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No Internet “kill Switch” For Australia
An anonymous reader writes "Well, it looks as though at least some Governments have a backbone. Egypt switched off its internet to stop protests over the past few days, and the US Government is considering legislation that will give the President 'kill switch' powers over the internet as well. But in Australia, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy — best known for his attempt to filter the country's internet for child pornography and the country's flagship national fibre broadband rollout, says such a scenario couldn't occur."
With the weather they have I don't think they need one.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The current Government barely made it back in to office at the last election. They need every cheap shot they can think of to boost their popularity ratings. I assume the algorithm in use here is that Conroy scans the Daily(tm) on his iPad(tm) at the start of the week, picks a bit of news relevant to his constituency which looks bad, and composes a speech saying he won't do that. Repeat next week and so on.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well I did my bit by putting him last on the Victorian senate voting slip.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Wi-Fi "bucket chain" from Canada or Mexico.
Honestly? The only way to get rid of unelected officials is constitutional reform. I really thought this was going to be the generation to do it, but it seems there's too many of us around who have fond memories of standing on the assembly ground to God Save The Queen.. and we can't talk about changing the constitution without talking about finally pulling our finger out and cutting the safety line to mother England. Or, ya know, we could petition the US to become their 52nd state - right after Israel.. I keed, I keed!
How we know is more important than what we know.
OK, I'll stick my head above the parapet, because I'm interested in getting opinions.
Let's assume for a second that the kill-switch proponents are acting from the best of motives. They are worried about the potential for a huge, effective, external Internet attack on critical infrastructure, that could do the worst things - cut power, stop water , turn all the traffic lights red - you've seen the movies.
They are concerned that it such an attack occurs the population will be screaming "Why didn't you plan, why don't you stop it, how come you can't turn external connections off, you bozos?".
So they are planning and worrying - as they should.
What is wrong, in principle with a killswitch, if the correct checks and balances are in place? What is a better solution?
If any government is facing a threat it will do anything it needs to protect itself, regardless of laws. Having or not having a law will not make the slightest difference in the face of a real emergency.
Well, RFC 1149 worked for Egypt
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Egypt got around the internet blackout with dial-up BBS's and the likes of UUCP
Amateur satellites or maybe high altitude balloon or UAV based links. Pirate cellular services from aircraft, packet switched TCP/IP for the satellite services. Maybe you could build an ad-hoc store and forward messaging system with weather balloons. Each unit collects data and dumps it when contacted from the ground. Units can replicate data when they contact each other. Data is lost when they crash.
Use a CDMA like protocol to pack data into frequencies below 50Mhz. Ionospheric propagation, particularly at night should get your signal 1000km or so.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Until such time as they see fit to pass 'emergency' legislation to grant executive powers to do so. As John Gilmore identified though "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."... the data will flow... somehow.
a senator of a major political party, yes.. two words: proportional representation.
How we know is more important than what we know.
As long as Conroy gets his face in the media he is pretty much guaranteed a seat in the senate.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There's already enough dumb pipe satellites in orbit, the kind that are unlikely to be removed. You can just leech off of those. You'll just need enough nodes that are connected to a wireless mesh that have sat uplink to those.
Do you mean normal comsats? Don't you need some sort of key to use them?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yes. Try RFC 1149, otherwise known as IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC). You might need to substitute a more common discrete winged media though, say, bat or bumblebees. Just make sure you train them well (or use some strong pheromones), or you'll be getting massive packet loss.
(The RFC actually describes the sending of datagrams written on slips of paper strapped to the leg of the carrier pigeon. A more practical method would be to load the carrier with a flash drive containing gigabytes rather than bits of data.)
Hey guise! We gotta stop the spams and scams coming through the portal!!
I agree, the bloke is an epic twat. But he's good at wasting large amounts of money, I'll give him that
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
[ST8Z6FR57ABE6A8RE9UF]
Meteor burst communications
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why are people letting the US govt away with this? An internet kill switch sounds an awful lot like a violation of free speech, especially if they're thinking of using it in the same way the Egyptian govt did. The constitution is starting to look like a bad joke.
which is totally what she said
NBN rolled out with almost all traffic traveling over a backbone controlled by ine entity is a kill switch.
A single point of failure with one control system and a major control interface?
Who needs legislation when you control the router tables?
All the other isps will interconnect. That just leaves the very few submarine cables and satellites to manage.
A big Hi to the people at DSD.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Do NOT trust Stephen Conroy. This is code for "we are studying it, probably have it, and legislation is due to be tabled within weeks"
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
I understand that the internet was invented/evolved as a robust distributed system that allowed communication specifically even when subject to attack or damage. Having a 'kill switch' is completely against the core purpose. as mentioned earlier, you just introduce an attack vector that was engineered not to exist. just get enought leverage against the killswitch operator and you can cause major damage.
I speculate that this is a major reason behind tiered internet. the kill switch can shutdown only the 'low tier' users of the internet, (punters, small businesses, the small fish, whatever). But, the top tier (military, corporation, gov, banking,power generation, big fish, ) can keep running unaltered (maybe even faster, and with more hardening). In this situation, the killswitch looks a lot more useful, or at least useable.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
A kill switch lets people know that it has been flipped. Things stop functioning entirely, and the net "routes around it".
Why not instead use a "congestion switch" to slow down traffic to a point where government created misinformation can be spread in real time to achieve whatever goals the government wants?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
You think that by now some wifi router setups would be able to great local micro-inter nets with some data caching so local communities could hope over the local wifi grid.
Handy for publishing local papers on what colour pants your neighbour has and how often they do or don't wash them.
Could possibly do similar with parked or moving vehicles (though Doppler may be an issue, should be overcome-able).
big gaps could be crossed with two men and some flash lights stood on top of hills, or the phone network etc...
But as we all know, people want a country run for them and stuff on the super market shelves, not freedom.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Power companies lower their prices by instantly selling excess, and instantly buying extra power rather than fire up backup natural gas generators that are less efficient (in the US). The communications links used for this would be too expensive to build as new stand alone links. They really should be through VPNs or better yet, hardware AES links or something.
Water has few if any excuses that I know of.
Traffic lights have the best ones. To manage city-wide traffic there has to be communication between proximate intersections. And putting crytpo in the lights at an intersection isn't an easy fix. Putting different keys in each light would be a nightmare, and if you don't, physical access to one light compromises the whole system. If you have central control, that center can have each light's public key, thats not so bad, but a central control point might not be the most robust system in the first place.
These systems need to communicate, dedicated communication lines are too expensive, crypto is hard to do right and hence, also expensive. Crypto is the answer we need to move towards I think, its ultimately more secure than dedicated lines, and might even cost less.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
This is the same government that wants to be able to blacklist any URL secretly.
The EFA AU said it best: http://www.efa.org.au/2011/02/03/conroy-not-fooling-anyone/
The vast majority of commercial satellites are just simple repeaters - nothing stops anyone from aiming a signal up and getting a good downlink other than cost of equipment. It's not nearly as expensive these days, though still not cheap. From time to time you do see unwanted signals, mostly it's accidental though, uplink forgot to switch off at the end of their contract, maybe didn't pay their bill on time, operator typed the wrong frequency in to the up converter, etc. One fairly effective way to deal with the problem is to sweep a CW spike over the errant signal until it goes away.
Considering that they break up in the atmosphere, would that allow multicasting?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The constitution has already been reduced to a bad joke, get over it. The only thing left is the 2nd, and it's only 'cause it really doesn't matter whether you have a gun as long as the army has bigger ones and more.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Switching off the NBN will switch off the Internet.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
"The Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown" http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2009/04/fleetcom some are open for all :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Stephen Conroy is best know for his support of NO R18+ video games and his almost stopping of alien vs predator in Australia.
Rocket Surgeon.
The constitution has already been reduced to a bad joke, get over it.
You seem to be quite willing to go down without a fight, even with the pleasure of being so "smart" that you didn't give a sweat... You will worth your faith of staying in line, not daring to utter any word, at the mercy of whatever bureaucrat or corporate puppy the time will put on top of you. You might be opportunistic enough to become such a puppy, but... won't take long to lose your position.
I've experienced it for the first 25 years of my life, in Eastern Europe under communist regimes.
National emergencies occur for more reasons than suppressing the population to keep a dictator in office for a 31st year. I'm sure if you thought about it you could come up with some reasons.
No, I really can't think of any good reasons that don't have other solutions.
What "national emergency" will arise such that the govt needs to shut down all internet access? It makes no sense. If they want to take all government sites offline while they shore up security (similar to shutting down airlines while there is a significant danger) that's fine, but why shut down everything else? If a bank is being hacked, shut down the bank's site. If the stock exchange is being hacked, shut down the stock exchange. Blanket shutting down of everything only seems useful to stop public communications. It would be pretty pointless against an organised military force.
which is totally what she said
The constitution has already been reduced to a bad joke, get over it
I'm not American for one thing. I found the "land of the free, we're awesome" stuff quite tiresome even before it did start becoming a joke, but now it's worse. I don't want to get over the fact that such a previously vocal group is now letting the government shit all over them, but often still pretending like the US is number 1 in every way. I want people to get a grip.
which is totally what she said
I was wondering why one of my friends just up and left everything here to move there....now i get it....they are just better people down there...although I never hear anything else about things such as racism, sexism, etc...etc... would be nice to hear what people have to say about australia's other fronts.
Meatloaf can help.
"I would do anything for gain, but I won't do that".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Enter the return of Sneakernet and the Avian protocol.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
The US government isn't planning one, the Obama administration claims it already has that authority. Here is part of Section 706 of the Communications act of 1934 (my emphasis):
Considering that we are in a constant state of war, the President could exercise this authority at any time.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The constitution is starting to look like a bad joke.
I got news for you buddy, The constitution gets no respect from people in the congress that are supposedly representing us but taking payoffs from corporate or private interests. In fact the only people in this country that seem to believe in the constitution are the little guys like you and me that actually need some protection from the other group of assholes. What rock have you been living under anyway?
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Get rid of him - by all means. You'll just get another tool, who slips Aussie passports to Israeli money-launderers and "intelligence" agents. Australia is severely compromised by supra-national, deep-state actors.
Backbone? These are cthonic molluscs.
Besides, MPLS is a backbone replacement technology. ;-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOab8lYI2H8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obmP9UuOn-4
No. In point of the fact, the proposal in question would limit a power that the President has had for decades. Under a 1934 law, the President can (under certain circumstances) basically shut off any or all wireless or wired communications.
Please stop the FUD about this. One might argue that the bill should go further in restricting this power, or that the power should never have been granted in the first place, but calling it a new power is either ignorant or a lie.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
- Why are people letting the US govt away with this? An internet kill switch sounds an awful lot like a violation of free speech, especially if they're thinking of using it in the same way the Egyptian govt did.
National emergencies occur for more reasons than suppressing the population to keep a dictator in office for a 31st year. I'm sure if you thought about it you could come up with some reasons.
One that requires cutting off communications? I can think of lots of emergencies where enhanced communications would be necessary. None whatsoever that require cutting it off.
I'm sure nobody has ever threatened to invade Australia.
You mean, other than in 1942?
- The constitution is starting to look like a bad joke.
It's in fine shape. The US just had one of the biggest changes in the legislature in 70 years, and the massive power grab that is Obamacare is being defeated in court.
One strength of the American system is that defeated candidates voluntarily relinquish power, without violence or even histrionics. On the other hand, free speech and privacy have taken a big hit this last decade. Warrantless wiretaps are explicitly unconstitutional. An internet kill switch would also be. That doesn't seem to stop them.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
....if you are unable to speak?
Or put another way: what use is internet access if the site you want to visit is on the secret blacklist?
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
The signal is going to scatter everywhere when it hits the meteor trail so I suppose the answer is yes. The main problem is that you need something like radar to detect the trails, and that exposes your station to attack from people with direction finding equipment.
http://michaelsmith.id.au