Slashdot Mirror
Australia Pushes Ahead With Website Blocking In Piracy Fight
angry tapir writes As part of its crackdown on unauthorized downloading of copyright material, the Australian government will push ahead with the introduction of a scheme that will allow rights holders to apply for court orders to force ISPs to block websites. (Previously Slashdot noted that the Australian government had raised such a scheme as a possibility).
Look up "proxy", you simpering halfwits.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This way they will end up with actual evidence of how useless these schemes are.
Slippery Slope meet the Australian Government. This is going to be a wild ride all the way down.
took a few minutes to circumvent the block yesterday
justfuckingoogleit
https://proxybay.info/
take your choice
Go well
I don't think this is half bad. Copyright holders need to go to court, rather than allowed to go straight to the ISP under previously proposed schemes.
Of course this is ignoring other possible agendas... and we know the block is useless anyway, but that isn't the point.
I lost me sig.
Well, they could prevent all downloading of copyrighted material by blocking all sites with copyrighted material on them. That'd work...
Australian here.
This is all pretty hilarious, since Australian's are already being encouraged en masse to take up VPNs to get around geoblocking etc.
http://www.choice.com.au/reviews-and-tests/computers-and-online/networking-and-internet/shopping-online/navigating-online-geoblocks/page/how-to-circumvent-geoblocks.aspx
(Choice being one of the leading consumer advocate groups in Australia).
We've been shafted by geoblocking / staggered releases (or non releases) and exclusive licensing locking up shows/movies for so long, that 'pirating' is basically a cultural norm here. People from all walks of life, from every cultural background do it. Louise CK explains it fairly well:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2014/06/louis-ck-explains-why-all-australians-pirate-things/
We've already got 'mum and dad' users who know about VPNs (they don't know exactly what they are or how they work, but they know that they are a good idea).
In other words, Australia as a nation is much better equipped to circumvent such trivial 'blocking' than your average nation.
Also funny is the government's mandate to ISPs and content providers- they've got 120 days (over a holiday period too) to agree on something that has been argued about for the last...5 years.
Expect this to fail spectacularly at every level.
Blocking piracy websites isn't the endgame here. The bigger picture here is using the guise of piracy and the clout of media rights holders to force all ISP's to implement a system capable of blocking the whole of Australia from accessing specified content. Pair this with enforcing all records to be held for a minimum of two years and the Australian government has just staged a coup on the online community. With these two moves they can block and track anything in the future as they introduce ever restrictive laws. This isn't a move to prevent piracy, it's a thinly veiled step towards government enforced censorship of the entire internet within the country, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership will only hasten this.
I'm convinced that all these hardline tactics by governments and corporations is only going to fuel a backlash which will be fought in the IETF Working Groups with the goal of end to end encryption and anonymization of all internet traffic. Oh I hope I live to see the day.
The term "piracy" has been used for illegal copying for over 200 years. Not saying it's appropriate but it's definitely established usage.
It all leads back to Rupert and his Foxtel service.
[citation required]
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
Sorry, I was posting from a mobile so citing was not practical. See:
"A Treatise on the theory and practice of Seamanship", Richard Hall Gower, 1808, p. v-vi.
https://books.google.com/books...
"In justice to the Author, it becomes necessary for him to state, that during his late voyage to India, Mr. Steel*, a bookseller, of Union-row, Little Tower-hill, republished nearly the whole of the 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th chapters of the first edition of this work, in a voluminous Compilation termed, "Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship." However illiberal such treatment must appear to the truly generous mind, the Author Would the more freely forgive Mr. Steel had he not* by artfully endeavouring to evade the piracy, been guilty of such misrepresentation, as has a tendency to bring his professional knowledge in question. Several deviations of this sort are contained in the 2d volume, 4to, of Mr. Steel's work, and are produced to shew that the Author has just reason for complaining."
It has certainly stopped piracy dead everywhere else they've done it :|, Oh wait, the other thing, has had very little if any effect.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
That VPN you suggest was already on the radar before this was announced. The Australian Government has been discussing blocking VPNs to stop those "cheaters" who are using Netflix etc instead of the local, very expensive, Fox cable network. The owner of that network, Murdoch, has been a cheerleader for the current Government so long as they do exactly what he wants.
It's not quite 200 years but the forward of "Three Men in a Boat, and not to mention the dog" goes on about "pirates" in Chicago who reprinted the book for the US market without giving the author anything. The US publishing industry was infamous for that sort of thing.
No it is actually about selling out to donors who want copyright enforced brutally. You are looking for deep motives in a very shallow government. Murdoch wants this, Tony will provide.
VPN - there's a move to restrict those as part of the current mess that's being complained about, so that could mean blocked ports, protocols and blocking any packets on unblocked ports that look like they belong to a VPN.
In this case there are less than a dozen ways in and out, and the "hundreds of thousands" of potential tunnels have to got through those and can be blocked if the means is draconian enough, which is the intention. Even a VPN tunnelling via a "safe" port is likely to show up with some packet inspection.
An earlier time this came up there was a suggestion to block all encrypted traffic and do deep packet inspection on everything else, and it was seriously considered.
So the answer is not to say "ha ha, they can't stop the net", the answer is to oppose these attempts to stop the net because they can get pretty close to stopping it if they don't care about upsetting the people who are using it. Murdoch is calling the shots and an internet slowed to a crawl by insane filtering and packet inspection is less competition for his cable network.
If the government and media companies REALLY want to stop piracy they need to make the content easier to legally acquire without needing to pay a lot of money for content you dont want. This applies to both new content and older content.
Some examples of how the local industry makes it harder:
1.Scorpion (2014 TV show). Channel 10 (local FTA network) aired up to episode 10 straight after the US airing. However, to see Episodes 11 and 12, you will have to wait for a few months. Episode 11 is already available online to download and episode 12 will likely follow shortly after its US airing next Monday.
Its a good bet a bunch of Aussies are going to pirate those 2 episodes rather than wait for TEN to air them. And its a good bet that when Episode 13 airs on TEN, it too will be weeks behind its US airing and have already been pirated by a fair few people.
If TEN aired these episodes straight after the US (and continued to put them on their catch-up-TV website), there would be basically zero reason to pirate them.
2.The films of Yahoo Serious. Aussie actor who was in 3 films, none of which is particularly popular but all 3 of which have their fans (myself included). Young Einstein is available on DVD overseas (and importing that DVD is technically illegal under Australian parallel import legislation I believe). Reckless Kelly is not available on any physical media format. No clue about Mr Accident. All 3 films seem to be available on the US Amazon digital store. None of the 3 films are available in Australia on either physical disk format or digital store.
3.Halt & Catch Fire (AMC TV series). As far as I can tell this show has yet to air on any Australian TV network (Foxtel included) and is unavailable on disk or digital in this country.
4.X-Planes (old Discovery Channel show about the X series of experimental aircraft). Totally unavailable in any form.
All 4 items above are items I would happily consume legally if there was an option to do so.
He has a vast amount of influence on the Australian government who control all the links from Australia to the global internet. Is it making sense now?
So where is you VPN licence citizen? No licence? No hole through the firewall on the undersea cable for you.
That bit make sense now?
Yes, all very authoritarian but that's exactly what is being pushed - tight control. Expensive, draconian and stupid certainly, but look at the way refugees are treated by the current government and you'll see that such things do not matter to them on the way to their goals
Exactly. Take one guess as to what Australian Intelligence organisations want done with SSL traffic in and out of the country. Yes it's bull in a china shop territory but the major donors to the ruling party do not care.
There are only a handful of links and all but a couple are run by Telstra, which has very extensive involvement with the government.
The technical requirements would be far less than firewalling all links into a typical US city.
I mentioned "packet inspection" at least twice way above did I not? How did you miss it? I suggest you learn what it means before foaming at the mouth and declaring that we are all idiots to be worried about what can be done with draconian laws enforcing what can and can not go through a very limited number of routes.