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Australian Net Censorship

Posted by justin++ on from the censorship-down-under dept.

An anonymous coward writes "The Australian House of Representatives has passed the censorship legislation which was passed by the Senate a few weeks back. According to the EFA, from 1/1/2000 Australia will have more restrictive internet censorship than Singapore and Malaysia. This legislation was introduced to win the vote of an independent senator for the GST vote. The local news media has made no mention of this legislation. Apparently censorship isn't newsworthy. " If the Australian media isn't saying anything, I think that's about as scary as the legislation itself. Wired ran a story about this the other day that seemed to imply choosing Jan. 1, 2000 was not a coincidence. Conspiracy theories, anyone?

4 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. To win GST vote HAH by bug_hunter · · Score: 3

    For those of you not in Australia, as the slashdot article mentions the net censorship was done to win an independant's vote for the GST.
    (I like how according to the independant the GST becomes more moral when there's internet censorship, democracy for you).
    At any rate, once all the independant's demands were met, he did a back flip and refused to vote for the GST yet the net censorship still went ahead.
    Our beloeved Prime Minister John Howard, very devote creationist Christian, said that he was in support of censoring the internet because there were things on there he wouldn't want his sons to see. His youngest son is 19. Sadly I believe his sons take up a very small percentage of the Australian internet users.

    I run a webpage which has a listing of mentally ill hate sites so people can look at them and see what they really are. If that bill comes in I wont have any ability to continue that page.
    http://www.rebel.net.au/~andrews/dhw/index.html

    Choose exposure over censorship.

    --
    It's turtles all the way down.
  2. %$!@$*! by Large+Green+Mallard · · Score: 3

    Quite seriously, the tirade of obscenities which this action has caused me to spew forth is so vulgar and vile that common decency stops me from typing. I really hoped that for once our government would have some f**king brains, but nooo.

    EFA is totally correct in saying that it is a political stunt. Honestly, they don't give a s**t about the moral wellbeing of Australians. Considering that one of our award winning adverts consiteted mainly of the word "Bugger", and that "If you drink and drive you're a bloody idiot" is a slogan endorsed by our police forces, that gives you a kind of idea about how non-anally retentive we all. Except Brian Haradine. This bill was introduced to pacify him, and him alone, so they could sell off our national phone service, and introduce a GST. Total assholes. I for one totally support the EFA's call for Richard Alston to resign.

    But hey, at least it's still legal to burn our flag, and that they don't think that sticking the 10 commandments up on the wall, and confiscating nail clippers will stop mass murders in schools.

    :-)

  3. But how can "Internet" censorship ever work? by Hobbex · · Score: 3

    Is it just me, or does the idea that something like this is possible just stem from the fact popular misconception that the easily proxied and filterable Web is the Internet. I mean, they can have all ISPs block off http ports so people have tp use the filtering proxies (I think) but to be realistic, they will have to block off all other ports as well.

    I mean, how will they stop my naughty pic DCC file bot? How will they keep people from joining my Q3 server where I replaced the wall textures for pornography?

    So far I have yet to here of program that scans tcp packets looking for dirty bits...

    - All spelling errors are deliberate and for the sake of effect.

  4. Yes, this is correct by Silex · · Score: 3

    I live in a country with net cencorship. No, they CANNOT stop you from DCCing pics or downloading stuff from your friend's FTPd box. It's not possible. They will probably just block URLs through a proxy. Here, there are two proxies. One is on the ISP and the other is a national firewall (see www.isu.net.sa). I'm not sure what the local, ISP proxy does (other than caching). The national firewall is the one that does the cencorship. You have to use your ISP's proxy, and your ISP uses the national proxy. This is probably a bottleneck. But it seems to do the job, in most cases. It's amazing how they can find the most remote websites and shitlist them. But they can shitlist everything because the web is almost infinite, as it is growing constantly.

    But I seriously doubt that they can stop you from doing whatever you want on IRC and such. And it will probably be possible to simply use a foriegn proxy (as long as it's listening on a really weird port) and thus bypass any cencorship at all.

    But don't get me wrong. This is still going to be glaring in your face almost everyday. The bigest downfall to this is when they start blocking stuff that shouldn't even be blocked. Like somtimes you'll click on a download at Freshmeat and you'll find that the particular address is blocked.

    Just hope they don't block any major hosts like GeoCities. That would mean you can't access thousands and thousands of websites.