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New Zealand Introduces Internet Filtering

Posted by timothy on from the watch-out-it's-catchy dept.

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."

2 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Ireland got it worse yesterday by ionix5891 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  2. Interesting technical details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.