Slashdot Mirror
Australian Government Censorship 'Worse Than Iran'
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Government's plan to Censor the Internet is producing problems for ISPs, with filters causing speeds to drop by up to 86% and falsely blocking 10% of safe sites. The Government Minister in charge of the censorship plan, Conservative Stephen Conroy, has been accused of bullying ISP employees critical of his plan: 'If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.'" Read on for more, including an interesting approach to demonstrating the inevitable collision of automated censorship with common sense.
The same reader continues: "Conroy's plan involves censoring at the ISP level to product 'Child-safe' Internet feeds. Initially he said that adults would be able to opt out. He since reversed that position, saying instead they can only go onto an 'Adult-safe' feed censoring 'illegal material', which another senator warned could include 'euthanasia material, politically related material, material about anorexia.' Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia said 'I'm not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure [note: forum membership required] than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.'"
Another anonymous reader suggests this answer to the proposed clone of China's great firewall: "Some of the tested systems use md5 hashes to find illegal content. As proof of concept, how long will it take Slashdot users to create an image with the md5 hash of 5ff742a58529efa02ba00ec8fa2e89bf? This md5 was picked because it is the hash of the current picture of the Prime Minister on his party's web site. A couple of points: The created image should be a jpg. It must be safe for work. It needs the correct MD5. It shouldn't break modern browsers. Its copyright should be free." Any takers?
Another anonymous reader suggests this answer to the proposed clone of China's great firewall: "Some of the tested systems use md5 hashes to find illegal content. As proof of concept, how long will it take Slashdot users to create an image with the md5 hash of 5ff742a58529efa02ba00ec8fa2e89bf? This md5 was picked because it is the hash of the current picture of the Prime Minister on his party's web site. A couple of points: The created image should be a jpg. It must be safe for work. It needs the correct MD5. It shouldn't break modern browsers. Its copyright should be free." Any takers?
Canada has a huge surpluss of oil and we're not invading them.
Let's play devil's advocate for two seconds.
1 - We haven't financially gained from invading Iraq. Quite the opposite. The war has cost us greatly, and we have no control over Iraqi oil anymore. We help guard it, but we don't own it.
2 - Republicans don't go to war more then Democrats. Both parties voted to go to war. People seem to forget that polls showed that US citizens, as well as many of the world supported going into Iraq immediately after 9/11 on a false premise that Saddam had ties to 9/11. Bush pushed for diplomacy and intel. That intel concluded that Saddam had no ties to 9/11. A warmonger strikes while the iron is hot, not pushes for diplomacy for a few more years.
3 - Clinton while in office bombed 4 different countries without pursuing diplomacy in any of those cases. He didn't ask permission, talk to the UN, consult with allies, or give warnings. He just bombed. The funny thing is that few people argued because it was over so quick, where as a land war is costly and lasts for years.
I really hate the notion that Republicans are more likely to be war-mongers than Democrats, not because I agree with all Republicans, but because the assertion is foolish.
I also really hate the notion that Americans are war-mongers. In almost every use of American forces, they were requested by the UN, and in most cases (embassy evacuations, small peace-keeping missions, etc) the military is used briefly, and without bloodshed. For instance, when troops were issued to Liberia in 2003, they prevented bloodshed, but you don't hear about things like that.
Please, stop ignorant trolling. It isn't funny, and it only spreads FUD.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Hi,
First time posting a reply so be kind :)
The Australian Federal Election last year was the first one I had actually voted in (I'm 21).
I am now sad to say that after watching what has occurred in australia in relation to the NBN (National Broadband Network) and this...filter, I am seriously believing that I made the wrong choice in voting for Labor.
This is an absolute disaster...I was always under the impression that no matter who got into power here, neither side would actually attempt such a radical censorship let alone be completely willing to implement it.
Does anyone have any ideas on what little me can do to perhaps turn this around? Writing / calling Conroy or my local MP perhaps?
Kind Regards,
Eliminatrix
That and Conroy is too busy getting caught rigging Senate hearings over Treasury issues. My worry is he'll push this to get some cover from the other stuff-ups.
I wish I had the answer, but if I were in charge I'd start with medical and psychological studies into pedophilia, and while sex offenders are the group most likely to repeat their crimes once released from prison.
Locally I keep seeing cities passing laws saying sex offenders can't live in their towns. I see sex registry laws that are doubly-unconstitutional (ex post facto and double-jeopardy). The current plan seems to be shoving sex offenders away and pretending like that will solve anything.
Chemical castration has worked in extreme cases, and if there is a medical issue with these offenders (biological or psychological) then you will most likely need to treat that problem. Instead of publicly vilifying these people, encourage them to seek out medical treatment anonymously before they victimize others.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Actually I don't know that. Sure, labor governments have a long history of not finishing projects either on time or at all, but this project is just stupid enough to actually be implemented.
I voted for them at the last election, based mainly on their other policies. I knew that the filtering was something they were going to do, but if I had of know it was going to be this bad, I would of changed my vote.
Conroy has to get with the times and to stop using the 'nothing to hide' argument (in another light here: if you don't agree with us, they you are a pedo).
I'll point out here, but this is aimed at Enderandrew's post a couple down. Australian's don't have the right to free speech. We have a concept of free speech and there are some laws supporting it, but its nowhere near the level that America does.
Two fundamental design features of the multiple networks that make up the internet are "transparent encapsulation", and "path redundancy". The upshot of this design is that no filtering mechanism can prevent *simple* circumvention. None. It is simply not possible given the way in which the technology is implemented.
For the case of parents attempting to stop children looking at pornography this is not a drastic issue, as children likely will not know how this circumvention can be achieved.
Once you are attempting to filter out "illegal content" however, you have entered a whole new realm of pointlessness. If someone is attempting to access illegal material on the internet, they are presumably already technically savvy enough to find such material, and so will have no problems at all circumventing any filtering mechanism.
The point being, the government is currently opening itself up to vocal criticism over the implementation of a filter that will not actually do anything. That does not seem particularly clever.
Presumably it will get worse once the money has been wasted on the filter and videos explaining how to circumvent it start popping up on youtube.
I sincerely urge you to rethink this technologically naive and fundamentally flawed plan.
end
I realise some of this is mostly just magical handwaving. But I was trying to get my point across.
Ahh, yeah. Actually, we voted out the previous Government Most Likely To Censor The Intarwebs in favour of this lot, on the basis that of the two evils this one was lesser.
I mean, sure, I'd love a Greens-majority parliament -- I even voted that way -- but given achievable goals, getting RatBastard Howard the hell out of power was pretty good too.
Now we just have to convince our not-as-bad-as-the-other-lot parliamentarians exactly how stunningly bad this idea is, and that this was not one of the things they have a mandate for.
(Actually, that's one of the things that pisses me off most about the party-based government systems: you can't vote for specific policies, you either pick the Liberal package, or the Labor package (Labour/Tory, Dem/GOP, whatever). If one party is better than the other on most accounts, and has some really stupid ideas as well, then -- given that the other party has its own stupid ideas -- there's no way to tell them "Don't get cocky, we voted for you on the basis that you don't try that"... until it's too late. Or unless there is a huge popular outcry, which is what we're doing, so if you're going to bitch about us 'taking responsibility' for our government, then watch closely: this is what it looks like.)
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
According to reports: http://forums.mactalk.com.au/20/56127-coming-soon-censored-internet-15.html#post668070
The list of excluded sites used in testing includes sites like: "The Pirate Bay, demonoid, mininova, Erowid (the web's best known haven of drug info) and 4chan"
Australia's 3 commercial tv stations are struggling under the load of huge debts and poor revenue, time to throw them a bone I guess.
We're talking about Australia here. You know, the country that rides along every time the Americans 'go it alone.'
And in all seriousness, we do appreciate it. You Brits, too. I think, in part, that's also why we're concerned when we hear about some of these Orwellian schemes your governments are scheming up. Er, not that ours is so shining and pure, of course.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yes, he's Labour, but the ALP is more a party of religion[1] and unionism. It has a right wing component that is just as conservative as the official conservative parties, including the Liberals. The summary used a worthless label. The major political parties in Australia have conservative and liberal parts and both would be left-wing to Americans.
[1] There's some correlation between Irish-Catholic-Worker --> Labour and English-Protestant-Manager / Owner --> Liberal / National. Given that most people vote the same way their parents vote, it's something of a self-perpetuating system.
America is a peaceful country. As long as you do what it tells you to do and don't get in its way. Then, nobody gets hurt!
The very few studies I've seen about child porn users/viewers is that there's no link between that habit and their personal likelihood to abuse actual children.
That said, they'll find their taste in porn somewhere, its just very unlikely according to current data that they'd go abuse children to get it.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Not only that, but child pornographers might be neither pedophiles nor child molesters, but simple profiteers. All the medical and psychological screening in the world won't flush them out.
Actually some studies have shown that a sexual attraction to children occurs in something like 2-10% of the population at large (depending on the study) and attraction to minors would be a much larger subset than that.
If you disagree, I'm assuming you think everyone who thought Britney Spears was sexy at 17 is a pervert. Ditto for those who watched Rihanna's sexy videos at 16-17 yrs old. Not to mention the age of most models you see in magazines (stop assuming, look it up).
I don't believe I've ever come across a good study showing any link between an attraction to minors and child abuse in the same person in any consistent way. Sure, it may happen, but it isn't the norm. In fact, many child sex crime perpetrators are NOT sexually attracted to children.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I've written to Stephen Conroy and his office by letter and email at least a half a dozen times and received nothing but silence on the issue, even my local member doesn't respond on this issue
I'm sorry but I don't believe you. I wrote a single email to Conroy, cc'd to my local member Anna Burke, expressing my concerns about the filtering and received a reply from both of them. I believe it's actually required by law that they respond to you.
now, whether I was satisfied with the response is a whole other matter. Conroy (or more accurately his office) just replied with a generic form letter/sales pitch, not addressing any of my concerns at all.
It is not FUD. The scheme proposed requires total interception of web traffic. That is more than Iran does, and puts us in the same league as the Great Firewall of China.
The point is not *what* is being filtered, it is that it is being filtered at all. Doing so is incredibly intrusive, has a deadening effect on free speech, and leaves open the door to police-state control of Australians' internet connectivity. We're supposed to be better than that.
As an aside, political speech is protected by the Constitution, according to the High Court of Australia.
Which raises an interesting point about whether this is constitutional, considering that this scheme will inevitably cause blocks to political speech due to false positives.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
citation needed,
Whats an ecstasy addict? ok there are people who will snort and sniff anything going but they tend to be a minority. Most recreational drug users wouldn't go near heroin.
What will Peodophiles turn too if they can't get child porn through their browser?
The kids knicker section in a catalog maybe.
It's still wanking material to them i would have thought.
Viewers of adult porn don't usually go out and become rapists do they?
Most people are aware of the potential consequences of breaking the law to them and act accordingly.
Unfortunately the risks are quite low currently for people wanting child porn through the internet. Probably in the same order of risk as getting busted for downloading an mp3 of some song. Most of us are quite confident we wouldn't get busted for copyright infringement.
Lets say we couldn't download mp3's and movies anymore most of us wouldn't switch to shoplifting cd's because we would get caught and face consequences.
So your implication that blocking child porn would increase child abuse doesn't seem credible, in fact it is more likely to reduce it. The current situation probably tends to lead pedophiles to believe that their mindset is relatively normal which is far more dangerous to children.
Filtering and government censorship isn't a solution if its blocking legitimate legal sites.
posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
You'll notice I said "more technical interference", even our communications minister isn't as bad as the Ayatollah. :)
The quote appeared in the paper here.
For anyone interested check out, our (Electronic Frontiers Australia) campaign site.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
More to the point, who should they really be pursuing, the deranged viewer or the sadistic photographer. Of course the reality is it has nothing to do with child porn, or terrorism it is all about control. Control what people can read, controlling what people can say, controlling dissent, controlling criticism of those in power of being able to take control of the public mind scape to promote what profits them most.
At least they have giving up of the lie of trying to make an internet designed for adults suitable for toddlers. A bit hard to say content suitable for a 17 year old is also suitable for a 5 year old, precisely to what level do they really intend to censor the internet. Most important of all how much is going to cost, what corporations will be profiting by it, who will be sued for illegally blocking legal sites and, who will profit by illegally blocking legal sites.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
They threw the brick, but it was the kind of girlie throw that doesn't quite reach the batter. I thought it was pretty amateurish for someone who has been in parliament for as long as Conroy, but it's entirely the kind of behavior I'd expect :-)
Cheers!
- mark
-----
I tried an internal modem, but it hurt when I walked.
Rudd and Conroy are both conservative Christians. You can see it not just in this, but also in the 'Alcopop Tax' they just introduced. Rudd doesn't drink and both men are on the record as being anti-pornography.
It explains the zeal with which Conroy is pushing this through. Any politician with a brain would have looked at seen it was going to go to crap. But Conroy doesn't have to worry, because his prime minister is on a mission from God.
Don't vote for Conservative Christians. They ram their ideas down your throats, and there is no a damned thing you can do but wait to the next election.
I would really like to know what U.S troops are supposedly stationed here in Finland (my home country). AFAIK they come here for the occasional multilateral military exercise but that in my opinion does not mean a permanent presence.
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
This is what the Opposition Broadband Minister said:
"Like anything in life it's about finding the right balance between the basic freedoms we all expect to have in a democracy like ours while at the same time wanting to protect minors from exposure to material we prefer they didn't see. We think the arrangements that we had in place when we left office struck that balance. We'll watch the government's trials of this and we are prepared to consider what comes out of those trials. But our presumption is this cannot and will not work, it's very heavy-handed." http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;879301684;fp;4194304;fpid;1;pf;1
As for Conrad, I can't believe this guy. This is his testimony at a senate estimates hearing:
Senator Conroy: I trust you are not suggesting that people should have access to child p-rnography.
Senator Ludlam: No. That is why I was interested in asking about the law enforcement side of it as well.
We're a lot more advanced than you might think:
http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/SoftIntCodeSign/
This generates two programs (actually valid Win32 Executables compiled from source) and modifies them to have the same MD5. So you have "good.exe" and "evil.exe" of your own crafting with identical hashes but VERY different content.
Let's say you use MD5 to implement a "known good" program list in your software firewall/antivirus program, etc. You've just been compromised because now I can distribute a "good" program that a user allows after they have verified it's authenticity and then I can generate an "evil" program with the same hash that deletes his hard drive.
MD5 is dead.
I thought this was settled a long time ago, but apparently some of you twits still insist on believing the lies told by the left. Why the news media has not followed up on this old report you'll have to answer for yourself.
Monday, April 26, 2004
OPERATION: IRAQI FREEDOM
Saddam's WMD have been found
New evidence unveils chemical, biological, nuclear, ballistic arms
Posted: April 26, 2004
1:36 p.m. Eastern
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
© 2004 Insight/News World Communications Inc.
New evidence out of Iraq suggests the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction is having better success than is being reported.
Key assertions by the intelligence community widely judged in the media and by critics of President Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all.
But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.
In virtually every case -- chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles -- the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.
The Iraq Survey Group, ISG, whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight.
"There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."
Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner.
The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.
Both Duelfer and Kay found Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects."
They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.
But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence.
"Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior administration official told Insight.
"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.
When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice.
Among Kay's revelatio
That depends. If you insist Bush lied to go to war, then Clinton must have lied about it first since two of the countries he bombed were on the grounds that Iraq had and was pursuing WMD.
Alright, what the hell? The presence of WMDs in Iraq is not some sort of unchangeable, eternal quality.
Just because Saddam had the weapons 15 years ago doesn't mean that he still had them when the US invaded recently. In the same way, the current absence of WMDs has no bearing on whether or not the weapons were present in the past.
This isn't some weirdo time paradox feedback loop that makes everyone in history a liar on a given subject just because someone lied about it recently. This is the real world, and things actually do change.
'If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.'
I suppose if you think you can agree or disagree about what falls under freedom of speech you have not understood the concept. I thought it basically meant that you not only let people have that freedom that agree with you, but also people that you disagree with. I certainly disagree with people watching child pornography. And I do think that people that hurt children need to be punished (really really hard), but I always thought that reading or watching something (as an aldult) does not hurt children.
Well, maybe he knows better than me. After all he his a government minister.
"So you have to get inside their heads and make them restrain themselves.
How? You do horrible, horrible things to the people you're certain of being pedophiles."
Umm, no. If that were the case, there would be no reason for paedophiles to abide by laws which we disagree with. Your argument sounds more like an excuse to attack a vulnerable minority than an attempt to protect children.
If you're using "paedophile" as a synonym for "child molester", please extend your vocabulary. It's difficult to know who people are talking about when they use the term paedophile, a term which refers to a sexual preference for pre-pubescent children, not a behaviour.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
Oh! It refers to the hippy commune sterotype, tree-huggers living in the bush, stoned 24X7, and yes probably having outdoor sex...lucky bastards... "Poofs" is a derogotory term but they would vote for Molly Medrum as prime-minister...you're spot on with the sheep thing :o.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Don't you just love it when someone tries to use drugs as an analogy for some behavior and they just highlight the idiotic nature of drug hysteria?
OK, lets get one thing clear, it doesn't matter about the speed. I don't care if it doesn't affect the speed, the issue is that it's a blacklist decided by a government department. Some public servant sitting in an office reads a comment on /. that's actually a joke about bomb plans on the internet, doesn't get the reference, then /. becomes a banned site because of "illegal content".
Don't think this can happen? Think about the stories of "wags" who miss their flight because they're asked a few questions by police about the "bomb in their luggage" joke they cracked to a mate as they were queuing for the plane. That is how Australia's net censorship plans will "work".
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1