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Australian Censorship Bypassed Before Live Trials
newt writes "The Australian Government is planning to conduct live trials of as-yet-unspecified censorship technology. But as every geek already knows, these systems can't possibly work in the presence of VPNs and proxy servers. PC Authority clues the punters in." Maybe the ISPs secretly like encouraging SSH tunneling — and making everyone pay for the extra bandwidth used. Not really; Australia's major ISPs, as mentioned a few days ago, think it's a bad idea.
Ssh typically does compression and then encryption, so we might very well end up with a net savings in bandwidth.
Any decent blocking software also blocks all the popular proxy lists and proxies too (and it constantly updated). Software that does this (like Websense) may not be impossible to get around, but it makes it damn hard (and I know, this is what my school uses and even with my knowledge it's still hard to find a proxy).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
He mentioned adding it to the root certs to get around that. Just persuade Microsoft to add it as a "critical automatic update" and the majority of people won't notice a thing.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The filter is there for people who don't want to bypass it.
The only reason there is no opt out planned for the "illegal material" filter is because a "reasonable person" should not want to opt out of it.
In other words: it's not malice, it's stupidity.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's LZO compressed by default - not to mention encrypted and X509 authenticated - which probably means a net reduction in bandwidth. Go visit their site. It's truly excellent open source software.
But seriously. As a practical matter, anyone stuck behind state censorship can use a friend's OpenVPN and proxy in another country.
you had me at #!
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation."
-- Adolf Hitler
Sorry for Godwin'ing this article but it is quite relative. Senator Conroy is trying to argue this like a Christian, any time someone speaks against him about the filter he just puts his fingers in his ears and says "la la la can't hear you, you're a pedophile because you oppose my filter"
Given that this whole thing looks to be a pander to Steve Fielding and Family First, I think the better solution will be to start blocking things they care about. That and downloading porn and asking them to grade it for me.
I've had just about enough of FF. Rigging Australian Idol didn't bother me, but now they're trying to shut down the web.
When deciding whether to allow them to have access to my first kid I bought their course materials. I have no problem at all with kids learning bible stories (I'm a amateur wannabe bible scholar myself), or being taught to be kind to one and other (in fact if the catholics we here I might let him go). But that is not what is being taught. The course has been cleverly designed to inculcate the kids with fear and an unshakeble belief in God as the evangelists see him (complete with creationism).
Hmm, I know the problem. I fixed that in my kids' school---I teach the Scripture lessons. Few of the kids in the classes I teach (11-12 year olds) had heard of evolution until I taught it to them last week.
It wasn't strictly in the curriculum, but it's nothing that's not (officially) in the school curriculum anyway, so I think I'll keep my job. If I stop posting on /. in the next week or two, though, send out a search party...
Cogito, ergo sig.