Slashdot Mirror
A Sad Day For the New Zealand Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Another one bites the dust, as New Zealand's Internet filter stealthily goes live with two smaller ISPs, and three of the largest already rumoured to have signed up to do the same. However, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is apparently 'committed to helping people to circumvent government internet filtering,' so perhaps the USA will launch an invasion to free the poor downtrodden Kiwis from their own evil government?" Clever of one of the acquiescing ISPs to have named itself "Watchdog."
Why would an ISP implement a filter voluntarily?
Unless this is a filter designed to reduce bandwidth use (Torrents, P2P) I truly don't understand the logic here.
I did RFTA.
Encryption
Proxies
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"Like internet censorship too will never last."
Censorship will exist as long as either
1.) There are governments with secrets to hide
2.) ZOMG SAVE TEH CHILDREN
I forsee neither of these going away anytime soon. As in, Ever.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is apparently 'committed to helping people to circumvent government internet filtering,'
You might have got that a bit confuzed: US only circumvents in the case of the Cuba's, Iran's etc of the world - it helps destabilize our enemies. For everyone else like NZ, WE are committed to forcing the world to filter as conditions on our trade treaties. (in this case, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Free Trade Agreement (TPP FTA) with Singapore, Chile, New Zealand, Brunei Darussalam, Australia, Peru and Vietnam.
I forsee neither of these going away anytime soon. As in, Ever.
I don't see 'em going away, either - not when we have power-hungry groups who have been including the Internet in their thinking for some time.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Google can quit!
If you want to know more about it, check the NZ Internet Filtering FAQ at: http://techliberty.org.nz/issues/internet-filtering/filtering-faq/
"so perhaps the USA will launch an invasion to free the poor downtrodden Kiwis from their own evil government?"
That is probably true.
Since there is rumor CNN might have proof that Bin Laden has been seen there for vacation.
People also say he is accompagnied by Sadam Hussein and Joseph Stalin.
Who are said to have found some oil offshore.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
Ok, I do have to admit that this is the first time I heard about the filter... but how can they possibly square that with human rights? Especially this part:
I get that various dictatorships and so on around the globe might not care all that much about human rights, but New Zealand was still a democracy last time I checked?
We have two major parties in NZ (Labour and National).
The filter process was started when Labour was in power.
It's now gone live while National is in power.
At least the Greens are against it! Oh, pity they only get ~5%.
"so perhaps the USA will launch an invasion to free the poor downtrodden Kiwis from their own evil government?"
The USA would be more than happy to overthrow your government for you and install a dictator friendly to our interests. We can also free you from your public health care system and bring in a less efficient private system that will only cost you 2X as much. We will though commit to spending billions to rebuild your country after our war of words. And finally the issue at hand. We promise to bring you the same great internet service that we have in the USA. If you haven't experienced dial up before you're in for a treat!
It keeps amazing me that the governments of the "free" world does everything they can do stop internet freedom. It would also be very interesting to know who decides and on what grounds a site should be filtered on. Also what kind of filtering, http? smtp? p2p? msn? twitter? Facebook? youtube?
This comes as a great surprise to me, considering the NZ government is SUPPOSED to be the 2nd least corrupt government in the world: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/gov_cor-government-corruption All this talk in the article of secretly implementing crap to filter the internet doesn't bode well for NZ. Internet there is already shiit.
Having recently moved to NZ, I'm still not used to having a 25 gig/month data cap, but at least my ISP (Slingshot) has taken a stance against the filter. We'll see how long that lasts. Having dealt with numerous account issues (overcharges, undercharges, VoIP issues, you name it) in the two months I've had it, I have a pretty dim view of their professionalism. At least I can reach an actual human being in customer service. They're usually quite polite and helpful (I make it a point to be also). Gotta give them kudos for that, at least.
Nooo...
That means there's more chance the proposed filter might come to fruition in Australia. Now the Government can point and say "see, NZ did it!".
Although it's sorta funny ... I was being berated by a kiwi on this very forum a few weeks ago, who was going on about how crap Australia was and that he couldn't wait to go home to NZ where there was "no chance of an internet filter". Joke's on him now, I guess. At least our 'filter' is still only an (unpopular) proposal, rather than actually implemented. Yet.
Perhaps the uncensored internet is the fad coming already to a close?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
And don't forget us brits too.
So...start a new party.
Call it the Packet Party.
To be fair, a lot of our stupidity results from our proximity to Australia. It's like trying not to have the volume too loud when you're living beside the airport.
(It's a friendly rivalry, really)
When confronted with one problem, some think "I'll use recursion". Now they are confronted with one problem.
...which will get even fewer votes than the Greens.
I think the next step for democracies is to scrap the party system and have voting based on particular policies, not on some nebulous notion of a "party platform". The common system of voting in a bunch of drongos every few years and writing to representatives and hope they'll support your views is far from ideal, and modern technology makes it quite feasible to enable voters to have a much more direct say on particular issues.
But I'm not sure any of the major political parties would ever support such a scheme; certainly not while they're in power.
Oh, sorry. You said "China".
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
4 million people isn't a lot and perhaps half of them are eligible to vote.
So Start a Party call it th will of the people and if elected will take the majority view on any issue. Each topic would have a poll I doubt it would be able to be a huge part of Politics but every vote would b e reflecting what people want. Just as the Green Party doesn't control any countries government it certainly influences both the left and right.
In a PR system 5% of 4 Million is 200,000, probably could be a working reality with 100,000 people voting for it.
could kick something like that off with a facebook page.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
That's basically the same ploy that was used here in Finland to get ISPs to censor certain (claimed to be) child porn domains. If the ISPs wouldn't do it "voluntarily", then it was understood that government would step in and make it mandatory. Interestingly, after a couple of years, some ISPs have turned off the censoring by default and allow people to explicitly order the censorship "service". Basically it felt like it was all about making politicians look good at that moment, nobody really cared about if it worked or not.
Rule of the majority. Rule by Facebook. eep
http://ihatehate.wordpress.com
Oh, you speak the queens english? That is good enough. Prepare to be liberated! (Also known as kiss your ass goodbye)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As any Kiwi could tell you, sheep numbers are plummeting with the dairy boom. 32 million sheep and 5.8 million dairy cows in 2009.
As a Kiwi, I wasn't aware of that. Not all of us obsess over the sheep population.
i think this story is referring to where peter jackson is from
you know, middle earth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
*Attempted* Censorship will exist as long as either
1.) There are governments with secrets to hide
2.) ZOMG SAVE TEH CHILDREN
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
the target result that will be eventually achieved is censorship and control over what is communicated publicly over the internet.
And all that is really going on here is the effort to water it down little by little in public semi acceptance and the newbees that simply don't know better.
Freedom is a simple word to understand.
And its easy to see this sort of censorship does not support freedom.
Read the Declaration of Independence if you doubt the intent of the government, any government.
It might last, but it wont take long before people find other ways to do the things they want to do. it's always been like this. All it takes is enough people adjusting to it, it spreading and becoming more convenient until it raises brows enough to slap it down.
And then, the next alternative will sprout up.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
It is a very important topic taught to us every year at schools, universities and even in the news.
signature is pants
Corruption takes three forms:
This last one is actually most insidious, because the above leave a paper trail and can land you in jail. Being incompetent carries no such penalty, if it did, most judges would be in jail. These kind of measures are not introduced out of malice, but out of a sense "something must be done, this is something, therefor it must be done".
the problem is ultimately the voter. Politicians are like women, once they reach a certain age you should replace them with a new model.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Not that I support Child Pornography but I have seen many filtering systems over the years and NONE of them (including the one proposed for Australia or the one that seems to be being used in New Zealand) are going to stop someone who wants to find Child Pornography.
No filtering system that I have seen even attempts to block the kinds of encrypted p2p networks used by many child pornographers.
The right solution to child porn is to go after the people who are taking these pornographic photographs of kids in the first place and lock them up in a Gulag, Federal Pound Me In The Ass Prison, Jail, Camp or whatever the appropriate correctional institution may be. If you cant do that because its not illegal in the country they happen to reside in, extradite them to a country where it is illegal and pressure the government of the country where its not illegal to make it illegal.
Maybe the best way to get ISPs to stop being censorship bitches is every time you have connectivity issues, is to call them up and complain your site has probably been caught in the government censorship filter and you can't see any reason why it would be blocked. Here is hoping that enough complaints of false positives will change things. After all how are you to know whether a site is mearly slashdotted or being blocked?
Sounds like like you guys really need a pirate party to defend your liberties and in the mean time VPN all your important traffic.
BTW does the filter support IPv6
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Perhaps try this: http://pirateparty.org.nz/
signature is pants
Is New Zealand's government not elected by it's citizens?
There is not truer saying than "We get the government we deserve."
A troll moderation? Seriously? I am in fact a Kiwi, and I honestly didn't know that the livestock population was going through a shakedown.
of why filtering doesn't work.
No, I don't mean just the fact that the simple text string filter is too crude, but mainly the fact that there is no penalties imposed (eg loss of job) on the assholes who implement filtering technology with the same due diligence as an indian first line support call centre, and fuck up the entire internet for whole groups of users, or domain owners.
Scunthorpe is just one example, what is crude, evil or illegal to one person, is totally innocent and innocuous to another person.
Back in the day, no ISP wanted to touch filtering with a bargepole, not even if it cut their upstream bandwidth costs by 50%, for one simple reason... once you filter, you take legal responsibility for EVERYTHING, and open yourself up to lawsuits.
Goodbye "common carrier" and "mere conduit" status.
EU Law states (and I know exactly of what I speak, being personally instrumental in this law being codified and specified within UK Law) that for the purposes of the Electronic Commerce Directive an ISP is a "mere conduit"
As this applies to a UK ISP this ruling SPECIFICALLY EXEMPTS the "mere conduit" from all civil, and criminal, liabilities, even if the material in question is defamatory, copyright violation, or even child pornography... PROVIDED THEY REMAIN A "MERE CONDUIT"
The nanosecond you start filtering, you are no longer a mere conduit or common carrier.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
I think any porn site will require payment. For that fact alone, they already have a secure site, if only to prevent scaring away paying customers.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I'm curious how these filters work. That is, how you can get around them. Everyone shouts "VPNs! Encrypted Proxies!" but do you have to go that far. Are they just names-level filters? Can they be bypassed by manually setting your DNS to google/OpenDNS? Or via a hosts file or directly typing the pinged numerical IP. Do they block http: but not ftp: ?
Not just the NZ filter. But also the UK and trialled Aust filter. Has anyone had a chance to actually throw rocks at a filtered account?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
There is no such thing as a "threat of coercion". Threats are coercion.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
I think the next step for democracies is to scrap the party system and have voting based on particular policies, not on some nebulous notion of a "party platform". The common system of voting in a bunch of drongos every few years and writing to representatives and hope they'll support your views is far from ideal, and modern technology makes it quite feasible to enable voters to have a much more direct say on particular issues.
I agree, that's a great idea, in principal. I doubt that any politician, even assuming an honest one, perfectly represents my views.
The big problem, though, is that 1) parties will form no matter what, and 2) few people have the time to become knowledgeable enough about every issue to make in informed vote. For example, I heard on NPR the other morning, that a temporary speed limit for boats on my state's big lake will be made permanent. I think it was 45mph during the day and 25mph at night. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I have no idea; I'm not a boater, and live far away from the lake. If it were put to a vote I'd have to either abstain or get advice from someone whose opinion I trust. If lots of people begin taking the advice from people they 'trust', this begins to resemble a party system again...
That image went through my head.
I wonder what they say.
The Christian certainty that theirs is the only morality and their certainty that we all really want to be moral by their standards drives them to commit atrocities that they would rail against if it were perpetrated by another religion.
Why bother
You need to generalize this from "uncensored internet" to "privacy", but otherwise, judging by developments in the last decade or so, you're spot on.
We have two major parties in NZ (Labour and National).
Well, guys, you don't get to blame FPTP for this - you have MMP, so the only ones to blame are the electorate.
So, could it be that this is indeed what the people want, and we see democracy working as designed?
A recent featured article on the Wikipedia, even;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gropecunt_Lane
Come now, Hillary... that's not very progressive of you. Government knows best, right? Or do you even like telling other countries what to do?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Perhaps the uncensored internet is the fad coming already to a close?
Maybe, but I think this is going to be a country by country thing. In America, the concern won't be things like child porn, it'll be bandwidth and piracy. I don't think you'll see ISP's blocking what you can get, as much as throttling what you can get if you spend all night downloading DVD's. While in places like Europe and Australia and NZ, it'll be less of a broadband concern and more of a nanny state thing. People will download movies relatively freely, but their ISP's... at the behest of their governments... will monitor and report all "uncorrect" browsing.
The Americas will have politically uncensored but commerce-throttled Internet, and Europe and Asia will have free wheeling downloading with heavy censorship. Russia and China will eventually all but lock down their gateways to only government-approved sites.
While this may surprise people, it shouldn't. New Zealand is one of the most liberal countries in the world... a no nukes policy, an Air Force with no fighter planes, etc. ... but along with that comes a nanny state attitude by leaders.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Watchdog has positioned themselves as filtering specialists. They always have. That's why they call themselves "Watchdog". Parental control is their biggest selling point.
Funny though, their logo is a duck. Never worked that one out.
There are some who call me
They could 'accidentally' send routing commands to ISPs for sites that are not actually banned. The traffic for those sites would then be routed through the DIA ready for snooping.
How does the filtering work?
1. A list of banned sites and their internet addresses is maintained by the Department of Internal Affairs.
2. The DIA then use a routing protocol to tell the participating ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that the ‘best’ way to the internet address of the banned site’s web server is through the DIA’s filtering server.
3. When a person tries to access a site (banned or not) on one of the filtered addresses, their ISP knows to divert the request to the DIA’s server.
4. The DIA’s filtering server then looks at the request. If it is to a banned site, the request is refused and a message is sent back to the person. If it is to a non-banned site, the DIA’s filtering server passes the request on to the real server through the DIA’s internet connection.
Good timing Slashdot. You posted this at 9:30pm NZ time. It's already off the front page. Now nobody will know...
There are some who call me
Watch out or the "West Island" may annex you ;)
Don't tailgate - the end is near!
My thinking here is that the people who put forward proposals would also be responsible for putting together a concise summary of why their view is the best (it would need to be concise, since voters won't read a wall of text). Their opposition would then vet their summary for accuracy, so any claims made would need to be backed by evidence. A few weeks of debate would probably be more than enough for most issues to make it to the final stage where they can be put to the vote. A voter who spent a few minutes reading all the summaries would then be sufficiently informed to make a decent decision. Those who don't care can abstain from the vote, and those who are really interested can always do their own research and check out the citations for evidence presented in the summaries, and so on.
With this system, parties won't be so important. You'd probably want to require a certain amount of support within the House before a proposal could actually be put forth to vote (so if only one or two representatives backed it, it wouldn't make it through to the voters); in this case, you'd probably have groups forming to back particular issues, disintegrating after the matter was settled. There should probably be a "none of the above" option in every vote, too, so even if you do get a silly situation where there's only two proposals and they're both terrible, the voters can refuse to back either. (I think there's a significant difference between "voting no" and "not voting at all".)
I think such a scheme could effectively be implemented using the internet to vote so it's not a huge burden on the populace, and such voting could occur very frequently, even weekly. That way there would only be a small number of issues each time, making it viable for the populace to read the summaries for issues they're interested in and have their say. Also, the summaries would make it easy for the mainstream news media to present the issues in an unbiased manner.
I don't believe any of the credible parties have objected to the filter. For reference, it wasn't a political decision, it was implemented by the civil service.