of the good sides of censorship. If children are able to learn how to circumvent censorship they will learn an important step to beeing mature net-citicens.
The only sin committed here, is the Governement spending $84 million on a Porn Filter! How many other programs would that kind of money funded, oh wait we are talking about the Government are we not. Think of the food that could buy to feed people in need, womens shelters, life saving operations.. and on and on. Despite that, they spend it on a Porn Filter. Even if they succeeded, there are still magazines, movies etc.. and if in some distant future they manage to erase all traces of Porn the world over... that still leaves the imagination..
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22304224-2,00 .html?from=public_rss
84 Million? That's twice Blizzard's developing budget for World of Warcraft... for a porn filter. Seriously?
A national database of naked children, duh!
While I thought your joke was funny I also want to share that the database actually exists using one-way hashes: it's maintained by NetClean with contributions from police forces around the world.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
Masturbate?
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
$84 million dollars? WTF?
Which that sort of money you could create something useful...
Governments shouldn't have money.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
A teen need not seek out porn when he just has to find girls that will put out; and those are more common as women gain more social equality and freedom.
Some teens might be better with the porn than diseases or their own children. How about a study on the impact porn has on teen sex related problems?
Physically adulthood is sooner than our cultural adulthood (the mental threshold IS cultural) and therein lies the bulk of the problem. The whole issue is a cultural one which as a result has little fact or logical foundation and more to do with belief, dogma, tradition, peer pressure, etc... Religion and SIMILAR belief structures should be prevented from getting into government. Its a core reason for having a Republic as opposed to an actual Democracy; protect the minority from the majority.
Non-Disclaimer: I will not cave into judgmental self-centered people who think other people can't understand points of view that they do not agree with.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Oh I have to stop drinking this early in the day.
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
Once his parents read about this on slashdot the jig will be up.
Where there's a willie there's a way.
I gave up using these filters. My son show me not only could he bypass it easy but he could reverse the filter and use it as a source of good sites to go to.
There are 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The government isn't, as such, spending $84 million on a porn filter. They're spending $84 million subsidising licenses for 3rd party filter software at minimally discounted or non-discounted rates.
Frankly, I think it's nonsensical, but it DOES help keep the religious crazies quiet without them making another mandatory ISP filtering push. As if the last one (that was actually passed into law here!) ever had any effect beyond being openly ignored by ISPs as impractical and downright stupid. It stops them demanding something even more absurdly costly and embarrassing.
Didn't Alberta flat-out refuse to participate in the system?
As the site says:
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I note from he summary that "the icon is still there".
How come there even is an icon to see? I'd have expected such a filter to be implemented on a physically separate proxy server operated by the ISP - otherwise how does a parent who's got a Mac or an older PC use the product? Unless the software is on a proxy server but there's a Windows applet which confirms that the proxy is being used.
Even then, Tor (or similar) would make short work of this.
Sounds like he is just killing the process. That will leave a ghost system tray icon until you mouse over it.
You can just right click on the task bar to get to the task manager also, so clicking around works.
The solution is to run the filter as a system level service and deny users access to kill it (lots of services can do that).
Sounds like a shitty program for sure.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Porn is more like going into a restraint, smelling the food, watching people eat, looking at the menu, but not being able to eat.
Fight Spammers!
Watch this timeless masterpiece of sexual education. We have to save the children!
o m-the-1960s/
http://www.ludzer.com/2007/07/22/anti-porn-psa-fr
Open Source Alternatives
if they had a robotic arm like that! I am surprised it took that long, his parents must have tried liquid nitrogen on him.
John Conner
Seriously, people. Everyone here thinks that "thinking of the children" is a crappy excuse to take away our rights, but in this case it really is about the children! When I was 14 and wanted to masturbate, I had to actually close my eyes and imagine Sarah from Bio class in a short skirt with no panties on bending over as she drops her pen. Now it's just too easy for kids. They could get that image of Sarah (and MUCH more... oh so much more) just by spending a few minutes clicking on the computer. It's seriously ruining our children's imaginations. Without being able to close your eyes and envision naked girls with pinpoint accuracy, how will we expect our kids to grow up and solve problems in imaginative ways? So please, think of the children and make them work to get off.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Dude, you're supposed to touch yourself while you look at it!
Didn't your friends teach you how to do it?
You and I are morons; we couldn't possibly understand the complexities of the music business...we just don't have their pay! Inconceivable!
:>
Yet the old-world robber-barrons who hire people to be on the watch for people singing "Happy Birthday" can't seem to identify the same thing this story shows: in computers, there's always someone more clever than yourself. Time and time again they try some lame attempt to get paid for every copy of a title (Oh! And give $.03 or so to the artist!) and they get crazy because they can't stop the piracy and sales keep going down.
It's time to see these old-timers for what they are: future exhibits next to the cavemen.
What makes this worse is that, in the same week-or-so, another kid cracked the AT&T/iPhone lock, so it could be used on other carriers. Wouldn't it make more sense to SELL as many iPhones as possible, considering a royalty on the idea?
TIME TO CHANGE THE PARADIGM, GUYS.
But ignorance is bliss; aren't we happy? Now let's go down to NYC and watch the robber-barons fight to get a cab!
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The article was seriously lacking on info. The fact that they don't even know his age makes me question whether his method was tested, either. The quote at the end makes it sound like propaganda.
I mean seriously...what the hell did they spend that much money on? Licensing? 'cause there's no way you could spend that much making almost ANY piece of software, let alone a stupid-ass IP blocking filter!
expandfairuse.org
A few years back I found my eldest son (12 at the time( was using the small dark hours to view various kinds of porn. Some was 'normal' but there were many sites that were et the more extreme end of human sexuality.
I set up a transparent proxy with Dansguardian. Do I think it's impossible for my kids to find porn (or other content I'm uncomfortable for my kids to see) ? No. But I do know that it's unlikely for them to stumble across it accidentally. If they set to work to find and view porn, they'll find a way around the filters.
I also took a few of the images C. had looked at, and by zooming and playing with palettes showed him the scars of self-mutilation, the scars from slashed wrists, the track marks, the rotting teeth and the sores. He now knows that many of the girls have pretty nasty problems, as well as nasty habits. He also can see that many of the girls are being exploited, and that porn denigrates humans, unlike art which glorifies the body or casts these girls onto the canvas of our own life to challenge our our nice safe prejudices.
I know if my kids view porn. They know that I know. I also know that they have at least a glimmering of some of the moral and social issues involved. Hopefully I've also provided some guidance about what constitutes 'normal' and what the difference is between sex as an act of love and sex as exploitation for purposes of ego stroking.
So my approach as a parent is (1) make it less likely that they'll find porn by accident (2) make sure they're game to talk to me about it (3) make sure they see woman as more than a set of orifices in a warm bundle (4) make sure they know that their dreams and urges are normal and (5) that they are the only ones who can decide whether they treat Human Beings with respect as Divine Creatures deserve.
I figure that if (however unlikely) I can make some headway on all these points, I'll have got some wins, and their chances of happy future relationships are (slightly?) improved. I think thats my job - the rest is up to them.
Last I checked, the word "teen" meant that there were some thirty-something women trying desperately to pretend to be younger by pouting, sucking on a finger nail and wearing their hair in pig-tails. I'm not sure whether you can actually get porn that shows anybody under ~25, but if so I'm pretty confident that it won't be labeled as such...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
What if you redirect every porn page to Slashdot? That would keep the kids away from sex for years.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
They should arrest him, after all the stories I've read on here about people finding security holes and reporting them, then finding themselves in lawsuits for damages.... Then this this kid comes along and wastes $84 million worth of taxpayer dollars!! The Howard government should be disgraced with itself
This "news article" had no info no links to who or what this person did, the hyperlink leads to a site that has nothing to do with the article. The blog just boasts that the kid (no age) broke a "filter" but not which or where, I imagine that it was in Australia, since the page is from there. All around very unprofessional and suspect. Any other links?
It's moments like these that make me proud to be an Australian High School student. *Tear* The current government is such a bunch of old fogeys that wouldn't know a thing about technology. They want to roll-out a Wi-Max system for broadband delivery across the country. Basically giving us a sub-standard system in a technological dead-end. Idiots. The fact that their strategy has once again proved inept suprises me not in the least. It was always going to be cracked by teenagers, but 30 minutes is just ridiculous. Would it have taken less time for a $40 million dollar filter? I doubt it, they're almost as stupid with their spending of money as my local council, and this council spent $10,000 dollars on a display of street "art" consisting of hundreds of pool noodles. This guy is right, especially after this story, it's a matter of time before instructions are posted. Hopefully the government will be embarrassed enough to lift their game, if not, perhaps the display of stupidity, yet another in a long line of stupid acts, will help the opposition party get into office. The company that made this is going to be severely embarrassed.
Give us this day our garlic bread and lead us not into vegetarianism but deliver us some pizza.
... I feel a bit safer. I don't know of many teens who aren't already technically inclined who are willing to spend 30 minutes straight trying to do anything computer-related. They usually get distracted pretty easily... oh, please excuse me, I have an IM from one of my friends. I wonder what they're up to...?
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
I thought all Europeans were supposed to be feeling guilt through inheritance for the empire days and all the slave trading that went with it? And that all men were supposed to be feeling guilt through inheritance for repressing women since time began? So are you saying we no longer have to have all these expressions of heart-on-our-sleeve sorrow and regret? It might actually be a relief not to have to listen to Tony Blair wringing his hands over something that happened >200 years ago.
I'm afraid that you'll find that people do like to visit the sins of the fathers on the children; and part of the real message of Christianity is that since it is such a human thing to do, it took someone extra-human to forgive even the direst of sins and failings.
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
Ah, and I suppose that your principles are the correct ones.
Yes, you obviously respect others greatly. That'll be why you summarily dismiss their beliefs as being wrong.
Respecting others means accepting that many people enjoy both creating and watching porn, and that no particular harm comes to any of them in the process. It means learning to understand these people, how they think, and why they believe what they do. If you do not understand, you cannot respect.
Respecting others also means accepting that your opinions and beliefs are no more valid than theirs. If you think that your beliefs are somehow better than another person's, then you do not respect that person.
I mean look at how many parents these posts have. Has it helped??
Just thought - the filter is probably not meant to thwart anyone over the age of like 13 anyway.. perhaps it's just for fairly young kids playing on computers? Seems a lot of money just for that tho.
They say that the student was 10 years old AND a teen. I thought teenagers are in the 13-19 range. Geez, it makes me mad how inaccurate everybody is these days.
I believe that teens technically start at thirteen, not ten.
What if the kids are using a limited user account? Does the hack require you to have admin privileges or not?
He's in year 10 at school, which doesn't mean he's 10 years old.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Me personally, I don't need God to get high, I get high off life.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
That sounds even viler. Ouch.
Blar.
Hackers on Testosterone.
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
I want to see the vaporhack. Unless he can show me it, I can't bring myself to believe that he has achieved it. I might as well say, "I cracked 128bit RSA encryption last night, in three clicks". My point being, unsubstantiated claims should not be taken that seriously. Anyone else interested in seeing this vaporhack?