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Australia's 2 Largest ISP's Start Censorsing the Web
unreadepitaph writes "Looks like after Stephen Conroy's web filter went down in flames he went quietly behind the backs of Australians and struck a deal with Telstra and Optus to start filtering an undisclosed blacklist of sites from organization within and external to Australia. From the article: 'Electronic Frontiers Association board member Colin Jacobs also expressed concern at the scheme, saying the Government and internet providers needed to be more upfront about websites being blocked and offer an appeals process for website owners who felt URLs had been blocked unfairly. "There is a question about where the links are coming from and I'd like to know the answer to that," Mr Jacobs said."
...because the current government is utterly doomed at the next election, and all their half-baked ideas will be junked, like they should be. Given the current - and trending downwards for over 12 months now - opinion polls, they'll be reduced to a mere rump of their former selves. The Australian Labor Party federally has the same disease as their state-based comrades in New South Wales and will be severely punished in similarly spectacular fashion at the next election, you mark my words :-)
WikiLeaks will show them the stupidity of this.
In the meantime, time to fire up Tor and change ISPs.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Just before someone chimes in with this, iiNet is the 2nd largest ISP in terms of Broadband DSL subscribers - Optus would have more combined subscribers with DSL/Cable/other (which is what OP would be referring to).
Get your real info from here :-
http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/cleanfeed
Why does everyone want to save me? I am happy to be damned!
Gizmondo recently wrote that Optus and Telstra have just signed a lucrative NBN deal. Coincidence?
Can't force it through parliament, so get the major ISPs to voluntarily do it via an offer they can't refuse?
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
This is only the start of it.
The NBN will kill the Internets as Australians know it.
The current plans to force everyone to connect to the NBN weather they want to or not gives the Grubbermint instant control over all net traffic.
FWIW, the biggest winners from NBN will be Foxtel and other media providers who will simply suck up as much bandwidth as they can get. The current cable TV networks will be shut down and everything will be moved to the NBN. Where do you think the bandwidth is going to go then?
All telephone lines including POTs will be routed though the NBN.
The people who actually believed the garbage about 100Mb to their homes were only dreaming. They never had a hope of getting those sort of speeds as it was never in the game-plan.
The NBN is going to make Telstras Bigpond look like a good deal. All of the current ISP's will simply be relegated to be billing companies. In one swoop the Grubbermint get the control they want and their friends in big corporations that will hire them when they get thrown out of office will have somewhere cushy for htem to sit while they continue to suck on the public tit with their pensions.
Australia, is having a lemon shoved down it's throat, while the vocal kiddies who dream of 100Mb porn to their screens are being flashed a pair of titties to tease them.
Why the hell is Conroy still pushing for this? He has a face saving excuse to drop it with the hostile parliament so why doesn't he just drop it?
It seems like he's taking it _way_ to personally. It's as if he wants to filter the net just to spite everyone.
What's the bet this is just going to be DNS filtering?
Or, to put it more rationally:
The NBN takes the aging copper network out of private hands where Telstra was using it to restrict competition, and replaces it with an open-access high speed network open to full competition.
Just to be clear: almost everyone being forced to switch to the NBN is currently using Telstra infrastructure. If you're on iiNet, Internode, TGP, Optus ADSL etc then you're using Telstra copper. The only people being forced to switch to the NBN who aren't using Telstra infrastructure now are the relatively small number of people on Optus Cable Broadband. After the switch to the NBN, you'll still be using iiNet, Internode, etc for your internet access (if you want to) but instead of using Telstra's infrastructure you'll be using NBNCo's infrastructure. And it will be damn fast and more reliable. And it won't be Telstra... which in itself is simply wonderful.
The act of censorship is always more obscene than the material being censored. My personal opinion.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
It's a 'voluntary' scheme whereby the biggest six ISPs implement a block list maintained by an organisiation called the 'Internet Watch Foundation'. They claim that only child pornography sites are blocked, but of course there's no way to know what is on the list.
Recently the first efforts to expand block lists to include 'other illegal' content have been made, and to set up a list for copyright-related restricted sites.
It seems governments have realised that legislative oversight is a bit of a nuisance, and it's just easier to coerce and/or bribe big business to get what you want.
He takes a lot of things way too personally. One hysterical press release of his was about a "lesbian cabal" that was trying to stop the NBN. It turned out to be a female staffer that was insisting on sticking to tendering procedure to avoid legal problems and a female former member of his department that just happened to work for a potential contractor that agreed to wait until a contract had been drawn up before signing on. Two parties agreeing not a sign a blank cheque became a "lesbian cabal" in a bizzare press conference.
Thanks to the necessity of dealing with Telstra the Communications Ministry is almost a punishment post so it has been historically been given to a complete dropkick that a Government hates but has to give something to keep a powerful faction happy. Thus the long string of utter bastards and incompetant wankers in the job. Sadly Conroy is a competant wanker so actually manages to make progress on a filtering policy that his own party hates and only put up to get the reactionary weirdo vote. If he stuffed about on the policy for a decade saying it was a good idea and he'd do something soon (which is what the previous government did) everyone would be happy - even the weirdos that may get a few more paying customers in their fake churches.
My ISP (Exetel) uses Optus to provide their Internet services. It is unclear to me if this means I will get the block list, but I don't want to take any chances.
The article mentions two other smaller ISPs voluntarily censoring the web. I'll bet one is Primus. Anyone got any idea what the other one would be?
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Today, Gillard and NBN paid Eleven Billion Dollars to buy the Telstra copper network. Do you really think they're going to rip it out or decommission it?
Yes, they are decommissioning the entire copper network: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/350563/telstra-nbn_co_deal_telstra_plans_phased_copper_decommission/
I doubt it. All information I hear indicates that it's a DNS-level block, and every ISP I've ever used runs it's own DNS servers. Haven't used Exetel, but I doubt they're an exception. Telsta/Optus just provide access to the infrastructure for most of those arrangements, no service on top of it.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." Benito Mussolini
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
When you google "Australian Evangelical Churches". Maybe that is why they claim social media tools edged out pornography as the nations No.1 internet activity by 09. Or better yet, how they know.
http://www.eyefortravel.com/news/online-travel/social-channels-top-porn-sites-australia
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Check out the essay "The Doctrine of Fascism", attributed to him. Its roots are really in the philosophy of Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel, and even Plato. Mussolini's main idea was that fascism is anti-individualist, and that all people should see themselves as incomplete beings whose lives only have meaning and value in service to the all-powerful State. That's not really a corporatist viewpoint. Re: Net censorship, a fascist viewpoint would be that your individual desire to see porn, bomb-making instructions, copyrighted material, or sites about democracy is absolutely meaningless before the State's collective desire to shut you up and make you obey. Not to say that the ISPs are innocent here, but it's not because they own the government.
Revive the Constitution.