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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 ----
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
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.
(....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...
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?
Dude, you think you could sling code with all them titties dancin' in your face all day? I mean, one or two pairs of bouncing boobies is OK, but once you start adding "pasties and leather" to the block list, it's just going to be impossible. For me, anyway. What were we talking about? brb, yo.
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..
84 Million? That's twice Blizzard's developing budget for World of Warcraft... for a porn filter. Seriously?
Masturbate?
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
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
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.
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...
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?
I love the Freudian slip of writing "restraint" instead of "restaurant". I guess we know which kind of porn you prefer.
As to the actual content of your post:
1) Many people orgasm through some means while watching porn. So it's more like admiring someone else's dinner while waiting for the waiter to bring yours out.
2) Most people enjoy the smell of fresh baked bread, cookies, etc, even if they don't eat them. I love the sizzle of a steak even if I'm not eating it. Part of the reason people go to restaurants instead of eating at home all the time is that the experience is much more sensually stimulating -- smells, sounds, sights. You don't have to eat every plate of food in a restaurant to have your enjoyment of your own meal enhanced by their presence.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
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.
So by that token an orgy also makes sex better?
I always wondered where this setting was...
Oh come on, this is slashdot, can't anyone come up with a car analogy? :P
Alright, Porn is like the 8 years old chevette you drove for years until you got a real job and could buy a decent car. Chevrolet Chevette is porn (cheap unfulfillable and causes chaffing), Ford Focus is a hand job from the easy girl in class (a bit rough, cramped and ugly), Honda Civic was the blow job from the first GF who was too scared to do it for real (good and fun but kind of common and everyone gets one), the Ford mustang will be your first time (quick, short lived, busted too early, and kind of ugly and messy), The BMW 3 series will be the first stable GF who puts out (not as good as advertised but adequate), a Lexus IS350 will be the hottest GF ever had (expensive but worth it), and a Dodge caravan is like a marriage (ugly, but feels like home. ), and finally a porche boxster is like the mistress you pick up at 50 (expensive, fun, and a sign you are past you prime but not mature enough to admit it).
better?
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."