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.

Comments

The old saying still holds

[Smidge204]

A wise man once said: "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

(And if you don't know who, turn in your Slashdot account by tomorrow morning.)
=Smidge=

Re:The old saying still holds

[Geoffrey.landis]

A wise man once said: "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

In fact, the original quote was that "Usenet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," although the saying is widely misquoted.

(Note how incredibly useful the uncensored usenet has become.)

Re:The old saying still holds

[jandrese]

To be fair, the Usenet was killed by the old truth that if you give the people a cheap broadcast mechanism, the first thing they'll do is try to put advertisements on it.

It has been said that prostitution is the oldest profession, but before they could be prostitutes they had to advertise their services.

Re:The old saying still holds

[Speare]

(And if you don't know who, turn in your Slashdot account by tomorrow morning.)

Translation:

(And if you don't know who, I'm too lazy to google it for you as it has slipped my mind also.)

China!

[vik]

Won't it be embarrassing when people start routing their traffic through China to get around American and Australian internet legislation?

Vik :v)

Advantages to Censorship

[Sasayaki]

As an Australian who fervently opposes Chairman Rudd's censorship bill...

There is one advantage I can see to all of this. Big Brother will block anything illegal and offensive to me, right? So I can download absolutely anything I DO find since it MUST be legal. After all, the censorship is perfect!

Pirate bay here I come!

Not very good blocking software

[elrous0]

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).

Re:Not very good blocking software

[morgan_greywolf]

Any decent blocking software also blocks all the popular proxy lists and proxies too (and it constantly updated). Software that does this (like Websense [wikipedia.org]) 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).

Bypassing Websense:

1. Have a PC running on a high-speed Internet connection on the other side of the Websense proxy.
2. On that PC, you need to run OpenSSH and an HTTP proxy server, say at mypc.example.com. In this example, I my proxy server will be using port 8080. Run SSH on Port 443 (works every time) on this box.
3. Using PuTTY or Plink or one of the front-ends for plink, forward 8080 through an SSH connection to this PC from the inside of the Websense firewall. Putty and Plink can tunnel right through the proxy connecting to port 443 just like an HTTPS connection would do.
4. Set your browser to use the proxy on localhost at port 8080
5. Done. All Web accesses will go through the SSH proxy and all of this data will be encrypted as a result.

I will leave the details as an exercise to the reader.

Doesn't seem 'damn hard' to me at all.

Re:Uh.

[Ethanol-fueled]

...Until the Aussie government considers SSH, VPN's, and anonymizing proxies to be "hacking"(illegally circumventing a la DMCA) and takes steps to outlaw them.

Google 'Nolan Chart'

[bill_mcgonigle]

The US voted out the religious right yesterday. Pitty our religious right goverment isn't due for re-election for another couple of years...

It has little to do with being religious or right. The problem is statists, no matter their views on God, Gods, no Gods, or economics.

Misunderstanding

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:Uh.

[drsparkly]

How many businesses rely on VPNs to connect their remote offices? How many sysadmins use SSH to remotely connect to their unix systems? If the government moved to outlaw VPNs and SSH, there is no point having an internet any more. If the government did this there would be a major backlash from the business community. It would be political suicide, if the current plan isn't already.

My internet connection is paid for by my current employer so I can (a) telecommute (VPN) (b) remote administer systems in case of problems (VPN, SSH). Its a home internet plan, so they could not simply limit this block to home internet users.

I repeat my point... if the Aussie government starts blocking every protocol that can be used to bypass their stupid filter, there is no point having an internet. Australia will be back to the stone age.

Or use OpenVPN!

[toby]

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.