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?
Pretty much everyone in Australia knows this is not actually going to get implemented. The Australian EFF are just enjoying having their moment in the sun. There's no reason to have another story on the exact same topic every few days.
It's time to pick up stakes and move to Iran, that fabled land of freedom and tolerance--a shining country upon a hill.
It is an absolute. Either you have it 100%, or you don't have it at all. And the idiots who think that censorship stops child pornography neither understand pedophiles nor censorship. It is akin to DRM, where you don't stop the problem (pirates/pedophiles/whatever) and instead punish everyone else.
If you're upset by kiddie porn, then treat the problem. Don't shut off the internet.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The real story here is not that the government wants to censor the internet, but that the government has moved to gag a critic of the plan.
I think the anonymous reader in the final paragraph of the summary needs to read up a little on the MD5 vulnerability. It's possible to generate two files with the same hash containing a 16-byte block of differing code (where you have no control over the contents of that block in either file), but the rest of the file needs to be identical to the original. That's fine for dynamically generated HTML or even executables where a decision could be made on the contents of the varying block, but doing anything useful with jpeg is a pretty tough ask. Or are they suggesting we brute force it?
Athy, athier, athiest.
In a Democracy, the people get the government they deserve.
The idea of censoring the internet, especially for the laughable justification that its "for the children" simply indicates to me that the people of Australia need to start taking responsibility for their government and elect candidates who will not pull this kind of crap.
Don't get fooled into thinking that "the government" did this. It was the people of Australia who elected politicians who are doing it. It is up to the people of Australia to un-elect those politicians, by force if necessary.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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
We're talking about Australia here. You know, the country that rides along every time the Americans 'go it alone.' But not to worry, we're well ahead of you. We invaded ourselves a couple of years ago to save America the trouble.
After reading the article, it seems like the entire point of this law is to prohibit users from accessing child pornography.
Here's what I don't understand: why should the overwhelming majority suffer because of a few perpetrators? And ultimately, blocking child pornography accessibility doesn't help the root of the problem. The offenders will still be there. It's like blocking conventional pornography to fight the sex addicts, but people won't stop being horny just because of that.
Full Tilt
It'll be coming to the UK within a month or two and it will be here in the US not too long after that. Don't get too smug:/
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Anything outside of Australia I'll route over a VPN to a VPS in the states.
Somehow, I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through.
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.
Barring a major advance in cryptography theory, at least a millenium. While the MD5 hash function has been broken, in the sense that you can generate two files which collide with eachother, this only works when you generate both files; generating a file to match a particular hash is still infeasible, and if it were feasible, MD5 would be completely abandoned overnight.
This is deeply worrying. Not only is it insane, it's, ultimately, Kevin Rudd (the Prime Minister) being a damn hypocrite. Just before the federal election the news media made a big deal of "catching" him visiting an adult bar (strip joint) in Japan or something. His response was something along the lines of he is an adult and can make choices and it was harmless. Now that he is in government there is this insane vendetta to censor the internet. Further, censor anyone who is critical of the plan. The Minister in charge of this (Stephen Conroy) is clueless. Unfortunately the rest of the elected government seems just as clueless and agrees with his recommendations. I don't think that it's been said, but I would guess that circumventing the draconian filters may also be made illegal (or at least the attempt might be made). We already have shitty broadband; what the fuck is mandatory filtering going to do to our already inflated prices and absurd monthly download limits? /rant
Yes, nobody argued when we went to war because Bush _lied to us_. They knew Saddam had nothing to do with it. In fact, if you go back and look at their speeches and documents, they were _extremely_ careful to never specifically say that Saddam was responsible - they just implied it. Something like 80% of the soldiers in Iraq _still_ think they're there because Saddam was behind 9/11.
And speaking of Clinton, Bush knew 9/11 was coming. Clinton's administration warned him and his administration about it. So what was one of the first things he did when he got in office? Severely downsized our counter-terrorism forces. He knew it was coming, and he actively worked to make it easier for them to do it. And then, when it happened, he lied to the American people and to Congress to get them to approve what he wanted. Bush never pushed for diplomacy, Bush used the attacks to get what he wanted - and he still is. He pushed for diplomacy and intel? Really? He booted the UN out! How is that pushing for diplomacy and intel? He did just enough that he could say he tried. He did just enough so that people like you would be able to say he did something.
And yes, Clinton did some bad things too. I'm not a huge fan of him either. But nothing he did even begins to compare to Bush.
The issue here is to stop people access child porn. While I hate to be a black sheep, if you take speed away from a speed addict, they turn to meth or cocaine. You take ecstasy away from an addict and they turn to heroin.
What will pedophiles turn to if you take child porn away from their browsers at home?
Personally, if something like this ever went through, I would become more worried about kids on the street.
Put offenders into rehabilitation, or stop their contact or do something with a little common sense. This sort of knee jerk reaction solves nothing and generally creates more trouble than anything.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
"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."
Whoa whoa. Maybe US citizens did want to go to war. But I distinctly remember *world* citizens - even the ones from countries that did send troops - being overwhelmingly against the war.
Here's what Europeans thought for example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2747175.stm
Where's your proof? And you accuse someone else of being an ignorant troll and fo spreading FUD.
You assume the plan was to benefit Americans by invading Irak. It was quite the opposite, the plan was to use tax money to finance operations while profits went to private companies, this is not a new concept.
Understand that modern warfare is ultimately governed by profit of the few at the expense of the masses, the economy was artificially inflated to mask the cost of the war.
Sadly, it is only when personal pockets of comfort are affected that the public at large start to question their government, when is too late.
And even then excuses will be made to defend the mental image that the exploited cling to, it was not my country that did this to me, it was something else.
Plus we illegally invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. The Americans need to punish us.
I also really hate the notion that Americans are war-mongers.
Perhaps not the American people, but the American government (with the consent of the people) certainly seem to be war mongers.
Look how much money they US spends on war compared to the rest of the world (more than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined!)
Have a look at the number of countries with a US army base (willing hosts or otherwise).
These is not really the actions of a peaceful country.
My pics.
You're quite incorrect.
The Australian Labor Party was founded in 1891 as a centre-left, social democratic party representing the trade union movement. The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1920, never found electoral success and disbanded in 1991.
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). That itself is a completley flawed argument because of the way child porn is distributed. The internet is used to move porn yes, but its largely not through HTTP/HTTPS, and there is no kiddyporn.com webserver to be blocked. ISP WEB filtering won't work. With services like SFTP, Tor, DC++, bit torrent and other encrypted forms of transmission and private networks, these filters will make no difference at all. 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 also don't understand why this is such an issue, the previous government launched an internet saftey awareness campaign and offered FREE content filtering applications for every Australian if they wanted it, and this program was not well received, highlighting the fact that really most Australians don't care or are satisfied they can control their children's access without them. To me this appears to be nothing more then a government initiated campaign to restrict our access to information, and if it passes, this will be a very sad day for Australia.
Not in the weeks immediately following 9/11. On September 13th, the UN Security Council passed yet another resolution against Iraq, even though Iraq hadn't done anything new, but members of the council were drawing conclusions because Saddam publicly praised the terrorists. Many suggested the security council was immediately ready to approve military action against Iraq if the US wanted to pursue it.
Your article suggests people were against the war in 2003, which is true. What I'm suggesting is that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, several leaders were vocally drawing links to Iraq, even though they had no proof.
The sentiments changed greatly because we pursued diplomacy instead of immediately charging in on trumped up charges when support was higher.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
You have completely lost your grip on reality.
This is an absolute and complete fabrication. Nothing but pure slanderous bullshit.
Bullshit? On the internet? Are you SURE? Wow. I'm shocked.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Those private defense contractors are still making a boat load of cash off the Iraq invasion. Good luck claiming nobody made money off Iraq.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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!
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.
When you next have something to say, attach proof or it shall be given the attention it earns -- namely none.
Sorry you use a different dictionary. We don't all live in your hole. Get used to it.
E
Then where is it? That's right, it got away so no evidence is required!
We can be really thankful that Iraq had already been bombed into the third world over the course of a decade and that there were was no nerve gas to use on the troops. The reasons to go in were many, complicated and in IMHO mostly stupid but the WMD bullshit was a big PR campaign masquerading as intelligence information. Powell's presentation to the UN on the subject probably put back international trust about twenty years.
I'd say that's 'forbiding discussion' as you said...
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
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.
Good lord, you don't actually believe any of the crap you just spewed do you?
WMD did exist. Talk about old rhetoric.
Of course they existed -- past tense. That was never at question. That's why we had the UN inspectors there. But as the inspectors told us, and we later found to to be the case, most of those WMDS were either destroyed or not in any condition to where they could actually be used.
Two weeks before we went into Iraq, Bush held a speech saying that we'd go into Iraq in two weeks. Immediately after that, we watched caravans of vehicles leave Baghdad heading for Syria and Colin Powell immediately said that we'd likely never find the huge stockpiles now as they were leaving the country.
That never happened. The announcement that we were going into Iraq was 48 hours before we did, not 2 weeks.
Despite that we still found missiles filled with Sarin gas, documentation for WMD, storage facilities for WMD, training manuals for WMD, etc.
We found chopped up missiles with sarin gas residue in the warheads. That is not the same as what you are suggesting. We found defunct, destroyed, and useless old chemical weapons. We never found ANYTHING that could have been used against us. Ever. That's a fact -- look it up.
And in fact, those destroyed warheads we did find were, right where we were TOLD they would be. It's not like it took any great detective work to find them -- we demanded documentation of all of Iraq's WMD programs before we invaded and amazingly -- they complied. Remember the footage of a table full of thick files, books, and covered in cd-roms that Iraq said was all of the information on all of their WMD programs? Remember how, just hours later, without even taking the necessary time to be able to pretend they had actually read all of that information (even with a team of a hundred people they would have needed a few days to process all of that) the Bush Administration immediately announced to the press that it was incomplete and false?
Yeah, we found documentation on WMDS -- they gave it us when we asked for it. We barked. They rolled over. That was the whole idea behind the resolution giving Bush the authority to go to war. We wanted to show Iraq we were serious so that they could capitulate and we could *avoid* war. Guess what? It worked. And, despite that, we went in anyways because the Bush wanted the war. He said from day 1 he was going into Iraq and he found a way to make it acceptable to the public -- he just had to lie a lot.
Bush won the war without ever going into Iraq, then somehow snatched defeat from the Jaws of victory. Whether this was due to some sort of "democracy will flourish in the middle east" naivete or just "daddy issues" as others have suggested, I have no idea and won't guess -- but the facts are the facts: We won the war in Iraq before it was a war -- and we threw that victory away when we went in.
We never found any documentation on WMDs that suggested the programs were still active. We never found any sort of weapon of mass destruction that wasn't just some rusted old hunk of metal in a scrap yard. We killed far, far more civilians (accidentally, of course -- don't suggest I am suggesting otherwise) than Saddam could have killed if we let him live out the rest of his life (he was clearly already knocking on Deaths door anyways). We've spent nearly a trillion dollars on the war. I won't even tell you all the ridiculous things we could do with that much money. It's 25 times the ammount we spend on education per year, and we spend more than anyone else. Don't even get me started on the cost to our troops. There's simply no metric by which you can look at this war, or the Bush administration by extension, and not conclude that it has been an unmitigated disaster for this country. It disgusts me, as does your willful ignorance and gleeful repetition of republican talking points and right-wing radio misinformation.
Well, in this particular instance, its just complete and utter garbage.
There's about 1 million people living in detroit and about 400 murders per year. That's fairly bad.
Here's a link to 2006's muder rate: http://detroit.areaconnect.com/crime1.htm -- it was actually less than 400 in 2007. So we'll just say, about 400.
Now what someone is saying, when they make up a bullshit statistic like this one, is that there were fewer than 400 SOLDIERS killed. This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. This would be like comparing the number of police killed in Detroit to soldiers dead in Iraq, not civilians to soldiers. But moreover, there are about 8 times more people in Detroit than soldiers in ALL OF IRAQ -- and far fewer than that in just Baghdad. So of course, on a per capita basis, its just nonsense to say its "more dangerous" in detroit. Complete nonsense.
There have been over 29 civilians CONFIRMED as killed in the past WEEK (from last friday to this thursday) in baghdad. Just one week. At that rate, we're looking at about 1500 per year. Way higher than Detroit in a city with a much smaller population.
It turns out, that's a *GOOD* week. Check this out
From April 14th to 31st August, 2,846 violent deaths were recorded by the Baghdad city morgue. When corrected for pre-war death rates in the city a total of at least 1,519 excess violent deaths in Baghdad emerges from reports based on the morgue's records.
And last year? Try over 20 thousand confirmed civilian deaths. It's no wonder the fighting has died down since the surge -- there's hardly anyone left to kill. All the neighborhoods are now completely segregated because anyone who didn't flee is dead. That's one way to put an end to ethnic infighting -- not the one I would have chosen.
Nevertheless, suggesting the murder rate in Baghdad is less than Detriot for any period of time in the last 50 years is just a ridiculous joke. Like I said, the only way you could come even close to such a ridiculous number is if you ONLY COUNT American troop deaths in Baghdad. The most up to date information I could find suggests that we have roughly about 13,500 of our troops in Iraq in Baghdad. This falls WAY short of the 1 million people in Detroit. So saying that fewer of those 1 million people were shot than of the 13,500 troops is saying very, very, very little. It's per capita that matters here and that clearly has been ignored.
That's how easy it is to make a statistic lie -- thus explaining your Twain quote.
WMD did exist. Talk about old rhetoric.
You should tell W. before he leaves office. Last we checked, he was still looking for them under his desk.
Most of thoses bases or post are for things like the US Marines who guard US Embassies, you have US Navy personnal assigned to counties where we have ships that stop for refueling, suppies,etc to make sure the paperwork is completed and do the papwerwork to allow them access to local water, and you have military post for the US Air Force that do the same thing for allowing access to local country air space.
Except for the marines the others usally dressed in business suits and work out of local government offices or rent local office space the US does consider them military assignments if only for the paperwork.
A serious shortfalling of Western democracies is that if the government (and associated media) manage to misinform the majority of the public to believe a lie, they are allowed and expected to act on that lie.
If I hadn't wasted all my modpoints on a debate of the finer points of copyright yesterday, you would certainly be getting a +10 True.
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
As someone from Michigan, I can assure you that if a location exists that isn't Detroit, it's safe to assume it's safer than Detroit.
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
Here you go, every scrap of tangential evidence pertaining, even remotely to WMDs. Clicky If this is the best that the world's right-wingers can come up with, I'd consider Enderandrew throughly debunked.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
You contradict yourself....
"Viewers of adult porn don't usually go out and become rapists do they?", then "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."
In reality, most paedophiles don't molest children for the same reasons that most men don't rape women. Even those who think that sex with children is inherently harmless avoid sexual contact because of the effects of a socio-legal response for both themselves and children. From Freel (2003):
I suspect that blocking internet access to child pornography would increase rates of child sexual abuse, but not necessarily in the way many would imagine. Digital storage and distribution means that any scannable or digital material can survive forever and be distributed on a much wider scale than would be possible without the internet. This means that there will be less interest in new material being produced, which is obviously a good thing if the material in question is child pornography.
There will clearly be some paedophiles who would abuse children regardless, but they are in a tiny minority of what is a large but hidden demographic of paedophiles.
"The current situation probably tends to lead pedophiles to believe that their mindset is relatively normal which is far more dangerous to children."
What "current situation" are you referring to? I am a paedophile, I know that paedophilia is normal, but I don't molest children. Believing that a fantasy is normal doesn't mean that one considers acting on the fantasy to be acceptable. Freel's research also shows that:
From Hall, et al (1995):
"citation needed"
If you're referring to the argument that most child porn viewers don't molest children, see a collection of quotes here
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
The reason they got away with the lies in the US was because the public wanted blood.
Do you realize how stupid that sounds? Please, stop posting in this thread: some interesting comments are showing up but yours isn't one of them.
The real problem with democracy is that sheeple get to vote
Yes, because matters are so much better in countries where people don't get to vote.
Get a grip.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.