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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."
Everyone knows that the internet is for porn
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
But even I know that you'll get better Internet access to porn by not using a terrible provider like Optus.
I'm not in AU, but I happen to use my own DNS servers anyway.
The Chinese have an effective censorship solution known as the "Great Wall of China". Maybe Conroy should buy it off them? I wonder if it involves routing each user's communications to China? No problem, the NBN would fix that.
PORN!!
Required YouTube link: The Internet is for PORN!! (WarCraft Edition... just because).
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
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 creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
all the ISP's saying they "voluntarily" apply the mandatory filtering state its easy enough to bypass, doesn't affect P2P traffic, only websites. I'm in Australia and have been using OpenDNS for years. the ISPs DNS servers really do suck and some even use custom error pages.
Thing is,once the NBN is setup, the gov will have complete control over the data, and where to route it.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
The porn filter better pass breast breast cancer test or it will be a bad mark for a e-health system.
You can almost hear how the mind of an australian petty official works. Will Oz be the first post-democratic country? Where the slide back to totalitarianism is most advanced.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Shouldn't porn sites just start hosting DNS servers? Seriously, isn't that what most of the internet is used for now?
I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the Internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called 'Bring Back the Porn!'"
— Dr. Cox, Scrubs
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
how it is as it stands.. yes. how it will be after it takes a bit of a slide down the slippery slope, not so much.
That's a good feature.
That depends on who you ask. And I don't think that everyone will know how to bypass this (some might not ever figure it out).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
It's easier to have the default opt out (Don't want porn, don't go there) than force everyone to change DNS settings.
It's not trivial. And I highly doubt you'll open anything like that by "mistake" more than once :)
Also, most parental control software is a lot easier to install and there are even some free alternatives... In an ideal world I'd say the government would give you the tools to block it if you wanted (government sponsored software) and not force it on anyone.
PS: And correct me if I'm wrong, but blocking some site or another in australia, if a high level DNS is used, isn't there the possibility of contamination to other DNS's?
Indeed it is, and I'm sure of this because they're so open and... oh, wait, they're not even telling us WHO is contributing to the list, so their promises of WHAT is on it are a bit suspect. Reputable international organisations with such good reputations that they don't want to be associated with this? Really?
Perhaps they don't want to be blamed the next time a dentist is mistaken for a pornographer.
Your kid's netbook isn't going to cough up goatse, lemonparty, tubgirl, 2girls1cup, mr hands, etc via a random click.
Yeah, until someone puts up a machine serving one of them, configured to answer to any (or no) name. You can make a link to an IP address.
<sig> </sig>
all the ISP's saying they "voluntarily" apply the mandatory filtering state its easy enough to bypass, doesn't affect P2P traffic, only websites. I'm in Australia and have been using OpenDNS for years. the ISPs DNS servers really do suck and some even use custom error pages.
Thing is,once the NBN is setup, the gov will have complete control over the data, and where to route it.
No it wont,
Stop getting your info from News Limited (Limited News).
NBNco is a corporatised entity and not under government control.
NBN's mandate is to provide layer 1 and 2 services only. Layer 3 services are provided by RSP's (Retail Service Providers) which will be today's existing ISP's such as Internode, iinet, Adam and even Testra and Optus.
So any filtering will need to be done at the RSP level, iinet and Internode as well as several other ISP's are committed not to do it. Remember that this scheme is voluntary because it failed to pass in parliament, last time it was even bought up Labor faced a revolt from it's own back bench.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
But it's not a legal requirement to filter (it's voluntary), so there is no impetus to restrict changing DNS.
Besides, if you wanted to avoid Optus and Telstra's voluntary filtering, you'd just go to Internode or iinet who have flatly refused to volunteer for this scheme. In fact, the fact it wont work is why iinet expressly said it wouldn't implement it.
Oh, you'd also save some money by going with iinet or Internode.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Google even provide online instructions. Works faster than Optus DNS as well, plus meaningful "did you mean?" errors if you make a typo. Not just to do with bypassing filters, it just works better. Do not bother with Google conspiracy replies, just put on your foil hat.
One of the big reasons Telstra and Optus are doing this is because they want to restrict traffic on their mobile networks. Optus and Telstra are our oldest ISP's so they have a large historical customer base but their landline services are so expensive they have been haemorrhaging customers to other ADSL providers for years, so most of their customers are mobile. Mobile services are so horribly oversubscribed in Australia due to lots of new customers signing up for cheap data plans but no new investment in infrastructure. Vodafone already had a massive crisis last year when it's data network fell in a heap, now it seems Telstra and Optus are headed for the same thing so they want to restrict users from using what they've paid for (as retroactively changing the contract enables customers to leave with no penalties).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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
you're right, governments really should be involved in educating the public on the tools available for people to make their own personal and private moral decisions, not mandating law and enforcing a idealist point of view.
there was discussion of utilizing free software supported by the government as parental filters, then there was talk about an opt in system, now there is talk about a mandatory filter (2 levels. 1 "kid safe" and the other "legally safe" - which includes "extreme violence" like war crimes caught on tape etc being banned.). and if you talk about how this is the government turning into a nanny state, you get labeled a pedophile for "allowing the perverts access to evil content". both our political parties in our 2 party system want to implement a filter to some level, so Australians doesn't really get much say... the government also made it clear that "its not up to the people to make moral decisions, the government will make them for you" with this carbon tax its introducing.
shit is happening fast in this country, but i expect America to start revolting before we see anything dramatic here in Australia.
"I come from a land Down Under,
Where laws don't work and politicians blunder."
In an ideal world I'd say the government would give you the tools to block it if you wanted (government sponsored software) and not force it on anyone.
That's exactly how Australia's government mandated opt-in filtering works. What TFA describes is an end run around what parliment refused to mandate.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Your kid's netbook isn't going to cough up goatse, lemonparty, tubgirl, 2girls1cup, mr hands, etc via a random click."
You underestimate porn. There is a tradition of trolls posting such shock pics in unsuspecting forums, blog posts and chat as a joke, and if the common sites are censored they'll just upload the file to imageshack - it'll last long enough before it gets pulled. Then there is the same thing with real porn, which is often spread between friends. I've even seen pornographic spray-logos in TF2. Then the dodgy sites with Zs in the name will have their porn popups still, possibly switching to refering to server by IP to avoid censorblocks that might cut into their ad revenue. If you use the internet, you will see porn. It is unavoidable.
For now, officially... but once the technology is in place, there will be a lot of powerful pressure groups calling for expansion.
Did I say that you are wrong about this?
All this can ever lead to is 'the list'. You can't see this because it's on 'the bad list'. You can see this because it's on 'the good list'.
The world doesn't divide into good and bad. Period. Making a list derives from wrong-headed thinking and will always end up with the wrong solution.
Korma: Good
The obvious solution is to just get your own private offshore server and route traffic through that.
In Australia we already have ridiculous volume charges, so that it is more or less impossible to make bittorrent work well one. I expect this latest nonsense will just encourage more people to use them.
It was my understanding that ISPs were generally ridiculing Conroy's attempts to censor the internet. As such, this looks a lot like a deliberate implementation that gives parents who want their kids not finding porn "by accident, Mum, honest" what they're after, while not getting in the way of anyone with full control of their own OS too much.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Whilst I think being able to see all kinds of interesting and high quality porn is definitely a factor that people take into consideration when deciding how much they are willing to spend on their internet connection I think its pretty far fetched to say "adult content will be the major driver of consumer adoption." of the NBN. (Can't see that quote in original story BTW)
Considering what people can get already right now pornwise with a decent adsl connection I'm not really seeing how the National Broadband network will dramatically improve things in the porn world provide apart from higher quality porn at higher speeds?
I mean sure it will be an contributing factor but I would imagine that the ability to stream "any" kind of high quality video would be much more of a driving factor - for instance we don't have netflix in australia yet - I'm sure if netflix launched in australia coupled with the NBN that would drive demand for the NBN much more than just porn alone.
Funny and Interesting things from all around the net
... for my ad blocking filter system. So this means everyone on my LAN will be able to get around it and see the ads.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I love where in the attached article it said, "The main reason Blu-Ray took off was because the adult entertainment industry chose the format over HD." When the very opposite was true, they chose HD and while everyone expected that would be the home run hit, HD failed not long after.
While I believe the adult entertainment industry is big and powerful at its core, it simply follows the trends and doesn't really set them. I think this was a perfect example where the head of the industry thought that they would throw their hat in to the ring on the side of HD but without all the people who support the industry directly behind it, there was no weight behind the decision. It is an industry that tends to be pushed to the very front of technology but it is never actually leading.
Australia has some well-known prudes in their parliament who've been pushing movie and internet censorship for years. I don't remember if they're currently in the government or not, but some of them are at least in positions with enough power that they can't simply be ignored, though often it seems like they're in positions where they get to rant and rave loudly in public without actually getting to implement most of their latest great ideas, or their parties get to put them in charge of censorship policy in return for putting somebody more competent in charge of something more important.
Australia has rugged individualists, and socialists, and descendants of transported criminals, and imperialists, and sheep of various sorts, and is, after all, the place Rupert Murdoch came from. They've also traditionally had telecom monopolies who really really didn't get the Internet - they're the ones who gave us gigabytes-per-month usage caps - though there are rumors that they've been getting better.
This is in some ways a much better censorship system than some of the others they've tried to impose over the years. It's just DNS, not a Great Firewall of China that's constantly bogged down and overloaded by being a bunch of underpowered servers trying to filter every URL. So it doesn't disrupt service anywhere near as much, (and - shhh! -- it's easier to work around), and it's much more transparent because you can easily test that your query returns a real IP address from Google DNS and youre-not-allowed-to-read-that.telstra.net's IP address from Telstra or Optus.. (There are exceptions, such as other DNS services that block queries for malware domains or spammer domains, but usually you can tell.) Some years ago the Aussie censorship filter people were accused of blocking sites that were politically incorrect (as in "political content the party in power didn't like") in addition to just the pr0n they pretended to be blocking. And there have been filters that blocked all of terra.es, which was the Spanish flickr or geocities of its day, instead of going to the trouble of blocking just illegal material. There may not be enough transparency to prevent abuse, but there's enough to detect it and work around it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks