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New Zealand Introduces Internet Filtering
Thomas Beagle writes "The New Zealand government has been stealthily introducing a centralised internet child-pornography specific filtering system. Voluntary for ISPs but not for their users, ISPs representing over 94% of the market are already intending to join. Read the general FAQ and technical FAQ about the proposed Netclean Whitebox implementation."
Especially as these filters are never misused for other things than child pornography for convenience, when they're in place and all.
How about spending the resources on busting pedophiles and exposing pedophile rings instead? Or was that too straightforward and precise?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why normal people support laws like this. I completely understand why statist politicians, apparatchiks and lobbyists do, but not ordinary people. It's so incredibly obvious that if you know that a site focuses on this trash, just coordinate with the country where the servers are based. If the country is poor, it would be easy for New Zealand police to offer their police a modest "finder's fee" for allowing NZ police to tag along on a raid to take over the server, get the logs and go after the distributors. Hell, if we started offering bounties for people like this and the Nigerian scammers, third world governments would be falling all over themselves to help the first world countries fight internet crime.
Since neither FAQ mentioned any mechanism for reporting sites that have illegal content, I assume that means they're relying on some dedicated law-enforcement professionals to go out looking for child porn/bestial porn.
That's gonna make that first date "and what do you do?" conversation a little awkward.
And hey, slowing down everyone's internet experience for only half a million dollars/year? That's quite a steal!
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
We only just got rid of this laughably insane idea in Australia... here the ISP's refused to co-operate.
Actually, no, sorry, a few did co-operate, just so they could show the govt how laughably infeasible it was!
And now New Zealand introduces internet filtering, just before I plan to move there :(
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
small bit offtopic
but theres no mention on slashdot of the new 1984 style big brother law coming in in Ireland :(
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/all-email-text-and-phone-records-to-be-kept-for-2-years-1820026.html
What type of material is censored? The trial scheme was used to filter child pornography including video, photos, stories and drawings. Other illegal material (as defined by New Zealand law) is not filtered.
Stories and drawings. Because icky thoughts must be banned.
From the technical details article:
Does it support the next version of IP, v6?
No.
Whoops.
What if the website uses HTTPS (secure HTTP)?
If the website uses https (e.g. as used for internet banking or online shopping), the filter server can't examine the request to see what website it is going to on the target internet address.
This means the the filter server must block all https websites on a filtered internet address. This will interrupt service to any website that needs to use a secure connection.
Whoops part 2.
Is it possible to circumvent the filtering?
It is relatively easy for a motivated user to circumvent the filtering. This is done by routing the requests to a proxy service in another country that does not filter the required site.
There are also a number of free services that exist to allow people to escape from government monitoring of their internet usage. These services include: Tor, Freenet and WASTE.
Major whoops. Not only do they admit it's easy to get around it, they helpfully give you the name of three services to use.
Don't get me wrong, I find the idea of child porn abhorrent and sickening. It's just that I don't understand why governments continue to push filtering as the answer when it's never going to work. If they want to get rid of the problem, all they have to do is target offending porno sites with a massive DDOS attack. They could slave every idle govt PC in the country to the task, and there are an awful lot of idle govt PCs.