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The Pirate Bay, BitTorrent Websites To Be Blocked In Australia, Federal Court Rules (abc.net.au)
New submitter AnonymousCube writes: The Federal Court has made a ruling that will result in internet access for Australians being censored. Five websites are to be blocked after being deemed to be copyright infringing, most notable of which is The Pirate Bay. Internet service providers are given the choice of how they will implement blocking, but the result will be that when a user visits a blocked site they will be redirected to a warning page telling them the site cannot be accessed. Other sites being blocked are the BitTorrent websites Torrentz, TorrentHound, and IsoHunt, and the streaming service SolarMovie.
There was a huge fight about three years ago when the then Labor government's Senator Conroy tried to ram through internet censorship in Australia. The uproar was sufficient that the now marginal conservative government will not touch it. But now there is another attack from the courts, which is more difficult to deal with.
(Conway, incidentally, has taken up a lucrative job lobbying for gambling in Australia.)
Methodology is being left to the ISPs. Which means it will most likely be a DNS block. People just need to point their routers at the google DNS and it is circumvented.
As for the foxtel muppet he's claiming aussies don't use VPNs. Uh huh, right. That's why we have had legislation put through explicitly saying defeating geoblocking with VPNs is ok. Cause no one in Australia uses a vpn... Nope no one.
It won't work. This happened in the UK. The ISPs were forced to blocked thepiratebay.se and any other variants that court orders stipulate, but there are some many proxies being created all the time that it's a pointless endeavour. Effectively, there's no meaningful block as it's impossible to maintain.