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Oz Pirate Party Tells the Elderly How To Bypass the Net Filter
mask.of.sanity writes "When Exit International discovered it was earmarked for Australia's Internet filter blacklist, it wanted to ensure its members could access its pro-euthanasia material, but its members share an average age of 70 — not exactly from the tech generation. So Exit International turned to the filter-hating Pirate Party of Australia, which supplied a 'hacker' who taught a crowded room of grandmas and grandpas how to use proxies and advanced VPN tunnels to access Exit International's material — which the Australian government thinks breaches the moral compass of society. Computerworld has the presentation."
It'd feel odd to teach a group of old people how to access information about killing themselves.
But that's the point of the freedom of information - anyone should have the right to seek it out and access it.
Do they just want everyone to live forever? I'm not sure if I, for one, would welcome our new immortal, large-knife wielding overlords.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The presentation was short and simple enough that almost anyone should be able to follow its instructions. If motivated to do so, even the technologically ignorant could have a good chance of bypassing the blocklist.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
We may soon need similar lessons here in the UK when we want to access those filtered sites suspected of potentially hosting copyrighted material. Damn, that sounds sad.
The article says that each workshop lasts approximately five-and-a-half hours. It's taken me a half-hour just to explain how to properly navigate a website to some of my more elderly firewall. I'm not sure if the allotted time is enough to teach the various concepts and methods of VPN/ssh tunnels and proxies. I've worked with computer science graduates that didn't even properly grasp these concepts after a semester long course. I wish them the best of luck either way.
Currently, as a result of back room deals between the government and the Christian lobby, Australia has a moral anchor rather than a moral compass.
I always thought Australia was a developed country, economically, and politically. This Internet filter craziness makes them seem very un-democratic. What's next? Filtering the opposition party websites? Filtering any websites that has an opposing view of the current government? I don't think that next step is such a big one.
Hmm it looks like the website is 'filtered' out of order...
Hmm.. government trying to dictate to the elderly what is moral in society. One would think that the elderly would have the most conservative view on what is considered moral.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
Computerworld already slashdotted?
People have been trying to block the spread of ideas since before the invention of the printing press.
They've always failed.
If people want stuff from Exit, then they'll find a way; if not the internet, then via paper.
How would the Oz Gov justify, for example, banning a site that gave out just the address to write to Exit?
Or a site where you could leave your name and address to receive information?
I understand the motivation for blocking interactive sites for paedophiles to exchange their revolting material, but a static public information service?
Epic fail.
Link comes up with a blank page. I think Auntie Steve has already had it censored... :-{
You're reading Slashdot.
Huh, how did you know that?
Good grief, I'm in Australia and I can't access the presentation site already!!!! What can I say....the filter works!!!
"exit international" fucking hilarious name for self help on killing yourself.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The federal government of Australia, due to some sort of religious-conservative influence, has been really, really anti-euthanasia for some time now. The last major time the issue came to a head was in 1995-97, when the Northwest Territory passed the Rights of the Terminall Ill Act 1995, which allowed euthanasia for the terminally ill, under certain conditions and with a lengthy process. The federal government attempted to pressure NT into repealing the law, and when it refused to do so, in 1997, the federal parliament amended NT's territory charter to specifically remove its ability to pass laws relating to euthanasia (this was possible because NT is a territory, not a state, so its powers of self-government can be reduced by simple legislation).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Whoa Slashdot! Why are you running stories like this? Do you want to get this site *BANNED* in Australia? Better tone it down. I suggest the only Aussie news you consider running are positive stories about the Rudd Government:
Like the one how Conroy gave a plum job for the Governent's Broadband network to Mike Kaiser, a Labor Party stooge who was previously convicted of electoral fraud. A $450K a year job without an interview for a guy who knows nothing about IT or comms and who should be sitting in a prison.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/i-recommended-mike-kaiser-for-nbn-job-says-stephen-conroy/story-e6frgczf-1225827983520
Submitted this next story to Firehose but it never ran:
"Stephen Conroy's Internet Filter has received an unexpected boost from the Australian Opposition. Instead of voting down the Filter in the Senate, the Opposition Party Leader Tony Abbot refused to articulate a definitive position on the Filter saying he would "await the final legislation and seek technical assurances from the government on the operations of the filter". Both Tony Abbot and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy who is implementing the Filter have affirmed their strong Christian faith, overwhelming anti-censorship moderates. This raises the question for those opposed to the filter: How can a Democracy work if the only two viable parties both offer the same thing?
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/web-filter-splits-opposition-20100406-rpf7.html
At least Conroy recently got a taste of his own medicine when Trend Micro's parliamentary web filter blocked politicians from accessing news commentary and train timetables."
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/parliamentary-services-to-probe-trend-micro-filter/story-e6frgakx-1225850540731
All Australians paying for privacy.io using Australian based credit cards where raided.
Australians where raided after isp's where required to submit logs of users frequenting known 'proxy' sites.
The office of Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy announced a new partnership with Nokia Siemens and Narus to better understand https and onion routing.
The only way around this "wall of faith" is an encrypted tunnel to a end user in the USA.
As most Australian ISP's limit all usage to 10's of Gigabytes per month your donation of left over bandwidth could help millions of Australian net users gain access to life saving literature and multimedia.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
While we still can
http://www.internationaltaskforce.org/faq.htm
Wait! Whats a sig?
China's filter is also bypassable. I assume want it that way. The strategy is to ensure that the young and the very concerned have ways to protect themselves individually, to avoid having them motivated to look into organised ways. A classic way to take the wind out of people power.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
China has a snappy title for its "Great Firewall of China", based on the Great Wall of China.
Australia's censor system needs a snappy title too. They've got the Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral system and the largest organism visible from space, how about the "Great Barrier of Australia"? Hmm, maybe that needs more work.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Conroy is a moron .....or maybe he has to toe the party line. Whichever, the government of oz is delusional if they think a filter can block "unacceptable" sites. I bought my copy of The Peaceful Pill online despite the fact that it is banned here on oz - it arrived in a cardboard package with "book" written on the customs sticker, and no doubt the customs Xray confirmed that it is in fact a book. The other huge con (short for Con-roy) is "think of the children" - well please tell me Mr Conroy how filtering my internet will stop pedophiles making kiddy porn. That's right it wont!
The problem with blocking content is that there is no way to deduce what someone intends to do with information merely from the fact that they have it. Am I reading that suicide website because I want to commit suicide, or because I'm gathering research on why not to do it?
Instead of blocking information, make it easier to hold the authors of information accountable for any bad usage. Provide streamlined ways for people to lodge complaints about specific mis-uses of information so the author has an opportunity to rewrite the material or put up better qualifiers and notices about proper use. If an author refuses to respond, provide an escalation path to legal action.
We need laws that are much closer to what's happening on Internet time. We need better legal definitions of culpability, more reasonable penalties, and different standards of evidence that will work for the Internet. An entire court system built just for Internet-related suits -- and which would be run itself on the Internet, of course -- would not be amiss.
At core, we need to be reactive, focusing on real harm done, rather than on harms only imagined. We must preserve the principle that people are presumed innocent, until proven otherwise. But we also need a way that will truly suppress the criminal use of information.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
But its members share an average age of 70. Not exactly from the tech generation.
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Somebody who is 70 would have been born in 1940. I'm pretty sure they would have grown up with technology their entire lives. In fact, somebody of that age would have grown up with one of the biggest technology expansions in history. They are almost the definition of "tech generation," and grew up under the influence of people like Albert Einstein.
... and then they built the supercollider.
now, having its economy dominated by China, it is apparently more like a Southern outpost of the Middle Kingdom. funny though how Chinese cultural understandings of centralized thought domination and control has proven so quickly popular in Canberra
we need to keep an eye on New Zealand, make sure down there all alone in the Antipodes that cabin fever doesn't make it lose it's marbles like Australia obviously has. plus New Zealand has that domestic situation with Mordor being inside its borders
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"They had a nice demonstration on how to use the internet, the importance of changing your coffee filters and how to reach the exit it was hard to see with all the signs and the people running around but they taught us how to find it. There's a website that will show you how to get to the exit but only if you change your coffee filters or some such."
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Saw it there today: it's under 10 MB
Australia's censor system needs a snappy title too.
Since Australia was originally used as a penal colony, I would suggest "The Australian Packet Prison". It has a nice ring to it, and I'm sure some will be offended. To top it off, it works great for Australia bashing.
Is this a PR game or a way to increase Internet freedom?
Going door-to-door takes time.
Want to end the costly filter?
Publish WIDELY the way(s) to make it ineffective.
This is the perfect example of how censorship tries to control more than it "protects". You can make anyone think what you want them to think if you have the power to choose what they're exposed to.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
you'll need to back up your claim about police treating aboriginal deaths the same as animal deaths. i've lived here my whole life and never heard such a claim.
I have read many times that, under Australian law, it was legal for white men to hunt Aborigines up until the 1950s. e.g. this:
"the classic "nigger hunting" license that station (ranch) owners obtained from the local police was to permit them to eliminate Aborigines by hunting the local fauna, Aborigines were fauna by constitutional definition, kill them and feel not the retribution of law for murder. I have interviewed men who say this genocide continued into the 1950s when they had to get more subtle about the disposal of the remains, so they'd slit open a steer and slide the corpse inside. Mutual decomposition took care of the rest."
and this:
"In fact, as recently as the 1950s, a white man could apply for a hunting permit to hunt and kill Aborigines! Can you imagine? They were hunted and killed as if they were a game animal."
These are not great references - I would welcome a better reference to settle this urban myth one way or the other.
Its usually bullshit to talk about "burden" - it is (or it should be) a human right to END YOUR LIFE WHEN YOU WANT - anyone who prevents you from doing that is an evil bastard.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
What about the practical compass? Did they really think a software barrier would be impenetrable? All they can hope to accomplish with a filter is to make certain sites less convenient to access. I guess their toilets aren't the only things that spin backwards.
The thing that we can least afford to be censored is criticism of censorship. Too often it is the first to fall.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
70 means born in 1940.
They came of age with jet Fighter, space ships, nuclear power and color TV.
Not a computer literate bunch, but they weren't exactly from the dark ages.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We may soon need similar lessons here in the UK when we want to access those filtered sites suspected of potentially hosting copyrighted material. Damn, that sounds sad.
Hate to break it to you but most web sites you could ever even think of accessing will be hosting copyrighted material. That's right not just potentially hosting copyrighted material but actually hanging up copyrighted material for anyone to download.
To avoid getting copyrighted material, you'd have to find a country that did not sign the Berne Convention treaty, but even then the material might be under copyright. Alternately, even the countries in the Berne Convention treaty might have material online that has been made Public Domain either because the copyright expire or the rights holder (not the creator) put it into the public domain. Even then you'll have to download (and read) pages of copyrighted information to get at the PD stuff.
Alternately you can just download as much copyrighted material as you want. Try starting from these sites:
And remember, there's more where that came from.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
non-incumbent parties have fringe ideologies. so they don't appeal to many people. that is why they fail, plain and simple
meanwhile, if a non-incumbent party actually discovers a message that DOES appeal to many people, they experience success.... a major party takes notice, and that ideology is quickly coopted by the major party... and the non-incumbent party fades again
witness ross perot in the 1990s. and witness the tea parties/ republicans now. of course, the republicans don't HAVE to adopt tea party rhetoric. then what happens is the tea party REPLACES the republicans (like how the whigs were replaced for becoming ideologically obsolete)... and then... its back to two major parties all over again. and in that future of two new dominate political parties, tea versus democratic, you will find, again, some crank like you whining in an internet post the tired, false wheeze that fringe opposition is "shut up" (when the truth is, it simply doesn't have much appeal)
folks: the fact we have 2 major dominant parties is a matter of statistical inevitability, not centralized control. if you ran the rules of politics in the usa in a computer simulation, time and again, two parties would come to dominate: one slightly to the left, one slightly to the right. its simple inevitability. there's no control going on here, its a self-emergent phenomenon
deal with this simple truth and adjust your persecution complex accordingly. thanks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Religion is a tool, it can be used for good (volunteerism, encouragement, togetherness) or it can be used for evil (genocide, censorship, discrimination). People in power want more power, some of them see religion as a way to increase their power.
Those arguing for the elimination of religion strike me as being as stupid as those who say that selling kitchen knives should be illegal (also a tool that can be used for fell deeds). It would accomplish nothing, those seeking power would simply find another tool for it (nationalism, racism, classism, money?).
about Australia is about another creepy government program to control the minds of it's citizens. Filtering out content that might corrupt old people? What the hell is going on down there? It's worse than the US during the Bush years...
In 2007, at the UN Internet Governance Forum in Athens (the 3rd of 5 planned WSIS follow-ups), the 'protect the children' groups had a strong presence. It seemed to me there was a tipping point shift from the values of the self-organizing and anarchic internet to the values of commerce and creed.
As others have posted in this thread, it seems to me this is a reaction to loss of control at the top, information spreading widely, ...
I'm a member of Exit International, want to choose a death with dignity and grace, and appreciate Exit's work in opening up the discussion and describing available reasonably certain methods. Hospice serves people with terminal diagnoses. I worry about diminishing, deteriorating, the costs not worth the benefits.
Sylvia
Well, this does explain quite a lot.
The warden doesn't want his inmates running wild, so he has to limit their access. Also, it's really bad prison management to let your prisoners run amok all over the neighbouring areas.
It's not a firewall - it's the outer wall of a prison. Moat and all.
>which the Australian government thinks breaches the moral compass of society
They are just pissed because it now shows that without doing anything illegal, such as using a software to proxy passed
an obstacle, or vpn to bypass security breaches, you have shown the government wasted all that money and effort to impose
a filter that now even the laymen can subvert.
"But its members share an average age of 70. Not exactly from the tech generation."
John Backus, who lead the team that created FORTRAN, is 82. Although he's not likely to be a potential customer.
Are you saying that the "tech generation" likes the iPad or doesn't like it? (Personally, I doubt there is any relation).
Those 'pirates' (and supposedly "experts") advise innocent users to use a VPN fueled by MICROSOFT PPTP.
That's the flawed by-design beast analysed and denounced by Bruce Schneier 10 years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pptp#References
http://www.schneier.com/pptp-faq.html
So, the real question is: if "saving you privacy" is about paying to be spied upon, then you can as well skip the VPN step and be spied upon for free.