Slashdot Mirror
Australia To Block BitTorrent
Kevin 7Kbps writes "Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy announced today that the Australian Internet Filters will be extended to block peer-to-peer traffic, saying, 'Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.' This dashes hopes that Conroy's Labor party had realised filtering could be politically costly at the next election and were about to back down. The filters were supposed to begin live trials on Christmas Eve, but two ISPs who volunteered have still not been contacted by Conroy's office, who advised, 'The department is still evaluating applications that were put forward for participation in that pilot.' Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."
All I can say is "*sigh*" ...They really, truely do not get this "Internet thingy". :)
Be that software, video or music -- why should I be prevented from sharing it with world ?
This does not fair well for all the World of Warcraft players in Australia. Blizzard "legally" uses p2p to distribute patches and such. I guess only one question remains to be asked to all Australian WoW players...Can I have your stuff? Sorry, it had to be said.
The thing about P2P that's not the same for the rest of the internet is it's protocols are always evolving. Sure you'll be able to stop some stuff today, but you'll always be one step behind in a feudal battle against users, and in this case registered voters who may not fully agree with your ideas.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
When will this thing finally die? Every man and his dog acknowledges that it is a steaming pile of political rhetoric, yet it still goes on and on and on.
From the article I linked to:
Australia's largest ISP, Telstra, and Internode have said they will not participate in the trials. The second largest ISP, Optus, will run only a scaled- back trial of just the first tier while iiNet, the third biggest provider, has said it will participate simply to show the Government that its scheme will not work.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
"Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."
But four days is plenty of time, however. Noooooo problem. Piece of cake! You know our motto here in the IT department, if it can't be done in four........ (sigh)
A while back the freeswan project was trying to implement opportunistic end-to-end encryption with the eventual goal that all traffic on the Internet would be seamlessly encrypted. Whatever became of that? It seems like it's a good time to pick that project up again...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Aren't those distributed through BT technology? Won't this adversely impact the gaming segment? Or will they find that it's been automagically exempted from filtering?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Expect the newest blocking-filtering avoiding P2P technology to go live within hours of this filter going up, ensuring that your influx of music and porn will be virtually uninterrupted.
Citizens of Orwellstralia, it's about time you rose up and revolted. It may be already too late.
Arrrr, it doesn't make you gay if it happens on a ship!
> Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy announced
What is a "Censorship Minister"? Is there a "Ministry of Censorship" in Australia??
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The thing about P2P that's not the same for the rest of the internet is that it's the same as the rest of the internet, which is fundamentally p2p
In other words, he's declared war on the entire internet. He may as well quit with the pussy-footing and shut the whole lot down.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
In stopping P2P, Australia would stop Linux distribution, Microsoft would be able to crush all other operating systems as their more efficient P2P distribution model is cut off. Thus Australia prove they are anti-choice in the market place. The message is clear, pay Bill Gates or else!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
you used to be cool
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
So, like, if I am applying to also become, um, like a "Censorship Minister" somewhere, like, what needs to be on my resume or CV?
Spent college years with a big fat magic marker, blacking out a lot of stuff in the university library?
Maybe he duct-tapped up the mouths of protesting fellow students.
He should least have to pedigree to call himself the "Minister of Information" instead.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If they have tiered internet services, how many people who presently pay for the high end will no longer need said services if they have no P2P?
The ISPs may well find themselves with the same users, but the users paying less (lower tier) if they have no P2P.
If switching to encrypted does not help, I would imagine it is just a matter of time before someone figures out ways around their filters. P2P is a force of nature. Eventually the Colorado river is going to defeat the Hoover Dam, it is just a matter of centuries of natural forces. In this case it will take weeks not centuries.
Australia reports a rise in connections to proxy servers in the USA.
:q!
As they want you to use bit torrent to save on sever bandwidth to download it.
To give Australian households the necessary confidence, the Government is working to promote an online civil society through its $125.8 million Cyber-Safety Plan. This contains a comprehensive set of measures to combat online threats and help parents and educators protect children from inappropriate material.
It includes funding for:
* education and information measures
* law enforcement
* helplines and websites
* ISP filtering
* consultative arrangements with industry, child protection bodies and children
* further research to identify possible areas for further action.
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
Only one way to block BitTorrent.
What?
I think the sooner an 'important' state does this sort of thing the better.
The current situation is a chaotic cat and mouse game that's gradually playing into the hands of the publishing industry.
If a big state blocks and censors parts of the internet, they can probably make it stick. The result might be an incentive for people to start encrypting data by default, and I kind of think that would be a good thing for the whole world.
Here in the UK the government is up to all sorts of tricks - the RIP Act gives them the power to monitor all internet traffic and store it for up to 2 years. Even your local council can request to see which web sites you've been visiting - no need to involve the police or the courts, just a 'senior official'.
I think there's just not been a good enough reason so far to encrypt more than the bear minimum. This sort of thing might shove things in the right direction...
Why the hell aren't Conroy and his cronies listening to the people who know what they're talking about? All social points asside for a moment, there are huge risks with a system like this. Security for one.
You could man in the middle attack everyone in Australia if you wanted to, and nothing that is being proposed will help stop child porn. The blacklist will leak as was proved yesterday (there's a story about it on the site I mentioned) and when combined with proxies, the very people this plan claims to stop will be given the keys to their perverted kindgoms.
Is this all just the illusion of safety for the technically illiterate, or is it just me?
Australia gets some serious point deductions from my book. seriously. also, -1 for kangaroos.
Despite the article headline here, it appears that the plan is to filter certain items of "objectionable" content, rather than outright block peer-to-peer traffic.
Of course, this doesn't make the entire concept of filtering that is currently going on in Australia any less ridiculous (particular in terms of P2P and BitTorrent), but we might as well at least discuss what they're doing in the correct terms.
Just an other incentive to design a tracker-less Torent protocol ...
http://www.transparency.org
Cue last week's news about BitTorrent going UDP ...
By who's definition?
Peer to peer doesn't mean computer to computer.
To politicians, it mean any computer not in their Big league ball club member list.
. In other words , servers will be blockaded as well and at the whim of the politician .
Peer to peer blocking also kills small or unwanted internet telephone companies who wont pay Rico taxes or cooperate to the mainstream telco political mobsters you see?
The idea of blocking P2P traffic is flawed in a lot of ways. What defines P2P traffic? TCP protocol IS a P2P-based protocol. Obviously they want to stop the illegal traffic going on but this is not the way and like any type of crime you can't stop it from happening at all. Furthermore, banning the in essence legal means to perform a crime implies that they also intend on banning cars because they can be used to kill people, computers as they can be used to intrude one's privacy and many more examples. The Australian government seems nothing more than a group of hypocrits. Yet again only the honest people will be punished by this because people will always find a way to get what they want. Either through paying for payed hosting services (like Rapidshare), by setting up a proxy or in other ways that will unquestionably discovered soon enough if they choose to push their plans.
I give it one week after they implement this that someone will come out with a fully functional work around.
What's the point every time someone tries to block or deny access to something the faster people work to exploit it.
At least they don't sing about their freedom while it gets taken away.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
every story about .AU is somehow tied into aussie politicians acting like parents/guardians over a bunch of children that can't control themselves. I've never had a problem with the people "down under" but the politicians they elect do, by some measure, reflect the attitudes of the general populace... maybe the average joe in .AU manifests this inner need for a security blanket in their vote? Are they insecure? What is the divorce rate down there? Maybe they're all looking for a father figure they never had when they grew up...
Conroy is Catholic. Nothing wrong with that, but it explains why he believes everyone is addicted to porn. Especially child porn.
"Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."
It's not. OTOH it's about 3 times longer than I expect it to take for a work-around patch to appear on one platform or another, and the same amount of time it'll take to get it ported to most of the others, as well as other common work-arounds such as proxies to become common knowledge.
IMO the Minister of Information Blockage simply refuses to admit the effort has failed before launch and is trying to scare those who don't have the savvy to realize this.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
i thought he actually was a "Censorship Minister". it's actually Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. regardless of that title, the blatant corporate cronyism is appalling.
is a whole ministry for broadband, communications and the digital economy really necessary?
"To stop the terrorists."
And in other news, over 9,000 is not enough people to overturn a piece of legislation. Australia, you need to start thinking in millions, not thousands.
I know it's not the ever popular xkcd, but this comic is just too appropriate here. http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20081109
Anything that you can use legally, you can pretty much use illegally. For example, cars-- drive to the bank; drive very fast away from the bank, with the bank's money. You don't find banks lobbying the government to ban the sale of cars that might be used in bank jobs. I've come to the conclusion that politics is now lobby groups vs lobby groups-- fair and representative politics is long gone. And I don't think techies lobby louder than the **AAs. : (
I was in Australia about three years ago, and I was struck by a sense that it really does appear to be a nanny state. As for examples, unless I gave them all it would seem they were individually petty, but as a whole I got that impression and it has stuck with me since (this is no reflection on the people or the place itself) - I'm sure I didn't imagine it. For years we have been fed the image that Australians are laid back and chilled out but it really didn't seem the case to me, and this seems to be a further example.
What if those drug laws also made it illegal to buy Aspirin? That's the thing: P2P and filesharing in themselves are not evil, and have legitimate applications. For instance, updates for a number of games are distributed via Torrents.
Making laws should work like this: you define what's immoral, dangerous or otherwise undesirable, then you make laws to prevent that, and only that, from happening. If you feel that software piracy is immoral, outlaw it. If you can come up with something that would prevent piracy and nothing else, implement that. But the many legit activities that would suffer from this proposal are not acceptable collateral damage.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As an old fashioned sort of guy, I buy my CDs from the music store / internet (No DRM), Download music videos as yet unavailable in Australia (Then buy them on DVD). However restricting bittorrent traffic will remove my fast reliable access to Linux Distros I install for friends & clients. Not that I voted for the Mandarin in the first place, but next time around I will actively lobby against him. In the meantime circumventing the filters and publicly revealing the methodology as widely as internet dissemination allows.
Using this logic, we should ban roads for facilitating speeding, fast food outlets for obesity, compulsory voting for electing fools etc
Australian citizen and global internet user not prepared to be wrapped in cotton wool and told fairy stories.
It doesn't make much sense for a continent to block a bandwidth-sharing protocol which allows more data to flow through the links to the rest of the world. They're inviting their pipes to get clogged with traffic.
Thing is, you can buy for a little extra money a VPN account using OpenVPN for about 20 bucks a month.
Fully encrypted SSL UDP tunnel with bandwidth that exceeds your cable modem. I've used it for years without any problem.
So what's next for BitTorrent then?
Run it through port 80 or 443?
Frankly, I don't know if this is a bad thing. We've been saying for years that everyone needs to encrypt everything by default and it hasn't happened because "normal" people don't see the need for their "normal" traffic.
Take Freenet as an example. It's never reached critical mass and there's little worthwhile content (as of the last time I checked; I gave up on it some time back). But what happens if people can't get their torrents to work and all their mules and limes and kazaas stop working? Freenet with Frost needs just a decent installer package and enough users so that it scales up to reasonable speed. If that happened, how would that get filtered? Would the govt demand the blocking of everything that's encrypted? I can imagine some big players in the e-commerce game might have a thought or two on that subject.
I don't use bittorrent or any emule/kazaa-like applications, but I think I've read that they all can be configured to encrypt all transfers.
If governments want to stop "bad" traffic, they should realize that the tools are available for it to all go underground and flourish in ways the govt can't effectively monitor, much less censor. Are governments really stupid enough to hasten that situation?
I think so. Whether it's Freenet, some other encrypted environment, or just encryption on top of currently popular protocols, part of me welcomes the censorship because I know it will finally start moving people to protect their communications. I think that's a good thing that will come from all this censorsip silliness.
And to think - If the music industry had just bought out Napster and and used it to its potential, how many man-millenia of labor could have been put to productive use instead of wasted in stupid cat 'n mouse games?
Welcome to the new great firewall of chi- errr... Australia.
The internet is practically unusable without peer-to-peer communications. Instant messaging, remote desktop, and a lot of "non-p2p" applications would break. So, you HAVE to have peer-to-peer communications.
Filtering requires that you can intercept and interpret content.
If you communicate via SSL/TLS they can not intercept and interpret your content.
So what happens if you "accidentally" look at child porn? Can you sue the government for failing to protect you from illegal material? Since you're no longer given to choice to look at the stuff but are blocked automatically, if you happen upon a website where it's hosted I would imagine you can hold them liable for accidentally clicking on something illegal.
"OH DEAR GOD! It's child porn! I'm suing the Australian government for failing to protect me as they said they would!"
This should be solved Australian style. Just arrange so that this crazy filter guy has to be rescued from his locked office, where he gets found drunk and naked with a sheep and a pile of kiwis.
That should put an end to things, unless that helps him get reelected in New Zeland...
I really don't get why so many ISPs fight the P2P idea. Instead of implementing bandwidth caps to preserve the limited amount of transit/peer traffic they can send/receive, they could use their internal network to provide a lot of internet content through smart, P2P caching; not just files, but also video streams, audio streams, etc.
The problem seems to be, mostly, the MPAA/RIAA/BSA (and their counterparts in other countries). But, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. P2P technologies like Bittorrent have a huge potential for legal use, and are already used for distributing things like World of Warcraft patches (I wonder how ISP customers will react in AU once WoW can no longer patch for them), Linux ISOs, OpenOffice, and lots of other stuff which is legal to copy.
I wonder if Blizzard, and any other international companies using torrent for legitimate business in Australia, could sue AU under WTO rules for unfair trade practices, or somesuch, if this policy goes into effect? Actually, I don't think individual companies can sue, but they can petition their national governments to sue on their behalf. Still, point is, I wonder if a case can be made that blocking any kind of legitimate business traffic is a violation of WTO? After all, didn't one of the Carribean nations 'win' some kind of similar suit against the United States, for blocking that nation's online casino businesses?
First they came for the child pornography on the internet ... and I did not speak up ... and I did not speak up ... and I did not speak up ... and I did not speak up ... and I did not speak up ... and there is no one left to speak up for me
Then they came for the organized crime on the internet
Then they came to 'protect the children' against 'vulgar images'
Then they came for the illegal warez
Then they came for my bittorrent
Then they came for me
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Peer-to-Peer Fights Global Warming!
Download your next software instead of wasting the resources for CDs and CEO guest mansions. What good software wasn't ripped from the universities anyway?
/ip firewall filter add chain=P2P dst-address=*.everybody.down.under action=drop comment="BITTORRENT server drop" disabled=mentally
It seems to me, than in Australia, everyone in a technology related political office might be someone's mentally handicapped cousin.
Granted, it's not much better here in the states; and won't be until we all start kicking the rich, corrupt, old men in power out of these positions.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
... is permanent revolution.
The Government understands that ISP-level filtering is not a 'silver bullet'. We have always viewed ISP-level filtering as one part of a broader government initiative for protecting our children online.
Couldn't give a flying fuck about what children see online, not if it means that I or anyone else is going to have to put up with your motherfscking filtering nonsense. How about you try something REALLY radical, like, say, getting lazy-ass parents to actually pay attention to what their goddamned kids are doing on the computer???!? STOP MAKING MY WORLD CHILDPROOF, DAMNIT!!!
Don't rouse the people! :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chqi8m4CEEY
In all honesty, I think censoring the internet is sort of like censoring a library...
Libraries involve borrowing books, not buying them, and sometimes even borrowing DVDs and music, for any extent of time (you do pay late fees, but if you never return it and never go back, not much they can do). We should, therefore, shut down libraries, as these people using them are not paying for the original book, nor are they buying their own copy of the DVD or CD they borrowed. Video rental stores should also be shut down, and game rental stores should be burned.
They're all morons. BitTorrent: 1 person buys the item, then rips it and puts it online. Thousands of people obtain it without paying. Video Store: 1 copy of the item is purchased, and thousands of people rent it, obviously not paying for their own copy. But you don't see them shutting down video stores for lost profits.
As for child porn...I always thought it was funny how they handled that. Watch child porn online = punishment/removal of said child porn. Get drawings of child porn = punishment/removal of said child porn. But...isn't it much less harmful to have them watch cartoony vids, or vids that already exist, then say 'well, you have no harmless way of slaking your disgusting lust, take that!'. I wouldn't be surprised if their attempt at preventing the spread of child porn resulted in an increase in child molestation, kidnap, and possibly even an increase of child porn vids that are 'homemade'. It's disgusting and vile, yes, but for Chrissakes, if you can't stop it until it already happened, do these people really sleep better knowing they stopped videos from being watched, but can do -nothing- to stop child rape? Let them watch the vids = they don't have to go grab a kid themselves.
Similarly, if you take out the option to share a game/music/video, do you really think those people will say "Well, better go buy a copy at $60". No; they'll boycott you. Or, they'll steal a copy for realz. Or, they'll borrow somebody's copy and rip their own copy.
These idiots in their little government buildings need to leave the internet alone; they clearly don't know what they are doing.
How dare they interfere with my right to steal copyrighted material? How dare they interfere with my right to enjoy watching children raped? How dare they interfere with my right to send 5 million unsolicited pieces of E-mails an hour? How dare they interfere with my right to vandalize networks and computers? How dare they deny me $50 worth of bandwidth to save myself the $10 cost to purchase something legally. How dare they cut back on money spent to produce movies,pay bands or programmers? If they keep this up their won't be anything worth stealing. How dare the government interfere with my right to steal, vandalize and abuse, simply to prevent terrorist attacks, my right to privacy trumps other peoples right to not be killed by a car bomb.
this kind of stupidity and shit, is not even found in here, despite our distorted and skewed legal system.
courts routinely order blocking and unblocking of youtube, but this is related to cases filed in regard to copyright infringements. when some people complained that they were not able to use youtube, prime minister replied 'i dont know about you, but i can use it', hinting the use of web proxies.
granted, the same islamist prime minister's party gets a lot of sexual content, political content sites blocked through the 'national filter', yet everyone knows about proxies. the blocking is more saving face than an actual filtering.
but even here, blocking an ENTIRE protocol, has never been even mentioned or thought.
Read radical news here
They can do this because they control the pipes.
The Internet is a bunch of computers all connected together through various networks.
What this screams for is an Internet where we don't get inter-connected through their pipes but our own. e.g. Wireless mesh.
Maybe Australia blocking it will be the incentive we need to move on to the 'next big thing' in filesharing.
Consider revising your title. It may be more accurate and enticing to the readers to call your article:
Australia To Fail
whoever told you that, is your ENEMY!!
..follow in the footsteps of China, by protecting it's citizens from the internet. Good luck with that.
It should read 'Australia to TRY to Block BitTorrent'.
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/acta/
Recently when I went to download Fedora Core 10, I had to use bittorrent for the first time (Never bothered in the past) as all of the official servers I tried timed out at some stage or other.
"Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist "
Wow. Never heard of a packet shaper? This is why non-technical people shouldn't be making technical decisions.
Ok, I need a bit of education here. There are "anonymous" ways of browsing the internet. I am thinking that that in the back of my mind that one only need to enhance bitorrent protocols with the typical "anonymous" methods (yes I know this means software for detection and participation in an "enhanced btorrent protocol") but these packets could then be routed to/from random machines (which the receiving machine having an encrypted list of "who" to accept connections from).
What would be "true justice" is if we could compromise one or more of the huge "botnets" to become P2P redistribution networks... The hackers hacked...
Could someone explain precisely *what* it is in the P2P protocol that makes it vulnerable to filtering? Is it some unique port (I can setup randomly migrating ports at specific time points distributed though encrypted communications)? Is it some specific address list of machines hosting BT traffic? (Then increase the number of machines the source packets are coming from -- part of the anonymizing strategy).
Until a government disallows (a) encrypting any data (which I think in the U.S. would violate the 5th amendment, in the U.K. may violate the Magna Carta (or one would presume whatever the operating basis for UK law is today); or (b) connecting peer-to-peer systems at will (which if you randomize it enough should allow any data to be distributed to anyone). (There are all kinds of "government" prohibiting "life, liberty and the pursuit" of happiness" arguments that can come up here.)
In short it sounds to me like the BT authors should go back to the drawing boards and develop a "fault-tolerant", "randomized distribution", "non-filterable" strategy. Since we have seen this coming, my question would be why have they not done this?
Hoping that someone who understands these things better than I will take the time to respond.
My point is that techies gab gab gab without making it simple to understand and digest. People want to learn and understand, but they need to be explained in simple terms. I find financial calculations a piece of cake and have no problem creating the derivatives that are causing problems. Yet most people consider this stuff mumbo jumbo and fake. (BTW its not!)
I ran out of Mod points yesterday.
I've found that people are actually quite interested in understanding things, when I explain them well in a way that makes it clear how it affects them. (When I just blab on about a pet topic, not so much. But taking the time to figure out what needs to be conveyed, and conveying it well in an engaging manner can work wonders.)
Worse, if you come into it with the attitude that the person that you're talking to is dumb for not already getting it? They will pick up on that whether you actually say it or not. And it will not make them inclined to really hear your point.
Bittorrent is merely a way of getting a large number of files across the internet efficiently. There is nothing wrong with or illegal about the technology. A reasonable analogy is the automobile. Do you use it to get around quickly and easily? YES! Can it be used illegally? Yes. Do you ban it because of this? No. But not so with peer-to-peer. The brainless fucktards who are doing this have less good sense than God gave a housefly. Whatever their goals for doing this, they won't be achieved by this method, and they really are chucking the baby with the bathwater. Oh well. They were voted in, they can be voted out (and not quickly enough).
I'd rather support them by making a convenient copy of their website available through BitTorrent.
Can you shpare a mod point??
Geeks vastly overestimate their influence if they think that a party will lose an election because of bittorrent filtering. The majority has still no idea what filesharing is and those who know are more likely to be young and therefore not of voting age.
Even if you can vote, know bittorrent and are opposed to its filtering, you still might vote for the labor party. Identity politics is a bitch.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Subj: Please do not block all peer-to-peer traffic
For one thing, World of Warcraft (a passion for our entire family) depends on P2P for the distribution of updates.
And where I have absolutely no problem with suppressing child pornography, I believe that in the long term censorship by filtration is not the answer. It's never the answer, in a free society -- no offence, mate, but you're the government and I don't entirely trust you. Once you start filtering content for good reasons, you'll soon be filtering content for bad ones. The answer is to find the perpetrators and take them out. I believe your efforts should be directed toward finding the source of the trash and taking it down, not slowing down the pipes for the rest of us. (name + address) IT consultant since 1969 Husband and devoted father of two
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I can't really blame the Australians for making all of these new laws, they are just trying to honor their national heritage by making everyone a criminal again.
There is another possible slant to this announcement - perhaps Conroy is intentionally trying to sink the scheme by showing how hard the control of P2P traffic will be. The media coverage and public feedback is impossible for him to ignore - indeed we know he's not ignoring it due to the blog set up, etc, and Conroy is very selective in when he chooses to answer questions regarding this.
The government now knows how unpopular this idea is, but still has top "play the game" of placating the supporters of the scheme. By extending the live trial to cover P2P traffic as well, they can get even more damning results of how ineffectual and obrtusive the filtering will be, and so will be able to throw the scheme out with a "well, we tried..."
Yes, I know I'm probably completely delusional... ;-)
http://rights.theseekerr.com/
Band together and fight for your freedom - it was going to remain a prototype a little longer, but I think it's time to move!
Captcha: Repress
Within a few more years, people will have 1TB in their pocket, whether on an ipod-like device or flash drives on their keychains. With normal compression, that's about 100,000 songs.
If Governments(/business interests) were to succeed in making stuff unswappable online, sneakernet will return.
The next step will simply be to ban 'unlicensed' encryption.
Don't think they won't do it.
Read Pynchon.
Normally the people that have "given up" what they really mean is that they can't be bothered, they just rephrase things in a way that presents themselves as freedom martyrs instead of what they really are: lazy bummers.
More relevant issues nowadays are decided by a handful of people, a few dozen of them at most. If you want to influence an issue you care about then you have to make sure you are one of those people taking decisions, by doing nothing you become part of the problem.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If people really voted like that the same party would be always in government.
Since there is alternation in power people are obviously changing their minds about the issues and voting accordingly.
If you want to affect how decisions are taken you have to be part of the system.
Being an outsider is just the easy cop out.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Living a life of servitude while pretending you are rebelling (by doing nothing! what a fucking cop out) is a life not worth living.
And before you say what I have done, let me put it this way, I am sure I have a record somewhere in a government office where my political activities some way back were recorded. That is what dictatorial governments do.
To read that people in democracies just cop out and try to "live their lives" just makes my blood boil.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Politics is not done in the streets, that is a nice way to let off steam, but politics, real politics, are done in the parliaments of this world.
Don't write a letter to your MP. GO, visit him and make it clear in no uncertain terms that if he persists with his support for the scheme you will do all what is in your power to see that he loses his job. And then follow through with the necessary action (work for another party or candidate, spend some of your money informing the people about this guy, work with other people having a beef with the MP).
Writing fucking letters and then patting you in the back is a cop out.
Time to get involved in real politics, before it is too late ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Oz is no different than China or Iran. Just ban the whole thing and criminalize it as a felony. I would 1 thousand percent back that.
Good musicians will practice several hours a day, for several years, before they even have a sniff to some degree of success.
The problem with the systems is with the record labels and the current politicians, the labels have lobbied for the laws they need and the politicians have had no qualms to legislate against of the best interests of the people they are supposed to be serving.
As long as people like you and me, that "get it", don't get our hands dirty in the realm of politics, not much will change in how a few companies are always abusing the weaknesses democratic system.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This has gone beyond a joke!
Man, I was so happy when Rudd got in. Oh, how stupid I feel now! This government is just morphing into a different version of the last. Messing in to all the wrong things, on the back of bs poll results, media s**t, and just good old fear.
I only hope the people who know how, make ways of circumventing all this crap easily available so I can continue to enjoy the only free communication channel the world has left after the wall goes up!
Sorry Kevin, you've lost me!
Well, that's the peer-to-peer problem eradicated forever! Is there nothing that bureaucrats can't solve?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
The more I see all this stuff play out, the more I have to admit to myself that at least a small part of the problem is a generational thing.
The people of the previous generation(don't nit-pick, and yes, I realize the generation of which I speak includes my parents) seem to have very different values then my generation, as well as that of my children. I am of the opinion that until a large majority of them pass away, the resistance to change will remain.
But then that can also imply that, at some point, my generation will be the pain-in-the-ass generation.
I'm assuming someone has a massive hash table of 'unwanted' content on p2p. Small point, but salient none the less.
The stupidest thing about even bothering to filter P2P - the state aim of this initiative is to prevent people from accidentally seeing something that's not suitable for kids.
Putting aside the ambiguity of that, does anyone really believe that you just 'accidentally' download porn on P2P?
If people really voted like that the same party would be always in government.
Perhaps you would be willing to point out for us what the real differences in *actions* (not talking points) are between the Republican Party and the Democrat party in the USA?
Sure, they are two "different" parties, but they both pull the same bullshit on the public and only seem to be in it to line their pockets and consolidate their power. They are two sides of the same coin and they are a part of the same system that has been running countries into the ground throughout history.
I'm willing to bet that's part of what the GPP meant. No matter what, the same types of people always get voted into office and the system never changes for the better until it falls.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Remember how Nine Inch Nails released their music over BitTorrent?
So long for getting their next album legally over the internet if BitTorrent gets blocked.
While i am adamantly apposed to the whole govt filtering thing. The reasons I hate it is because its going to waste alot of tax payer money and achieve nothing but make my game playing in MMO land alot less enjoyable... Yet the govt is too stupid (and too ham-strung by the family first minister who is truly the most god-forsaken idiot on the planet) to be able to see it.
But, how do you stop bit torrent? dont you just cut off the trackers? (im no bittorrent expert). In which case its just going to be like the rest of the internet filtering rubbish. Now, my assumption is its going to be partly automated and partly player-controlled in that there will be family first fanatics sitting in a room looking for sites of evil (funded by the tax payers) and adding them to a list of "banned" sites. And of course, you'll have users at the other end going "this site isnt evil, please unblock it".
But, getting from the list of evil onto the filtering list (or off again) will probably require some political process - i.e. time. So "generic porn site" will get blocked, but by the time it does, 15 other sites will have risen in its place. So you achieve nothing, and in the interim, joe user is banging his head against the wall going "i really wanted to get to a site" that had nothing to do with porn.
Now, for example, a little while ago I went and got a vps provider and it just so happened that the person who had used that particular IP address prior to me was an adult website (the reverse address lookup gave it away). Now assuming they've blocked access to that IP address, can you imagine how p*ssed off I would be not to be able to access my shiny new vps?
But, this isn't about protecting children and never has been, its not about blocking porn sites or anything like that, its about a small-minded minister with no brains trying to persuade another even stupider minister to vote the way his govt does.
The thing most people dont seem to get though is that its going to be about killing "crime" much the same way as it is in real life - find out who the criminal is and block them. This is not a black-and-white kull p2p (i dont think). But the government is too slow to really achieve that on the "Real" internet, by the time they're able to add a block list for some p2p tracker it's probably already distributed its load and when some more legit site takes its place they'll be the ones to suffer. So right along side them the other people who'll suffer are the users, copping a huge boost in latency and making the traffic to the US (when MMO land lives) even slower.
But as the old saying goes "make something idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot" (applies to our ministers in AU quite well), but in this case I simply mean that if you make things inaccessible, people will find other ways to access them and eventually it'll be so hard to differentiate between good and evil you cant achieve a goal. In that sense it'll probably be good for the internet in some way, it'll spawn innovation. Need is the mother of invention after all right?
they have a censorship minister. enough said!
Americans truly don't get irony do they?
Yes, Linux is a piece of poo... And somehow it is a number greater than one that are thieves and sticks? Your sentence doesn't make any sense.
I could call you a M$ fanboy, but I wouldn't be that mean. Plus, that would be assuming that you are running Windows.
Dang! You are good, you just made me waste several minutes typing this up. (I'm not very fast at composing things!)
From your post, I'm guessing you might find Thirty-Thousand.org to directly address your concern (although more with regard to representatives than senators).
The basic premise is that US congressional representative districts have become so blooming huge in population terms that it's simply impossible for normal (i.e. non-mega-rich non-corporate) constituents to have much real impact on what representatives do. The group argues that it's way past time to increase the number of representatives in congress (artificially capped at 435 since 1939) in order to reduce the constituent / representative ratio. This averaged 40K in 1804, and now averages around 700K -- a 17.5x difference. Boosting the number of representatives and shrinking representative districts would bring constituents into closer contact with their representatives, and thereby allow for (shocking, perhaps) actual representation.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Someone should remind Peter Garrett it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees!. It's amazing how a little power can affect someone's politics.
The problem with this is that many groups such as music artists, distributors of Linux software, etc use bittorrent as a way of legally7 distributing their software, so the implimentation of such laws would be useless. People will always run behind anonomous proxies (like I already do), and people will find a way around it. It is a useless law, and the censorship minister will be hung out to dry on this one.
fagggggots!
Maybe not lose government; but the Senate affects the ability of the government to pass legislation. One or two votes in every hundred could be enough to place the government at the mercy of a minor party (like the pro-internet Greens) for legislation which is not backed by both major parties.
Have a look at http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2007/results/senate/,
keeping in mind that half the senate is elected at each election. If the results from the 2007 election were repeated in the next election, we would have the following scenario:
Lib/Nat: 36 seats
ALP: 36 seats
Greens: 6 seats
Family First/Others: 1 seat
Meaning that any legislation would require either (a) the support of both major parties or (b) support of the governing party + support of the Greens to pass.
Of course, this wouldn't help with the problem at hand (as Lib/Nat would likely deal to make this happen, being even more conservative than the ALP)
But - definitely not what the party in government would want - and that one or two votes in a hundred is a spanking worth delivering
Surely Christmas Eve is not the best time to begin trialling it? If something goes wrong won't all the ISP Techs be on holiday for at least Christmas and Boxing Day is not for longer?
Also are they intending to block all those nasty Peer-to-Peer routing protocols? You know the ones routers use to identify how to forward traffic? Wouldn't that cause the whole of Australia's networks to fail, or is that a cunning plan. We can't block the Internet so let's block something it relies on and hope people don't notice till it's too late?
Anyone else worried by the fact a so called civilised country has a Censorship minister?
Australia strikes me as fairly ham-handed in it's policies, not just internet related ones. Britain too. The citizens are not stupider than US citizens, but somehow their governments are.
...
that this is a slow squeeze? If you control the flow of information you control the populace. The powers that be do not like the fairness that the Internet represents, they want to control information in order to control YOU.
Wake up world.
http://infowars.com
It's time to start integrating identity protection into p2p technologies. I2P is the natural choice and has come a long way since its humble beginnings.
WTF Mate
from non democratic nations.
So that we have a divided populace that never has more than 20% thinking ONE way.
But most people vote depending on how much tax cuts they get, or how much they get bribed for their vote. They dont care about any side issues to do with freedoms etc... or laws. Money is the only factor.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Senator Conroy said the internet filter would be in-step with existing methods to censor books, films and video games.
When a book, film or video game is censored, the fact that that particular book, film or video game is censored is publically available information. The same is not true of Conroy's internet censorship scheme.