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Australian ISPs Will Be Forced To Block (Some) Pirate Websites
angry tapir writes: Senators representing Australia's two main political blocs have issued a report backing a bill that will allow copyright holders to apply for a court order forcing ISPs to block access to piracy-linked websites. The proposed law has met with a less-than-enthusiastic from anti-censorship activists and consumer advocates. Even the federal parliament's human rights committee has been concerned about whether the law is a proportionate response to piracy.
Therefore, I demand that its sites be blocked immediately.
Also murder, arson, and jaywalking.
That you feel you need to go there? Looking for yer kiddie pr0n are you?
Anyone know why I can't get to any search engine now?
Check out this movie!!!
It's sad that people that don't understand the technology are making laws to try to govern how it's used. WTF Australia? What are you retaaaaaarded?
Yes, because blocking piracy websites stopped all those nasty pirates in the UK.
The headline seems to have a typo, it shouldn't be Australian ISPs Will Be Forced To Block (Some) Pirate Websites, but rather Australian ISPs Will Be Unable To Block (Any) Pirate Websites
The Federal Minister (Malcolm Turnbull) has stated publicly that using a VPN will not be an offence. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
So this blocking websites business will not and cannot work against tech savvy people determined to to pirate.
I suspect it has more to do with the upcoming Trans Pacific Partnership than stopping piracy. With vpn and proxy services costing very little, I think they know the outcome. Why we are signing up for this TPP is a complete mystery to me. Seems the big winners are big American corporations, not other countries. But we can only guess, it is ALL SECRET. Scary. Open and accountable government? I think not.
VPN ,Proxies, dynamic IP sites, Torrents
Blocking at the ip or dns level doesn't really stop anything. But it does give the 1% a great way to censor information they don't like.
Resolving the domain name to an internal warning page isn't "blocking".
That's just a minor inconvenience while people just use a different DNS.
Even if they decide to actively block the traffic originated to and from those IP addresses people will just use a tunnel.
So by all means, "block" it and say you did to get the government of your back.
In real life it has no meaning.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
So when a government site hijacks some music/clip art/photo can that person apply to get the government site blocked?
Yahoo Serious is a bigger crime than any of those things.
Do they not realize that this stuff is both continuously evolving and is also like water. When I was a kid people copied software by handing each other floppies. Each kid would amass as large a collection as they could afford floppies for in order to always have something that would interest others in a trade.
Then kids moved onto BBSs and in the very early 90s I could see kids stuffing those same floppies into machines connected to the internet. About the same time people would collect and share FTP sites some of which had over 100Mb of storage.
Since then it has been one technology after another ranging from Usenet, Kazaa, Mega, to Torrents. And those are just the sharing technologies. Then there is the data itself. It can be manipulated, streamed, encrypted, stenoed and so on. So while torrents seem to be a pretty good technology right now the only thing that having a government ban websites will do is to speed up the next evolution of the technology. In modern terms torrents are getting long in the tooth so, if anything, there are probably some superior contenders waiting in the wings right now.
But where this really stings is with legitimate traffic. For instance I had an old ISP that began "traffic shaping" to try and stop torrents. Except that a product I build used UDP streams which much have looked like torrents because suddenly they got very slow on my ISP. Plus I use a VPN for working from home and am not switching to the competitor (Bell Canada) because their leader just blah blahed about how evil VPNs are. If for some odd reason Canada banned VPNs I would literally have to move from the country.
If the second-biggest ISP in the UK can't manage to block the biggest and most publicly-known pirate site in the world, what hope is there of this working?
Maybe they can torrent a copy of whatever China uses. It still won't work, but it's the best there is.
I've always had the feeling we the USofA infected your society with the authoritarian virus that swept through ours in the Bush years.
So inelegant. Even if I agree with the ends, even if I agree we should "do something", we keep edging towards Full Retard.
It's as if... like we aren't able to control how people use fire. So we're going to try to ban - oh wait, there's no way to ban fire. But I don't want to look like I failed. So now I'm going to regulate sales.
The sales of every physical object that could potentially be used to ignite stuff.
Which still won't stop the use of heat anyway, that beloved instrument of humans. But I'm too much a dumbfuck to ever fathom something I can't control.
The amount of contortion we'll go through in efforts to double-indirectly execute the whims of our Betters is obscene, especially when the whims go anywhere near thoughtproperty and thoughtcrime.
In the United States we have begun blocking some of Australia's web sites.
This is a response to Australia's lack of comittment to freedom.
If you accept that a policy like this was inevitable, which honestly it was, then the small line that says rights holders should be liable for the costs of the blocks is a massive win.
The various **AA groups won't pay for enforcement because they know there is no link to making more money. So when iiNet or Telstra say yes we will block your address and it requires x number of servers and $x for electricity it will die a quick death.
Due to its relative isolation Australians pay significantly higher prices than their overseas brethren for a variety of goods and services. These prices have nothing to do with costs and everything to do with a market that has been geographically isolated from a historical perspective. What I find incongruous is that politicians do nothing to overcome these rigged markets. For example an xbox game is significantly cheaper in the US however it won't play on an Australian console, a home theatre amplifier costs more than twice the US price. A kindle book priced in American dollars is blocked from sale from Australian Internet addresses. Recently I could buy two of the same model Dell computer in the US, ship it to Australia for less than the price of the Australian channel. When Dell were contacted about this they said that they would refuse to support such a purchase (Initially they claimed the costs were import duties etc until I pointed out the actual duties). It is ironic that implementing these anti-piracy is not in the public or government interest from an economic perspective given the current budget problems and ensuring that purchasing parity would create a more efficient market enabling the Australian economy to complete more effectively. Australia is a net importer of entertainment goods and propping up distribution channels is in no-ones interest bar the owners of those channels. (Who incidentally donate to the political parties involved)
So we are to accept new copyright legislation as in our best interests when the TPP is being negotiated in secret... I suggest these are very closely related.
Wonderful - I wonder how many businesses can get away with demanding that the government prop up their obsolete business models and have someone else (the ISPs) pay for the effort. And then demand that the police become their storm troopers.
All because they got fat and lazy in the 1990's and 2000's and expect to be kept in that manner for ever.