Far more likely is that Optus cuts a deal with Conroy to give the trial an air of legitimacy in exchange for concessions elsewhere, particularly against Telstra (c.f. recent competition rulings making further competition concessions).
I've no doubt that Optus would find any inroads into Telstra's death grip on it's networks valuable. So would all the other ISPs in Australia. Any advances to competition in the Telcos could only make the industry better.
Far from being xenophobic, a realistic assessment would be that the upper levels of management in Optus and Singtel could have a culture that is significantly different in relation to civil liberties in general, not necessarily limited to the proposed censorship. Optus management have never commented about the censorship scheme when most of the large ISPs did. They were late in their participation in the testing. Optus are not particularly open about their internal corporate arrangements. Most of the public statements have related to competition matters and most were justified. Not a word from them on censorship using DPI having disadvantages for their customers in a democracy. They have taken a neutral position, where most other ISPs have been more active on this issue.
Websheild is a special case: they are a non profit organisation, they sell a censored ISP service, are agents for censorware systems, part of the trials and have a seat on the hand picked Cyber Safety Working Group that is contributing to the development of the policy.
My comment about Optus/Singtel related entirely to the fact that Singtel is the Singapore government owned telco and Singapore certainly has no scruples about censorship which means that Optus participation may have a different corporate goal.
To be fair, Telstra, Internode and iiNet are on record as objecting to this proposal and all have refused to be sucked into this debacle and are not participating. Telstra's public comments have been generally to the effect that trying to censor the internet would be like "boiling the ocean"
This idiotic plan is not killed and dead. The Labor government in general, and Senator Stephen Conroy in particular, have been taken aback by the strength of the opposition. The article noted in the summary only covers some of the incompetent answers given to hard questioning by the main Opposition party and one of the minority parties.
There is no engineering, vendor neutral specification giving trial design criteria or testing methodology as the basis for the trials. There is no requirement for the ISPs to disclose which method of censorship they selected. The ISPs have been supported to the tune of $AU300,000 but there is still a $AU887,000 consultancy contract for the testing and reporting of on a system to block up to 10,000 URLs. The IWF annual report lists between 1100-1300 sites blocked by their system. Rumour has it that much of the testing in the small ISPs is using equipment from the same censorware vendor but this is not confirmed as several censorware vendors have been lobbying for the windfalls. Watchdog, using the NetClean system was involved in some separate testing undertaken by another ISP, Exetel. The Exetel trial received a great deal of criticism in the Australian internet community and Exetel customers. The trial has not been cancelled and neither has the testing consultancy.
Any assumption that the scheme will disappear is premature.
A list of 1000s of banned films and publications is still in existence. The censorship regime has become more and more repressive over the last 10 years. Realistically the entire basis of censorship needs serious review. It is managed by more than one government authority under several different pieces of legislation. The proposed censorship of the internet is under the control of the telecommunications authority which is yet another government authority.
You would have to try very hard to find a more incompetent approach to anything to do with IT, networking or civil liberties all in the same package.
Viurt is nasty and fairly difficult to repair. Most malware removers recommend reinstallation rather than attempt to repair damaged system files.
There's no mention of the Blaster/Sasser worm, Sircam, CIH or Magistr. All of which caused panic and damage at least on the same scale as Conficker. All of which had much more damaging payloads than any of those noted.
Seems to be a fairly dodgy, or poorly researched list.
What happened to the whole "Conroy: Go after our source and we'll go for you" thing?
Was their bluff called?
Wikileaks Sweden has the protection of Swedish Law. That's why it's hosted there.
The German authorities must have assumed that an attack in Germany would be more fruitful as Germany has no similar protection of freedom of the press, press sources or whistleblower.
Might be time to donate to keep them available for countries subjected to heavy censorship and control information. Countries like Australia, UK, Germany etc.etc.
Because from a blocked ISP you can access the sites which are listed as blocked.
The internet censorship system is not yet in place. The leaked list is the sites provided to ISPs that have "family friendly" services and to the vendors of the PC filters supplied under the previous government's NetAlert scheme.
At the moment you should be able to get anywhere you like unless you chosen a PC based filter, a family friendly ISP or you use one of the ISPs testing the filters at the moment.
There are 6 ISPs in the trial. One is iPrimus that deals with retail customers. One is Webshield that is a Christadelphian not for profit family friendly ISP and the other 4 are business only ISPs. There are people on facebook with more friends than the 4 business ISPs have as customers.
You need to check your facts. The list isn't fake. It was pulled out of the definitions provided to one of the NetAlert filter providers. It also matches the dates and number of the published ACMA updates as downloaded from their site.
What you should be concerned about it that the blacklist was designed for PC "filters" for children and that the government intended to use that list to censor the activities of adult at the level of a child safe filter.
I'm currently in Australia and can get to the list of banned sites on Wikileaks just fine.
I'm at work and we use http://www.macquarietelecom.com/
The mandatory censorship scheme is not yet in place.
The blacklist referred to is the current list that is sent to the maintainers of local PC based child filtering systems. Until December last year, the government provided these free to any interested parents. The uptake was so poor that this scheme was canceled and the current censorship proposal is supposed to work better "to protect the children". The blacklist doesn't do anything else at the moment.
The current blacklist is entirely complaint based. By ACMA's own data, less than half the list is related to child depiction or child pornography. The rest of the list is material that would be legal (MA15+, R etc.) if it was in the broadcast media or it is material that has been refused classification. Refused classification material has not been reviewed by the Classification Board. ACMA assumes it would be prohibited if the Classification Board did actually see it. AFAIK none of the blacklisted material has been put in front of a court that would allow the word illegal to be applied.
If, and when, the mandatory internet censorship scheme is implemented the blacklist will form the basis of the "censored" material. There have been rumours of also using the IWF list or incorporating the IWF list into ACMA's blacklist.
I don't believe that a DNS blacklist is the proposal. More a blacklist + on-the-fly content analysis. That's why the initial tests show massive slowdowns.
The report indicates that all proposals involve using DPI. So the intentions are much more sinister than the current newsgroup blacklist.
Said blacklist is not published and is exempt from Freedom of Information legislation.
I'd be interested in getting a position with the australian government in monitoring the internet, specifically the porn portion. I have extensive experience.
PMSL. With those qualifications, you'd probably get the job.
The nutjobs that want this certainly don't have any qualifications at all.
one can alone think that the proprietary creators of the filtering have done a truly spectacular and likely very 'generous' snow job, just think millions of licences, annual update costs, filtering updates, and the inevitable targeted biases in accidental filtering.
Sadly, I think the government is only operating on vendor information. The report on the efficacy of the filter was released in July 2008. It demonstrates clearly that you can good blocking and lose up to 86% of "speed" OR you can have completely ineffective blocking and maintain speeds close to current.
All the systems on offer had relatively high false positives. Two of the systems offered also have the capability to scan and filter email.
As an Australian that values civil rights, including privacy and freedom of speech, I hope that those of us that don't agree with this level of moral panic can make a difference to this proposal.
Our press is so well educated, technically competent that they could print this one.
The poor woman has things flashing up all the time and can't leave the machine without supervision to check the stove. FFS.
Not that it's bad for beginners, but I'm not sure I want such a toy OS.
It's a full system, nothing toy about the default Xandros distro I'm still running on my EEEPC701. I did the full desktop mod and the kernel upgrade for using 2GB of RAM.
If I'm demonstrating it to anyone I use the easy GUI.
I'm looking to get one with a 8.9"-10" screen that is still in the same class. The Dell one is looking good and the AcerOne looks great but has kludgy old XP on it here in Australia and no linux version available. The HP Mininote has Vista shoehorned in on a VIA C7 CPU. I can't get the linux version of that in Australia either.
If Dell do sell the linux version here, I'll buy that one. I'm not paying for a Windows licence I won't use. Those days are gone, for me anyway.
Microsoft really don't get the point of the OLPC. They've missed the market for mini laptops and only have Windows XP to offer that market. Shoehorning a kludgy XP and Office, antivirus and protection onto the OLPC makes it a far less useful product.
Even better, start pushing to get rid of the ancient BIOS technology altogether. It belongs to a different era. Bring on EFI in commodity mobos. If Apple can do it.......
is AVG still a good free AVG prog? And I dont mean just because of this controversy, they made good on it and responded. I mean the long haul.
It's not the antivirus that I'd recommend. Along with Norton and McAfee it features heavily on HijackThis log postings on malware removal forums all over the internet. AVG Antispyware (originally ewido) is a good antispyware product and is incorporated into the AVG 8.0 product so it's not all bad.
AV product assessments are a difficult area but consistently good performance over time would be what I'd look for. Most opinions are highly emotional and based on limited experience of "I got [insert name of nasty] and the AV I had missed it, but [insert name of AV product] fixed it up".
AV Comparatives do keep post their test results and previous test results are available.
The malware epidemic out there is not going to be stopped any time soon by antivirus software. In general it seems to be stuck in a bit of a time warp in some ways and I'm not convinced that any method of testing is any sort of proof, given that testing has to be against known exploits/risks/malicious software.
The forensic report is linked to on this page and is scathing about the IT staff. They did the handover and didn't even notice that the antivirus wasn't working and that their SMS update system wasn't working.
It should be policy to handover computers with clean image and with updates.
Not in Australia. We have data entry related cases of RSI in industrial and workers insurance going back to the 1970s. It was somewhat of an epidemic to the point where RSI is regarded with a great deal of scepticism which can be very unfair on the victims.
...in something that's been known about and documented over the last 20 odd years. Any one pounding keys all day is at risk for this. I'm not sure a survey was needed. I'm trying to work out what Microsoft are doing these sort of surveys for now. Maybe even find out why they are doing it now.
The "apply changes" window for Synaptic package manager is taller than the EEE's screen. I'm sure there are hundreds of more examples out there in Windows & Linux.
Right click in the space on the window title bar and go to "configure Window". You can fix the size of the Synaptic window(s) (and any other window with the same issue) so they fit and you can get to control buttons at the bottom.
Thats the thing, nearly all of us are in the US so we have no idea what US censored sites to point you to because we can't see them either because we are in the US with you. There are sites in the USA censored from outsiders. During the Presidential election of 2004, many non USA internet users couldn't get to some election related sites.
Much as I hate to use a Digg link, it does have some of the information on one example and most of the relevant links. I'm in Australia and I could only get to some sites through a US based proxy. I can't remember all of them now, but it has happened.
On the less pedantic side, do you really think the ISPs want to give your data away? There is no profit in doing so, in fact it might even cause customer loss, which is bad for business. No, the reason they give out your data is because they think they have a legal obligation to do so. Now the court has said it isn't, so they won't.
How would this judgement affect the Deep Packet Inspection methods used by Contextual based advertising activity by the likes of Phorm and Nebuad?
People said this same thing when the Windows 2000 source code leaked. Nothing happened. Multiple problems with that theory but one of the biggest is simply that it is wrong. Lots of people have the Windows source code. MS has a license where universities can get a copy for research. One university I know that does is ASU in Tempe, Arizona. So this idea that only MS has ever seen the code is false, thus the argument is invalid, never mind the other problems with it even if it weren't.
I'm not sure that's correct. If you are only talking self-replicating viruses that spread to continue replication, you may be correct. However,the appearance of rootkit anchored malware "in the wild" closely followed that release which made the information widely available outside limited academic and security research circles. The first rootkit was published as far back as 1999 by Greg Hoglund, founder of rootkit.com. There was a lot of academic interest and discussion in rootkit development specifically on Windows NT based systems before that time but almost none had been detected "in the wild". But rootkit anchored, serious malware infections have ballooned are now "professionally" developed for criminal purposes and used as the base for most, if not all, of the botnets. The release of the Windows 2000 source code certainly removed the need for extensive reverse engineering.
The Windows 2000 source code leak dates back to 2004 http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39146176,00.htm
Hackerdefender was also coincidently released early in 2004 by holy father
One of the most frequently encountered is Hacker Defender, created by an Eastern European who calls himself Holy Father. The latest free version was published early in 2004 and, more recently, premium and customized versions of this malware became available for a fee. http://searchwindowssecurity.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid45_gci1112754,00.html
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, the mouse slipped to wrong mod :(
The benefits of a real smartphone with the convenience of a monopoly provider doesn't quite do it for me.
Methinks the xenophobia is strong with this one.
Far more likely is that Optus cuts a deal with Conroy to give the trial an air of legitimacy in exchange for concessions elsewhere, particularly against Telstra (c.f. recent competition rulings making further competition concessions).
I've no doubt that Optus would find any inroads into Telstra's death grip on it's networks valuable. So would all the other ISPs in Australia. Any advances to competition in the Telcos could only make the industry better.
Far from being xenophobic, a realistic assessment would be that the upper levels of management in Optus and Singtel could have a culture that is significantly different in relation to civil liberties in general, not necessarily limited to the proposed censorship. Optus management have never commented about the censorship scheme when most of the large ISPs did. They were late in their participation in the testing. Optus are not particularly open about their internal corporate arrangements. Most of the public statements have related to competition matters and most were justified. Not a word from them on censorship using DPI having disadvantages for their customers in a democracy. They have taken a neutral position, where most other ISPs have been more active on this issue. Websheild is a special case: they are a non profit organisation, they sell a censored ISP service, are agents for censorware systems, part of the trials and have a seat on the hand picked Cyber Safety Working Group that is contributing to the development of the policy.
So how is life at Telstra these days?
Nice try, mate.
My comment about Optus/Singtel related entirely to the fact that Singtel is the Singapore government owned telco and Singapore certainly has no scruples about censorship which means that Optus participation may have a different corporate goal.
To be fair, Telstra, Internode and iiNet are on record as objecting to this proposal and all have refused to be sucked into this debacle and are not participating. Telstra's public comments have been generally to the effect that trying to censor the internet would be like "boiling the ocean"
This idiotic plan is not killed and dead. The Labor government in general, and Senator Stephen Conroy in particular, have been taken aback by the strength of the opposition. The article noted in the summary only covers some of the incompetent answers given to hard questioning by the main Opposition party and one of the minority parties.
Trials are still being underway involving 4 tiny ISPs, one medium ISP, one Christadelphian ISP and one large ISP majority owned by Singtel.
There is no engineering, vendor neutral specification giving trial design criteria or testing methodology as the basis for the trials. There is no requirement for the ISPs to disclose which method of censorship they selected. The ISPs have been supported to the tune of $AU300,000 but there is still a $AU887,000 consultancy contract for the testing and reporting of on a system to block up to 10,000 URLs. The IWF annual report lists between 1100-1300 sites blocked by their system. Rumour has it that much of the testing in the small ISPs is using equipment from the same censorware vendor but this is not confirmed as several censorware vendors have been lobbying for the windfalls. Watchdog, using the NetClean system was involved in some separate testing undertaken by another ISP, Exetel. The Exetel trial received a great deal of criticism in the Australian internet community and Exetel customers. The trial has not been cancelled and neither has the testing consultancy.
Any assumption that the scheme will disappear is premature.
A list of 1000s of banned films and publications is still in existence. The censorship regime has become more and more repressive over the last 10 years. Realistically the entire basis of censorship needs serious review. It is managed by more than one government authority under several different pieces of legislation. The proposed censorship of the internet is under the control of the telecommunications authority which is yet another government authority.
You would have to try very hard to find a more incompetent approach to anything to do with IT, networking or civil liberties all in the same package.
Viurt is nasty and fairly difficult to repair. Most malware removers recommend reinstallation rather than attempt to repair damaged system files.
There's no mention of the Blaster/Sasser worm, Sircam, CIH or Magistr. All of which caused panic and damage at least on the same scale as Conficker. All of which had much more damaging payloads than any of those noted.
Seems to be a fairly dodgy, or poorly researched list.
What happened to the whole "Conroy: Go after our source and we'll go for you" thing? Was their bluff called?
Wikileaks Sweden has the protection of Swedish Law. That's why it's hosted there.
The German authorities must have assumed that an attack in Germany would be more fruitful as Germany has no similar protection of freedom of the press, press sources or whistleblower.
Might be time to donate to keep them available for countries subjected to heavy censorship and control information. Countries like Australia, UK, Germany etc.etc.
Because from a blocked ISP you can access the sites which are listed as blocked.
The internet censorship system is not yet in place. The leaked list is the sites provided to ISPs that have "family friendly" services and to the vendors of the PC filters supplied under the previous government's NetAlert scheme.
At the moment you should be able to get anywhere you like unless you chosen a PC based filter, a family friendly ISP or you use one of the ISPs testing the filters at the moment.
There are 6 ISPs in the trial. One is iPrimus that deals with retail customers. One is Webshield that is a Christadelphian not for profit family friendly ISP and the other 4 are business only ISPs. There are people on facebook with more friends than the 4 business ISPs have as customers.
You need to check your facts. The list isn't fake. It was pulled out of the definitions provided to one of the NetAlert filter providers. It also matches the dates and number of the published ACMA updates as downloaded from their site.
What you should be concerned about it that the blacklist was designed for PC "filters" for children and that the government intended to use that list to censor the activities of adult at the level of a child safe filter.
I'm currently in Australia and can get to the list of banned sites on Wikileaks just fine. I'm at work and we use http://www.macquarietelecom.com/
The mandatory censorship scheme is not yet in place.
The blacklist referred to is the current list that is sent to the maintainers of local PC based child filtering systems. Until December last year, the government provided these free to any interested parents. The uptake was so poor that this scheme was canceled and the current censorship proposal is supposed to work better "to protect the children". The blacklist doesn't do anything else at the moment.
The current blacklist is entirely complaint based. By ACMA's own data, less than half the list is related to child depiction or child pornography. The rest of the list is material that would be legal (MA15+, R etc.) if it was in the broadcast media or it is material that has been refused classification. Refused classification material has not been reviewed by the Classification Board. ACMA assumes it would be prohibited if the Classification Board did actually see it. AFAIK none of the blacklisted material has been put in front of a court that would allow the word illegal to be applied.
If, and when, the mandatory internet censorship scheme is implemented the blacklist will form the basis of the "censored" material. There have been rumours of also using the IWF list or incorporating the IWF list into ACMA's blacklist.
I don't believe that a DNS blacklist is the proposal. More a blacklist + on-the-fly content analysis. That's why the initial tests show massive slowdowns.
The report indicates that all proposals involve using DPI. So the intentions are much more sinister than the current newsgroup blacklist.
Said blacklist is not published and is exempt from Freedom of Information legislation.
I'd be interested in getting a position with the australian government in monitoring the internet, specifically the porn portion. I have extensive experience.
PMSL. With those qualifications, you'd probably get the job.
The nutjobs that want this certainly don't have any qualifications at all.
one can alone think that the proprietary creators of the filtering have done a truly spectacular and likely very 'generous' snow job, just think millions of licences, annual update costs, filtering updates, and the inevitable targeted biases in accidental filtering.
Sadly, I think the government is only operating on vendor information. The report on the efficacy of the filter was released in July 2008. It demonstrates clearly that you can good blocking and lose up to 86% of "speed" OR you can have completely ineffective blocking and maintain speeds close to current.
All the systems on offer had relatively high false positives. Two of the systems offered also have the capability to scan and filter email.
What a load of shit!!
As an Australian that values civil rights, including privacy and freedom of speech, I hope that those of us that don't agree with this level of moral panic can make a difference to this proposal.
Our press is so well educated, technically competent that they could print this one.
The poor woman has things flashing up all the time and can't leave the machine without supervision to check the stove. FFS.
Not that it's bad for beginners, but I'm not sure I want such a toy OS.
It's a full system, nothing toy about the default Xandros distro I'm still running on my EEEPC701. I did the full desktop mod and the kernel upgrade for using 2GB of RAM.
If I'm demonstrating it to anyone I use the easy GUI.
I'm looking to get one with a 8.9"-10" screen that is still in the same class. The Dell one is looking good and the AcerOne looks great but has kludgy old XP on it here in Australia and no linux version available. The HP Mininote has Vista shoehorned in on a VIA C7 CPU. I can't get the linux version of that in Australia either.
If Dell do sell the linux version here, I'll buy that one. I'm not paying for a Windows licence I won't use. Those days are gone, for me anyway.
Microsoft really don't get the point of the OLPC. They've missed the market for mini laptops and only have Windows XP to offer that market. Shoehorning a kludgy XP and Office, antivirus and protection onto the OLPC makes it a far less useful product.
They are doing the same thing to the EEEPC.
Microsoft's Plans for the distribution of EEEPCs in India
Even better, start pushing to get rid of the ancient BIOS technology altogether. It belongs to a different era. Bring on EFI in commodity mobos. If Apple can do it.......
Says it all really :\
is AVG still a good free AVG prog? And I dont mean just because of this controversy, they made good on it and responded. I mean the long haul.
It's not the antivirus that I'd recommend. Along with Norton and McAfee it features heavily on HijackThis log postings on malware removal forums all over the internet. AVG Antispyware (originally ewido) is a good antispyware product and is incorporated into the AVG 8.0 product so it's not all bad.
AV product assessments are a difficult area but consistently good performance over time would be what I'd look for. Most opinions are highly emotional and based on limited experience of "I got [insert name of nasty] and the AV I had missed it, but [insert name of AV product] fixed it up".
AV Comparatives do keep post their test results and previous test results are available.
The malware epidemic out there is not going to be stopped any time soon by antivirus software. In general it seems to be stuck in a bit of a time warp in some ways and I'm not convinced that any method of testing is any sort of proof, given that testing has to be against known exploits/risks/malicious software.
Yep.
The forensic report is linked to on this page and is scathing about the IT staff.
They did the handover and didn't even notice that the antivirus wasn't working and that their SMS update system wasn't working.
It should be policy to handover computers with clean image and with updates.
Not in Australia. We have data entry related cases of RSI in industrial and workers insurance going back to the 1970s.
It was somewhat of an epidemic to the point where RSI is regarded with a great deal of scepticism which can be very unfair on the victims.
...in something that's been known about and documented over the last 20 odd years. Any one pounding keys all day is at risk for this. I'm not sure a survey was needed. I'm trying to work out what Microsoft are doing these sort of surveys for now. Maybe even find out why they are doing it now.
Right click in the space on the window title bar and go to "configure Window". You can fix the size of the Synaptic window(s) (and any other window with the same issue) so they fit and you can get to control buttons at the bottom.
There are sites in the USA censored from outsiders. During the Presidential election of 2004, many non USA internet users couldn't get to some election related sites.
Much as I hate to use a Digg link, it does have some of the information on one example and most of the relevant links. I'm in Australia and I could only get to some sites through a US based proxy. I can't remember all of them now, but it has happened.
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/27/president-bushs-webs.html
The block wasn't entirely effective to experienced users.
How would this judgement affect the Deep Packet Inspection methods used by Contextual based advertising activity by the likes of Phorm and Nebuad?
Your data is being sold to a third party.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/04/208225
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/18/2033202
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/23/1233212
I'm not sure that's correct. If you are only talking self-replicating viruses that spread to continue replication, you may be correct. However,the appearance of rootkit anchored malware "in the wild" closely followed that release which made the information widely available outside limited academic and security research circles. The first rootkit was published as far back as 1999 by Greg Hoglund, founder of rootkit.com. There was a lot of academic interest and discussion in rootkit development specifically on Windows NT based systems before that time but almost none had been detected "in the wild". But rootkit anchored, serious malware infections have ballooned are now "professionally" developed for criminal purposes and used as the base for most, if not all, of the botnets. The release of the Windows 2000 source code certainly removed the need for extensive reverse engineering.
The Windows 2000 source code leak dates back to 2004 http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39146176,00.htm
Hackerdefender was also coincidently released early in 2004 by holy father
One of the most frequently encountered is Hacker Defender, created by an Eastern European who calls himself Holy Father. The latest free version was published early in 2004 and, more recently, premium and customized versions of this malware became available for a fee. http://searchwindowssecurity.techtarget.com/news/column/0,294698,sid45_gci1112754,00.html