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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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