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Australia Scales Back Internet Blacklist, Nixes Full-Scale Censorship
littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has officially abandoned plans to legislate a mandatory internet filter. The news ends a four-year campaign by the ruling party to implement legislation that would have compelled ISPs to block a list of URLs dictated by Australia's telecommunications regulator, the ACMA. ISPs have instead been told to block a list of known child pornography sites maintained by INTERPOL."
Also at ZDnet.
FTFS: "ISPs have instead been told to block a list of known child pornography sites maintained by INTERPOL."
I say make Interpol shut them down!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Still sounds like a mandatory internet filter to me. If anything, a worldwide blacklist of websites seems more troubling than an Australia-wide blacklist.
Don't worry, you're probably already labelled as some kind of pervert. But admitting that you have a problem is the first stage in dealing with it...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
How can i make a first post
Well, you didn't, so why worry?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Interpol is not in the pocket of your local politicians, it does not have a side in your environment vs. corporate-benefits debates. And the order was specific to kiddie porn sites, not file sharing.
Sounds like a reasonable compomise. If I were an ISP, I'd probably have been doing this before the government asked for it, but the legal cover that I'm complying with the law would be appreciated.
You insensitive clod! What makes you think I wasn't trying to say something funny? No one will ever take my perversion seriously now!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The only sites that are currently blocked in the UK are those that are on the IWF blacklist, of course there are sites where ISPs are ordered to block on copyright grounds, but that is usually the exception.
Now just remove the mandatory data caps and It'll almost be a decent internet.
While this seems like a small victory for common sense, don't forget that Conroy wants the ISPs to store years of traffic for every customer.
Rather than prevent a site from working (via blocking against a secret government list), they want to be silently collecting "evidence" instead.
ISPs have instead been told to block a list of known child pornography sites maintained by INTERPOL
Pics or it didn't NOMYEYESTHEYBURNNOOO*pokes out eyes*
**
captcha: viewable
Is that karma, or what?
Ideally an illegal activity should be dealt with in person, not by any blacklist. Apart from that +1 Australia!
Maybe the Treasury should start selling advertising space on currency. "The $20 bill, brought to you by McDonald's."
Much more effective to collect everyone's data for two years anyway and then selectively apply copyright law/lisa simpson is child pornography/hate speech against your political enemies.
...the term "child pornography" is horrifically broad.
Especially if you live in the UK and are into anime characters...
Govt: "Give me all your URLs"
ISPs: "No"
Govt: "OK, will you give me half?"
ISPs: "OK"
This is not a win. It is true that the government is no longer proposing new legislation. This is because they seem to be getting much of what they want without new legislation. In particular, it appears there will be a new industry "Code of Practice" which will then have force under current legislation (think of it as like changing a regulation). There is also going to be a 'police request' to the ISPs. It isn't clear to me at this point which of these, or how the combination, leads to enforceability, but it seems all Aus ISPs are now going to be filtered.
Good:
- The black-list will be the Interpol black-list, which I understand is at least reasonably well monitored and is quite small. It is also outside of political control in Australia.
- I'm guessing the filtering will be DNS based for domains on the list, forwarding them to a proxy that checks the URL. This means it will not affect people not accessing those domains.
Bad:
- We have a filter. This will have two effects: it will lead to worse enforcement of child abuse as people get complacent. It will cause the occasional problem like the Wikipedia/Scorpians cover (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_Wikipedia )
This is a shame. Child porn sites stay up longer than phishing sites because banks actually want the phishing sites down, not just covered up.
It will also be interesting to see what effect DNS-SEC has on this, but that is in the longer term.
Seriously folks, filtering the internet is like trying to filter the air.
Are you absolutely certain that you filtered ALL of it, ALL the time, in EVERY circumstance?
It's also kinda like locking your door to prevent burglary. A skilled and determined burglar will find a way in, locks just keep only slightly dishonest people out.
For example: if this is based on DNS lookups then what happens when $USER runs a local caching DNS server rather than "pointing at their ISP"? What happens when $KIDDY_PORN_ADDICT simply turns up his VPN-TO-AMERICA and routes ALL his internet through there?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Anybody have a link to this list?
Now to get rid of the data retention proposals, and commonsense will finally have prevailed.
Everyone seems to think it's a new law/technology brought in to implement the child porn filter, but it's existing (and has always been there), they're just adding INTERPOLs list to the existing AFP/ASIO/ASIS one.
Australia isn't really a country, it's a doormat disguised as a country. Hell,they don't even have their OWN flag,even India has got it's own flag.Crown Corp of London's fools.the stench coming off of it is so bad....it's been dead a long time now.