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Australian Net Filter Gets One Step Closer
Condobolin sends in an update to the Australian government's ongoing efforts to implement ISP-level filtering. One of the hurdles they had to overcome was to build a system that would allow them to filter content without impairing other internet usage. A trial of the system has just concluded, and the results are positive — at least, for the government. Quoting:
"More than half of the Internet service providers (ISPs) taking part in the Federal Government's ISP filtering trial have reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems. Of the nine participating ISPs, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect told ARN they had seen no slowdowns in Internet speeds or problems with the filtering solutions in place. Of the remaining four ISPs, Tech2U and Highway1 were unable to respond by time of publication while Unwired and Optus refused to comment. ... 'From a technical perspective we're more than confident that if the government decided to roll out a mandatory Internet filter based on or around an Australian Communications and Media Authority blacklist or subset thereof, then it can be done without any impact whatsoever to the speed of the Internet,' [said Webshield managing director Anthony Pillion]."
Yeah, but they have to actually implement it before they can find out whether it can withstand all the attacks that will be launched against it. That's where it's likely to really cost them. :)
Caveat Utilitor
Yeah right.
Results of filtering - bearing in mind that the incumbent Labor federal government is largely ruled by the Catholic-dominated right wing faction:
This is a huge worry. The blacklist will not be subject to public oversight. As an Aussie expat, I'm glad to be residing across the ditch in New Zealand (where ISPs are allowed to opt out of the filtering).
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
....sure, they'd be entirely neutral.
The participants were all
And an the obvious (some would say FOREGONE) conslusion was "it works just fine".
.... brought to you by the department of No!Really?
Seriously folks, aside from all the dodgy (ie totally unscientific and statistically irrelevant) testing, this "internet filtering" is bad because CENSORSHIP IS EVIL!
Always, in every case, by definition and in principle.
Censorship is NEVER, ever, in any sense of the phrase, a good thing.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
then again, you can't expect to talk sense with the labor party....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Australians must be relieved, the government's censorship software is working just fine. Personally, I wanted this experiment to be a complete failure. The fact that censoring the internet is technically feasible is hardly "good" news.
Would be to pick a trial region and see if the filtering with a statistical drop in the associated crime.
Are there any markers for success?
Well, let's look at hate crime. Most ISP sites already have TOS barring what they consider "hateful" content, and so theoretically, by blocking NAZI sites, you should see or should have seen a decrease in the amount of hate crimes out there. If you blocked web sites that hated white people, or hated black people, would crimes against either be reduced? I think that we would find that for some social problems, censorship simply won't work and what is needed more of a positive message than a filtering of negative ones.
On the other hand, one might imagine where censorship could work, and that might be in the level of violence, and the level excess sexuality. I think most people would agree that the world would be better off if we did not have entertainment careening ever so Roman like violence. If you cut out the violence content, would violent crime drop? Similarly, if you got rid of a lot of the sexual messages, would divorce drop?
The point is that, the argument that people make against filtering, that, it can't work, or, it will make things too slow, are technocratic arguments and usually when you say something can't be done, someone else will say that they can do it. Saying filtering is foolish because it can't work perfectly is kinda silly because ultimately, nothing works perfectly, but many things work well enough and can be managed or continually improved. The real social debate is, whether or not the censorship itself has a measurable effect on the behavior you think the content causes, and that's a scientific debate, and then there is the social debate of how much social damage, knowing the scientific metrics, you are willing to tolerate to have universal free speech. If filtering violent content cut the number of murders in half, or cutting down the sex in the media reduced divorces by 1/2, then, those would certainly be numbers that you could not ignore.
I mean, if we have come to accept that even the atmosphere has limits to what we can dump into it, then, why would it not be so unreasonable to think that our culture has limits too? It's time to get some real numbers on censorship, and argue it on its merits, and not any heated and random dogma.
This is my sig.
move out of Chin..ahem.. Australia.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Are all my fellow countrymen who just don't care. Indeed, even my close family believe it to be a good idea, even after I've explained just why it isn't. They either think it'll stop them receiving spam, or think it'll stop some middle eastern type fellow from finding bomb plans on the internet and killing us (because we've had such a problem with that here).
I'm tired of explaining these things to people only to have them throw it back in my face and ignore everything I say. I've sort of gotten to the stage where I just think "Fuck em. Let them implement their filter and we'll see what happens." If it fails miserably, perhaps we can finally get some interest from the every day Australian.
...we'll evolve beyond governments.
Why aren't you protesting against existing censorship in Australia? Unlike America our ratings system is run by and enforced by the government. This is why our highest rating for video games is MA and we why we have no R rating ("because the nintendos is for kids right?").
Sad to say it but this internet filtering fits right in with general government and public belief that a minority should be able to control what material adults consume.
Fire up your proxies gentleman!
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
More than half of the Internet service providers (ISPs) taking part in the Federal Government's ISP filtering trial have reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems.
So, in other words, just less than half reported significant speed and technology problems. This entire situation pisses me off! I emailed the minister in charge of this and he didn't even have the decency to reply with a non-canned response. So, all the big ISPs are saying that this will result in big speed disruptions, but the other half (idiot home-run ISPs most likely) are saying it's fine. Gee, I wonder if it's because those ISPs have negligible traffic anyway!
Just out of curiosity, has anyone got the idea of where Stephen Conroy got the idea from? I'm thinking in terms of the bigger worldwide picture of who benefits from a lack of free speech, assuming that we are a guinea pig for a controlled internet in a western country. I'm sure that Conroy didn't come up with the idea himself and has very large incentives to see this plan come to fruition. So think of who is pulling the strings of our politicians, are there any readers knowledgable to answer this as I'm afraid I can't already supply you the answer.
I guess the 15 users of Nelson Bay Online would be able to help, but iPrimus seems to be the only notable ISP taking part.
I'm interested in testing a few url combinations - so if you are using iPrimus, could you post the results for the following urls:
http://redtube.com/
http://www.redtube.com/
http://www.redtube.com/terms
http://www.redtube.com/contact
http://www.redtube.com/privacy
http://www.redtube.com/dmca
http://www.redtube.com/usc2257
http://www.redtube.com/?foo=bar
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Cyde/Weird_pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cyde/Weird_pictures
If you're reading slashdot, you should have figured out what I'm trying to test. The reason is that Conroy has claimed that only the exact url is supposed to be blocked, and if (for example) www.redtube.com is on the blacklist, no sub-pages should be blocked. How this is supposed to handle query strings (such as those used for slashdot threads) without overblocking or being trivial to defeat, I'm not sure.
Note that these sites contain adult content, but nothing that is illegal to view in Australia.
AC'ing because I don't want an $11,000 fine.
(Most sites taken from here)
Make something idiot proof and someone will build a better idiot. The problem with this filter is, those that want to get around it are probably not idiots.
As seen in countless examples where government officials state they have "high morals" and subsequently are caught abusing little boys or girls - I wonder if these same government officials pushing to censor the internet are cut of the same cloth.
Managing director of Nelson Bay Online, Patrick Sayer, said only 1 per cent of his entire customer base decided to opt-into the system, resulting in just 15 users.
Fifteen Users! And that's enough to be worthy of being hailed as "a successful test"?
(sigh) At least they've not actually had the nerve to claim this test was scientifically rigorous or statistically significant in any way.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I blame all those voters who voted for the people who wants to have this implemented. Now we have an economy who's budget is going into deficit after the previous government worked so hard to make it positive again, and now we also have censorship. I hope those people who voted for Krudd are the ones most affected by this. Personally I wont be, I only visit theage, slashdot and facebook so all good. This will never affect me. Also while they have this implemented I hope they can use it to catch all those pedophiles as well, may as well put it to good use if we have to have it.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced that the Australian government will build a new $43 billion national broadband network, connecting 90% of homes to 100-megabit fibre internet. "We believe that fast broadband is absolutely essential for our nation's future," he said.
"Telstra has raised issues with the amount of bandwidth usage this will produce, given we're still hooked to America by tin cans and string, but our Great Firewall of Australia Internet filtering project should keep usage down to reasonable levels at near-dialup speeds. We promise you won't go over your download cap."
The Great Firewall will reliably block all illegal material, child pornography, terrorism and unAustralian thoughts.
"Not only are the contents of the list illegal," said Senator Stephen Conroy, "but revealing the list is also illegal, and so is linking to someone linking to someone claiming to reveal the list. So we're blocking Google Search. Having to use Anzwers should keep usage right down."
Calling it the "single largest infrastructure decision in Australia's history," Mr Rudd said the project would employ up to 37,000 people a year monitoring citizens' net access, reading their email and correcting spelling errors in their football forum posts.
A consultative process will determine the regulatory framework for the network. "We're considering getting Senator Fielding to do it personally," said Senator Conroy, "since he's the dickhead who demanded the censorship in return for his votes. Hopefully it'll melt his brain. Bloody balance of power. At least Xenophon's bloody sane."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Uh, yeah, great. Two of them have more than a handful of users and only one of those gave some form of feedback. Yes, that sounds like a brilliant scientific sample. By the way, I live in Australia, so I know just how big each of these ISPs are. Also, caps lock, cruise control, etc.
But its for the children.
Seriously tho, i'm afraid LOTS of people out there believe that some censorship in exchange for their 'safety' is a good thing. Which is sad. Actually most of the world is ok with giving up rights ( that most never really had ... ) to their governments.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And credibility too.. Damned typos. Damned spell check.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Times likes this one really misses an "edit" button.
Yeah, the ISPs were big. That wasn't the point, as I explained. And thanks for the capitals, that really helps my comprehension. Of what a pompous ass you are, that is.
"From a technical perspective we're more than confident that if the government decided to roll out a mandatory train schedule for the jews around the third reich and and any subset thereof, then it can be done without any impact whatsoever on the speed of the rest of the trains in Germany", [said SS managing director Anofluthzen Pillikartoflen].
In all seriousness though. It just seems so strange to me how someone can talk about restricting the freedom of thought or speech with such glee. It's like ethics is an alien concept to these people. This guy completely misses the whole point. He seems to think that the problem with censorship is that it might affect how youtube videos with cute kitties in them perform and not that freedom is being curtailed.
Yes, yes. Godwins law bla bla bla. Knock yourself out.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
> iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online, OMNIconnect, Tech2U, Highway1
Hah hah. I live in Oz and apart from Primus I've never heard of any of these. All the big ones like TPG, Telstra, Optus, AAPT have been left out. Primus is way down the list anyway.
I can't wait for the next election. Now the Ruddcash handouts have stopped (paid for with a $40B loan from China) maybe the dopey mums n' dads who so greedily lapped them up will think twice about voting for Rudd.
Here is a picture of STEPHEN CONROY - Australian Censorship Minister:
http://picasaweb.google.com.au/lh/photo/kr8jhS0u3DZtbtndkmDUfA?feat=directlink
internet kitten fight