Slashdot Mirror
Australian Government Outlines Website-Blocking Scheme
angry tapir writes: The Australian government has revealed its (previously mooted) proposed legislation that will allow copyright holders to apply for court orders that will force ISPs to block access to pirate websites. It forms part of a broader Australian crackdown on online copyright infringement, which also includes a warning notice scheme for alleged infringers.
They're not the only ones getting on board with website blocking — a judge in Spain ruled that local ISPs must block access to The Pirate Bay.
Yet another form of prohibition. Will this all eventually come down to twin Internets running simultaneously? One, which has been scrubbed clean like a Caucasian-Disney fever dream, and one for the naughty and ill-mannered people? Oh wait. The darknet.
We just have to formulate a circumvention scheme.. Not sure if that's possible when all the service providers have to answer to the government, but we gotta do what we can.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
After RTFA it's pretty obvious this legislation is only meant to stop lazy downloaders or just inconvenience them, hardcore pirates will no doubt find their work-arounds and keep going on their merry way as always.
I really see this legislation as a bit of tree shaking meant to shoo away all those people who've been downloading copyrighted material because it was so damn easy to do so and there was little to no enforcement of infringement laws. In short the straight up easiness of downloading that latest episode of "A Game of Tits... opps Thrones" isn't going to be as easy as it was.
On a side note there's plenty of free culture out there that can be consumed quite easily; music, videos or whatever. Or you could just go out and make your own damn culture and put it out there for free, screw big business!
I've never understood why the Aus goverment would care given that almost all the content pirated is from overseas giving no financial benefits to the country. But I guess with the current governments relationship with media mogul Murdock who practically got them elected they must continue dance for the man (reference: image search "lets kick this mob out").
I see this only meaning the goverments popularity (24% in Feb) will continue to slide down while VPN services skyrocket. Sounds like a winning plan.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Fucking abbot is a fucking stupid fuck.
Brandis is probably thicker than abbot and abbot is a fucking numpty.
Hockey corrman morisson are incredibly arrogant and dont see their own stupidity.
Seriously, abbot is australias equivalent of bush jnr.
Eg a clueless, unintelligent, uneducated and easily manipulated when it comes to stake holders
Fact all the meda data ret3ntion is so murdoch can make those damn australian pirates PAY. Tony got brandis onto it,.
The whole lot of them are thicker than thieves.
The big thing coming is 'corporate sovereignty' treaties, where a corporation can sue a country and overturn national law if it interferes with the trading rights of a corporation. So even if you get a fair copyright law through Australians parliament, or UK, EU, a corporation can sue, and can then overturn that law.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150325/17151130431/corporate-sovereignty-provisions-tpp-agreement-leaked-via-wikileaks-would-massively-undermine-government-sovereignty.shtml
These corporate sovereignty provisions are used by Phillip Morris to remove warnings on cigarette packages, and other stuff that interferes with their 'fair trade'. These are being pushed by the US using all its NSA obtained surveillance leverage.
The proposal in the EU is one of the worst, it is to have a group of specially chosen lawyers judge these cases, who will take turns playing 'judge'. These will likely be 'special' lawyers. Where special means they act in US interests for unknown reasons. These treaties are being negotiated in secret and the 'special' EU Commissioners are dreaming up ways to push them through regardless of national governments veto powers:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150120/08264429758/european-commissions-clever-ruse-to-introduce-corporate-sovereignty-regardless-ratification-votes-eu.shtml
Australia has no effective opposition party, any new party that arises, has to make its way up through a net of US surveillance and black op propaganda. So its unlikely now you'll see an Australian or EU politician who will be a tough negotiator against the US, (see what they did to Dominique Kahn)*
* And anyone who thinks they wouldn't make fake rape charges, Google "jtrig fake victim" , one of the leaks covers exactly these fake victim claims as a means to destroy reputations.
Do copyright holders really think they can win the game of whack-a-mole as people bounce from domain to domain downloading whatever they please?
One has to wonder if this is really about copyright.
How do they know which web-sites contain pirated files? A corporation obviously has the money to look for this sort of thing. But with meta-data retention now enshrined in law, corporations will beg to trawl through those records. One reason Australians trust the government, if not the actual politicians, is their habit of keeping corporations on a tight leash. (With the courts keeping the politicians on a leash, which is why these 'go directly to jail' and 'guilty until proven innocent' laws are so disturbing.) But a data retention law encourages classic fascism, or corporate cyber-espionage.
I noticed several file-sharing (alright, alright, piracy) web-sites disappeared a few months ago. Most of them seemed to depend on CloudFlare.
Well, after the recent passing of the metadata legislation, and now this, I think Australia will go from the highest torrent downloading country to the highest VPN using country.
The Pirate Bay could reside on the end of a magnet link. It could be a web app that you download and which has distributed search function as a backend. Why exactly does it even need to be a domain that ISPs can block in the first place?
You seem to have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about.
'tails-autotest-remote-shell' in /etc/init.d includes a rather obvious test for a kernel parameter:
/proc/cmdline
if grep -qw "autotest_never_use_this_option"
then
:
else
exit 0
fi
If that parameter is missing, the script aborts. I guess you do not know how to read shell-scripts or you did not bother to even look what it does.
And 'tails-autotest-remote-shell' in /usr/local/lib is different from the file in /etc/init.d and actually the python script called from there if needed. It also includes a pretty clear and accurate statement at the start: "ATTENTION: Yes, this can be used as a backdoor, but only for an adversary with access to you *physical* serial port, which means that you are screwed any way." As this very clearly says this is a serial-port connected remote shell, I guess you did not look for one second into the file. And if you had looked and looked at the code as well, you would have seen that it does indeed only open serial port.
So, in total: This script opens a remote shell on a serial port if you give a very specific kernel-parameter on startup.
Remind me again where there is _any_ security problem here? My guess is you are just an honor-less shill spreading FUD for money to keep people from trusting TAILS.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just remember that most content that is pirated in Australia is not even availiable to buy in Australia. So what happens when you stream content that is not availiable to purchase, it that still illegal. This is the most stupid irrisponsible stupid government in the history of this country.
Exactly. The current cat-and-mouse situation is down to the fundamental laziness and technical ineptitude of the second/third-tier pirates.
You'd never catch 'real' (cue the No True Scotsman argument) scene groups with their cell-like organizational structures and heavy encryption on all communication falling victim to such simplistic web-blocking schemes..
The classic problem with all distributed tech is the initial connection. The pirate bay is on the end of a magnet link? Then why not attempt to block all references to the magnet link.
For each distributed system you need some place to start unless you think spamming random IP addresses on the internet hoping for a bite would be a good use of time and bandwidth, something that would also effectively become impossible with IPv6 address space.
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/video/2015/mar/27/the-roast-satire-metadata-brandis-malcolm-turnbull-video
.... because everyone wants to rule the world, but all you have is one country.
Let's just block the entire country from the Internet. That will solve their problem! Then just see how long before the mobs with torches and pitchforks form to hang their "government" (nannies).
This will start happening soon in the US, now that the FCC has passed rules that only protect "lawful" content from getting blocked...
I TOLD you to be careful what you ask for. Everything will be scanned and known. How else will ISPs determine what is "lawful" content and "lawful" protocols (yes, that's in the language, too - "lawful protocols").
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Only allow sites that use Yippppeeeee!!!! to celebrate good things!
TTY to SSH is possible but requires tools to be installed, so it may be done with a guest account if it is not locked down sufficiently. You'd need to try it to be sure either way.
http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/11543/remote-serial-connection-redirected-over-network-using-ssh
They can't even block the site which provided you with the link because there are so many trivial ways to hide it - e.g. writing it as an image, or inserting it client side with some JS, or just encrypting it in an HTTP connect.
Given how popular a search app would be, it's likely that bittorrent clients would integrate with one. e.g. you paste a magnet, check the "web application" box, and perhaps the "keep updated" box and hit download. When the app downloads, the client hosts it through a http port so you can see it from a browser. Magnets are hashes so how the app is kept up to date is certainly an issue and also how it does its search, but neither is an insurmountable one.
This is TAILS. There are no guest accounts. This is not a distribution intended to be installed at all. It is intended to run from CD or (preferably write-protected) memory stick. Without jumping through major hoops, you cannot even write persistent changes to it even if is on an unprotected memory stick.
That said, if configuration changes by a legitimate user, installing of packages by legitimate user, etc. are needed to open a backdoor, then that is not a security vulnerability. For example, it just takes one small change to the tunneling config of TAILS to send clear-text messages out over the normal network. It it just takes some very small config changes to open up any Unix installation to the world. Or it just takes a very small configuration change to your car to make it exceptionally easy to steal (leave the key in the ignition and the door open). These are not security vulnerabilities.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not blocking the link, but blocking the initial distribution. Yes it would be far harder but it's no more difficult than the current state of blocking where you can go onto Google, type in (insert fav torrent site here) and get a list of which domain it happens to be running on today. The only difference is you're looking for the magnet link which will bounce around as the power that be continue their futile attempts to block content one web address at a time.