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Telstra Starts Implementing Australian Censorship Scheme
daria42 writes "After four long years of debate about whether Australia will receive a mandatory Internet filter, finally some action has been taken. Yesterday the country's largest ISP, Telstra, started filtering all customers' connections for child pornography. The filter is DNS-based, meaning it's easy to circumvent, but you can't opt out of it — if you sign up to a plan with Telstra, your connection will be filtered for certain web addresses whether you like it or not. "
Domain Name System servers must conform to the standards. If Telstra is unable or unwilling to comply, they can be removed. Sure, they're popular in Australia... but you want to be ON the Internet, you have to work WITH the Internet.
DNS is specified in RFC 1034, RFC 1035, covered further in the Hosts Requirements RFCs (1122, 1123).
Telstra, if you can't be standards compliant, you will be worked around.
Australian users: use any public DNS server that is standards compliant. You'll avoid the censorship, and you won't lose connectivity.
Telstra -- Australian for "Censorship"
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How's this stopping child porn. The hard core predators will simply go out and find a kid, or change their DNS settings. Maybe this impresses the think of the children demographic but it doesn't do anything.
A bunch of cases recently have seen some people let off because it can't be proven that they didn't stumble across the child porn accidentally. Now apart from pictures of girls that looked like they might not have been quite 18 i've never stumbled across anything like child porn by accident so I find that a bit hard to believe, but if there is evidence that the person took steps to circumvent the filter it is harder for them to argue that they stumbled across it by accident.
But you're right, there was child porn before the internet and there will be child porn after the filter is implemented. And while it might stop a few brainless idiots obtaining pictures, it won't stop anyone who is seriously motivated to find them and it definitely won't stop the images being produced in the first place, which is the real crime.
I understand being opposed to child porn, hey, I'm opposed to it to. But if I knew of a child porn website, the first thing on my mind would be, "whose website is that, and how can we stop them?" and secondly, "who is hosting that website, and how can we get through them to the ones who are actually hurting the children?"
Censoring websites does absolutely nothing for the victims of child porn, and does absolutely nothing to stop the ones who are participating in it. This is true even if the censorship mechanism worked. What are you Australians thinking? How do you let your politicians get this kind of power?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."