In Australia, Censorship vs. DNS, and Porn As Network Driver

daria42 writes "Remember how Australia's planning to censor its Internet? Well, it looks as though the country's second-largest ISP, Optus, has made a stumble right out of the gate. Optus today confirmed you could circumvent its filtering technology simply by setting your PC to use a different DNS server than the default. Yup, it's really that easy. Oops." And why would anyone want to change their DNS settings? angry tapir writes "While the Australian Government has extolled the virtues of its currently under construction National Broadband Network (NBN) in delivering e-health and government agency services to every Australian, adult content will be the major driver of consumer adoption."

Comments

I'm new to Australia

[Nasajin]

But even I know that you'll get better Internet access to porn by not using a terrible provider like Optus.

Re:I'm new to Australia

[captain_sweatpants]

To say they were incompetent, would still be a disgusting insult to the incompetent.

Yes this perfectly describes the situation in Australia. Senator Conroy (the man responsible) simply refuses to listen to the advice of anyone who disagrees with his ideology or points out the gaping flaws in the implementation. He is obsessed by his own personal ambitions and is too stupid to recognise good advice when he receives it.

It seems, that Australia went for the political suicide.

I certainly hope this is the case, although I have my doubts. Apparently being stupendously incompetent is insufficient grounds for removing a minister from their post. I fear this will be one in a long serious of blunders he inflicts on the Australian people.

No problem!

[ewanm89]

I'm not in AU, but I happen to use my own DNS servers anyway.

Re:No problem!

[Mashiki]

Watch out they'll make it illegal soon. And soon only criminals will run bind.

sadly, easy to block

[KiloByte]

for prot in tcp udp;do iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i lan0 -p $prot --dport 53 -j DNAT --to-destination 1.2.3.4;done

There are other reasons for DNS hijacking, too. For one, it lets the ISP do SiteFinder-like spewing of adverts. Another reason is to "fix" broken local settings -- here, a bunch of "computer repair" bozos used to hard-code people's DNS settings to a big ISP's DNS server, and when that ISP reconfigured it, suddenly "the Internet broke, fix it!", making small local ISPs go the easy way rather than argue with customers.

Thus, don't expect this workaround to last long.

The porn filter better pass breast breast cancer t

[Joe_Dragon]

The porn filter better pass breast breast cancer test or it will be a bad mark for a e-health system.

Money

[Anonymous Coward]

The exact same week Telstra and Optus were awarded massive contracts to migrate their customers across to the NBN, they also 'volunteered' to implement the filters Conroy couldn't pass into law. iiNet (the third largest, nerd friendly ISP) flat our refused to implement censorship, and were coincidentally told that they wouldn't get any contracts.

I can't help but think Optus were forced to agree to this censorship, so did it in the least effective way possible to just barely comply with the requirement. It still sets a very dangerous precedent though, and it paves the way for Conroy to later go back to parliament and say 'Look, they're doing it voluntarily, it's a great idea let's make it law'

Good on iiNet for taking the flat out moral ground. It's even more noble considering it might have cost them a lot of money, looking at switching to them