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Largest Aussie ISP Agrees To "Ridiculous" Net-Filter Trial
Klootzak writes "Michael Malone, head of Australia's largest ISP iiNet announced today that his company would sign up to the Government's live trials of the Great Firewall of Australia. In an article published by The Age, Mr Malone is quoted calling Stephen Conroy 'The worst Communications Minister we've had in the 15 years since the [internet] industry has existed.' Despite at first giving the impression that iiNet is rolling over like a good Government puppy the article quotes Mr Malone saying that the reasons for participating in this trial is to show how unfeasible and stupid it is — Quoted from the article: 'Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we'll be publicizing it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we'll be publicizing it.' Let's hope that in typical fashion of government-instigated Internet-filtering that this stupid idea is just as useless, inefficient and ineffectual as the last one, and that the Australian Government realizes this before wasting more taxpayer dollars on it (seeing as the first attempt only cost taxpayers $84,000,000)."
... iiNet is my ISP!!! It will be interesting to see what happens, and what sites get blocked. I like Mick's idea about doing it to show how unfeasible it is, just hope it won't sour iiNet's reputation. Their already overrun support lines may end up getting worse.
Mark Newton (of Internode, not the same mob as this story is about) has an opinion piece on the ABC (which I submitted to Slashdot, but still pending...), entitled Filter advocates need to check their facts.
The other camp includes people who just make lots of mistakes; including Senator Conroy, who claimed that Sweden, the UK, Canada and New Zealand all have similar filter systems as are being proposed.
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Anyway, if Conroy is the worst minister, that's pretty damn bad. After all, Richard Alston, Daryl Williams and Helen Coonan were all communications minister under Johny sticken Howard.
According to Wikipedia, Alston tried "to ban online gambling, and make email forwarding illegal, he was dubbed 'the world's biggest luddite'. [1]".
Maybe this "representative" thing isn't all it's cracked up to be? Anyone up for some Demarchy?
I wank in the shower.
Anyone that has traffic on lets say... port 22 is *obviously* getting around it and will have their name paraded as a violator.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The thing is there's no motivation for them to screw us over. iiNet are out to make money, and filtering is just going to be a massive problem/money hole for them. Sucking up the government won't get them anything because of the telco situation here.
So iiNet are taking the long term view that being seen as 'the guys who stopped the filtering' will be seen as a positive for their brand and mean when people ask their local geek who they should get their interwebs from said geek will be more likely to suggest iiNet.
Moving from iiNet to TPG has proved to be one of the worst decisions I've made with my ISPs.
Their support is not good. It's terrible. It seems whenever I call I get put on hold and forgotten about. I once made the mistake of admitting I was using a Mac and the problems I was having with the TPG-supplied modem not registering with the SIP proxy for VoIP were suddenly because I wasn't using Internet Explorer.
They have accidently made charges to my account I had to have them revoke.
TPG use transparent proxies in some areas - thankfully not where I am anymore - which don't re-write the IP address properly, and (for the six months I was in their proxying pool) I'd find sites would tell me I was banned because someone else on the same proxy had incurred the wrath of the moderators and they'd banned the IP. You'd have similar problems with sites like RapidShare.
Finally, there are a lot of ways they get money out of you. Their contracts are long and their disconnection fee is very high. You have to buy one of their modems for many of their plans. Perhaps most annoyingly changing plans resets the contract period.
My experience with TPG has been one of pain and suffering I would only wish upon child molesters and people who talk in the theatre. As soon as my contract is out I'm dropping them for iiNet, Internode or Netspace.
Many Australian beaches have shark nets. They exist to stop swimmers from being exposed to sharks. Sure, swimmers can just climb over the shark net, and sure, the net isn't 100% effective at shielding swimmers from sharks, but does that really mean we shouldn't build them?
The fact that some of us might like to swim with sharks is completely lost on the majority of the population who don't want sharks near their kids.. and, frankly, think we're being unreasonable by insisting that the shark net be optional.
How we know is more important than what we know.
iiNet was actually named as a bit of a pun on uuNet. It also used to always be pronounced as "eye eye net" too, but a few years ago the few ads I saw or heard had changed it to "eye net".
I would've thought Telstra Bigpond was the largest ISP here, quite an achievement if MM's company has managed to overtake them.
Knowing Michael (and I do), he'll happily encourage his staff to break around the filter from their home connections.
They will do just that, document their methods and he'll have his findings to present to the government.
But that is immaterial. He doesn't need his staff to do this alone and give it a hint of bias. He has a wide basis of support on this topic with the technical masses who will all do the same thing.
As has previously been stated, this is all to appease a tiny minority group that represents a tiny minority of the population. It needs to be stopped dead in the water.