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

Is that really a surprise

[king neckbeard]

Everyone knows that the internet is for porn

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I read an article from somebody who was the only competent person at the internal meetings for setting up such a censorship in Germany.

What you all have to know, is that all this censorship "technology" ultimately is an offspring of something a Swedish (I think) company made. And that original thing, which they all drag around to show how "nice" it works, is extremely flawed and utterly idiotic.

Neither them nor the government they started with, can tell the difference between the WWW, domains, the Internet and IP addresses. To them it's all the same.
(You have to know that there are usually only lawyers and totalitarian-oriented politicians at those meetings.)

This goes so far, that if you try to tell them how the Internet works, they look at you with a blank stare and ridicule you. Followed by openly calling you a "troublemaker" who "spreads lies" in their speeches, etc.

I'm not kidding. That's how it went down in Germany.

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

In the German meetings, it became clear, that it was technically completely impossible, to create such a filter in a proper way. You could either create a completely failing one, like this one, and look good politically... for about a day, before everyone would laugh at you about how much it fails. (In other words: Political suicide.) Or just push the whole project under the rug, and hope you get away with your failure.

Luckily, because of that one techie among them, they chose to scrape it and tell nobody here in Germany.

It seems, that Australia went for the political suicide.

So I say, good luck with that, and good bye! ;))

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.

Not for techies

[muphin]

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.

Re:Not for techies

[snookums]

Thing is,once the NBN is setup, the gov will have complete control over the data, and where to route it.

No, it won't.

The NBN will simply provide layer-2 pipes to ISPs. The ISPs will issue IP addresses, handle routing and all that jazz. If an ISP wants to set up a fully encrypted back-haul (say using L2TP/IPSec VPN) then they're free to do so.

If the government want to control the data moving over the NBN they'll do it by legislation, just like they would do with the current model (ISP-over-Telstra-copper), not by deep packet inspection or DNS blocking.

Re:Not for techies

[TheRealGrogan]

OpenDNS doesn't block anything, if you're just using its DNS servers in place of your ISP's. It's not until you create an account on their web site, add a network and configure the filter settings that it blocks any lookups. You can disable the smart caching, typo corrections, DNS proxying etc. if you register. I choose "none" myself, because I don't want anyone fucking with my name lookups.

I sure as Hell don't trust an ISP's DNS server to return unaltered results, or to return results quickly for that matter. OpenDNS has been working very well for me, for years and I certainly do look up porn sites.

Re:It is not about porn

[The Archon V2.0]

The filter is not about porn, it is about kiddy porn, the sort that they arrest people for.

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.

For everyone not in Oz

[mjwx]

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).

In the words of Men At Work.

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

"I come from a land Down Under,
Where laws don't work and politicians blunder."

Re:Money

[WhitetailKitten]

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.

Quelle surprise.