Little Aussie bleeders!

[Torurot]

As we speak your access to ATS and friends is about to be terminated. Time to step up and do something about it before it's too late. Sundays Are For Activists.

No Internet Censorship for Australia © 2008
The "clean feed" nobody wants
http://nocleanfeed.com/index.html


http://whirlpool.net.au/survey/2007/

[BAM]

That'll be great for my VPN business!

[Road Runner]

I can just see it now - all the adults will be scratching their heads trying to work out how to get round the block.

The kids will work it out anyway and still get access!


Don't you just love it when governments set out to 'protect' us?

RR.

[seanbeag7]

here is a link to Stephen Conroy's address and phone no.
Stephen Conroy

His name has to be irish, but he looks like a Wanker, so every body should phone him up and tell him to shove his new censorship bill up his arse and then fuck off, so that the next time the elections come around, everybody should be told why NOT to vote for him.

[Torurot]

Bam you better get prepared to service all those "little Ozzie bleeders" cause the great Rabbit proof firewall is about to get worse.

Oz watchdogs howl over 'Cyber-Safety' net filter

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008....opt_out

Can you opt-out?

By Austin Modine

Posted in Government, 17th October 2008 20:10 GMT

Aussie civil liberties watchdogs are warning the country's "Cyber-Safety" internet filter plan won't actually let adults choose to opt-out from web censorship.

The Australian Labor party's $125.8m proposal is being pitched as a means to prevent children from accessing online pornography. The scheme includes a choice to opt-out, but many are now claiming the option won't in fact prevent internet censorship altogether.

Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) said http://www.efa.org.au/2008/10/16/efa...ing-clean-feed even those who don't want their internet filtered will still be put on a second, secret blacklist designed to block "illegal" content.

"The news for Australian Internet users just keeps getting worse," said EFA spokesperson Colin Jacobs. "We have legitimate concerns with the creeping scope of this unprecedented interference in our communications infrastructure. It's starting to look like nothing less than a comprehensive program of real-time Internet censorship."

The concern appears to have its origins from a forum post http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-r....6774529 by Mark Newton, a network administrator for the ISP Internode.

"The Government's plan is for there to be two blacklists, one for 'unsuitable for children,' and another one for 'unsuitable for adults,'" he wrote.

"The much-touted 'opt-out' would merely involve switching from blacklist number 1 to blacklist number 2."

"Under the proposal, there's no scope at all to switch to no blacklist at all. Regardless of your personal preference, your traffic will pass through the censorship box."

Reports of a secret secondary blacklist remain unconfirmed, due to the government's mixed messages on proposed opt-out provisions.

But the threat of such a system is enough to make pundits rather uneasy. Not only because the filter may incorrectly block websites or even controversial opinions, but because it may have an effect on Australia's internet speed and availability. ®

comments http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008....omments

[andre459]

I thought when we got rid of Johnny Howard we might see a more liberal government but Kevin Rudd is just another religious conservative. It's been bad enough having people like Brian Harradine (who started a lot of this) and Fred Nile in parliament pushing their stone age religious values on the rest of us. Some of the things that come out of Fred Nile's mouth make me laugh they're that stupid.

But the threat of such a system is enough to make pundits rather uneasy. Not only because the filter may incorrectly block websites or even controversial opinions, but because it may have an effect on Australia's internet speed and availability

Who would get to decide what goes on the blacklist and how much other censorship would go on without our knowing.

Oh well this might end up being like a lot of Kevin Rudd's other policies all talk and no show.
Kevin Rudd is watching you.


At least it might help Bam.

[donnnnnny]

k rudd crud for short is a goon with a sweet smile, fucking hell why do we vote for these cunts. Noticed now the boat people are arriving again from the middle east? good old rudd got rid of the off shore processing facilities, and hey presto here we come to the land of milk and honey . thank you mr rudd and your stupid government.

[Torurot]

Here's another update. Looks no better. Some of you Ozzie guys are going pay your MP's office a visit, and make your views know.

Aussie Internet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11...ssie_internet/

[Torurot]

Just like the UK's Whaki jaqui these fuckers don't look like they are going to stop, no doubt at the prompting of the "moral minority". Stand up brothers before they take your toys away! See my next post. The rot has set in. Time to cut it out before the cancer spreads!

Aussie government to rig filter testing

* http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12...ll_opposition/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008....rt.html
* Print story
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008....nt.html
*
http://comments.theregister.co.uk/2008....osition

Opponents of Great Aussie Firewall take to the streets

By John Ozimek €¢ 8th December 2008 11:29 GMT


The great Aussie firewall is coming apart at the seams, as opposition
mounts, and critics have a field day dissecting inept government plans
for testing their shiny new filters.

While the government might expect opposition from, well, the opposition,
it is possible that the architect of the plan, Labour Senator and
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, was not expecting dissent to
come from within his own ranks. However, last week€™s Conference of New
South Wales€™ Young Labour passed a motion calling for an opt-in system
instead of the mandatory one proposed by the government. Motion 42 read:

"The internet is a free medium for the open communication of ideas and
opinions without hindrance, and thus, should not be censored.

"NSW Young Labor supports individual discretion and choice with respect
to the internet, rather than censoring the world wide web and its content."

Further embarrassment lurks in the testing plan for the internet filter
now being tacked together by the government. According to a response
sent to a member of the Australian Whirlpool forum
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-r....42#r837 ,
the test will not actually involve any live customers. The letter explains:

"In consultations with ISPs, concerns have been raised that filtering a
blacklist beyond 10,000 URLs may raise network performance issues,
depending on the configuration of the filter. The pilot will therefore
seek to also test network performance against a test list of 10,000 URLs.

"This will be a closed network test and will not involve actual
customers. The list of 10,000 sites will be developed by the technical
organisation assisting the Department on the pilot, which has access to
lists of this size. As this test is only being performed to test the
impact on network performance against a list of this size, and actual
customers are not involved, the make-up of the list is not an issue."

In a well-argued piece that our own internet censors over at the
Internet Watch Foundation could possibly learn from, /Ars/ author and
former ISP techie Iljitsch van Beijnum
http://arstechnica.com/authors.ars/iljitsch writes
http://arstechnica.com/news.ar....il.html :

"There's no way to build a filter box that can filter all the URLs where
porn is hosted throughout the internet. A DNS-based filter that helps
naive users avoid being confronted with explicit content would probably
work to a certain degree. An IP-based filter for a small amount of very
illegal content ... may also work. But anything more ambitious than that
is certain to fail; either it won't work very well, or it will bankrupt
the ISPs".

Piling on the government€™s woes, opposition is now moving off the web
and onto the streets. Protests are planned to take place on Saturday
December 13 in all States: in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth,
Adelaide and Hobart. Event details can be found on the Stop the Clean
Feed website http://www.stopthecleanfeed.com/. ®

*
* comments
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008....omments

[Torurot]

Aussie convicted over Simpsons sex pics

'My butt does not deserve a website'

By John Oates €¢

Posted in Law, 8th December 2008 12:47 GMT

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12...supreme_court/

An Australian man has lost his appeal against child pornography charges for possessing images of the Simpsons characters having sex.

The Supreme Court of New South Wales upheld a lower court's decision which found him guilty of possessing child pornography. .....................

[Torurot]

Oz net censorship apparatus to target BitTorrent

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12...ia_bittorrent/

Peer to government filter, and then possibly to peer

By Chris Williams 22nd December 2008 13:47 GMT

The national web censorship apparatus being built by the Australian
government will also include technology to restrict peer-to-peer
traffic, according to the minister responsible for the plan.

Until today it had been thought that what opponents have called the
"great Aussie firewall" - in a nod to Chinese internet censorship -
would target only data transmitted over HTTP or HTTPS.

In response to suggestions by commenters on his blog that censoring web
content would drive more peer-to-peer traffic, broadband minister
Stephen Conroy wrote
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communi...._bother :
"The Government understands that ISP-level filtering is not a 'silver
bullet'. We have always viewed ISP-level filtering as one part of a
broader government initiative for protecting our children online.

"Technology is improving all the time. Technology that filters
peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated
that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial."

Conroy didn't offer any further detail on how BitTorrent traffic will be
"filtered" during the trials, which are set
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communi....e_pilot
to run during the first half of 2009 with volunteer ISPs. They will
filter websites against a blacklist for a minimum of six weeks.

In the UK ISPs use a blacklist of "child porn" websites maintained by
the Internet Watch Foundation, an industry-backed group rather than
government organisation. The recent climbdown
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12...erses_wikiban/ over its
censoring of a Scorpions album cover on Wikipedia demonstrated the
pitfalls of even a self-regulatory approach. The Australian plan
proposes much more government influence.

Prime minister Kevin Rudd's Australian Labor government has committed
AUS$125.8m over four years to what it calls "cyber-safety measures". The
great Aussie firewall is the centrepiece of the initiative, and has
provoked strong opposition.

Hundreds of protestors gathered in major Australian cities last week
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008....rotests ,
and some in the country's internet industry have derided the plans too.
In November, Michael Malone, boss of ISP iiNet, told the Sydney Morning
Herald: "They're not listening to the experts, they're not listening to
the industry, they're not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard
numbers will actually help." He pledged to take part in the pilot to
help demonstrate that the system would be ineffective.

Conroy's offhand announcement today that peer-to-peer traffic will be
filtered is likely to add criticism of the Australian government from
the filesharing community to that being voiced by free speech
campaigners and the internet industry. ®

* comments
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12...rent/comments/

[Road Runner]

I have thought for a long time that whenever politicians create a new law it should apply only to them for the first 10 years and any penalties applied to them should be double those applied to the rest of the people.

The more I read of this preposterous, expensive and ill judged plan the more I think I'm right.

RR.

[manarak]

tittytainment.

the future of the industry lies in the following businesses:
- producing low quality inert food
- energy/water supply
- entertainment
- surveillance techniques and law enforcement

We can see this trend every day now.

[Torurot]

Here's another update to the never ending saga of "think of the children".

Aussie internet-net will be drawn wider


Comms minister expands on site blacklist

By John Ozimek €¢ Get more from this author
Posted in Law, 25th February 2009 13:48 GMT

The Australian government is already planning to block legal internet
content when its "great firewall
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11...ssie_internet/ eventually
goes live. That is the fear expressed by some of the most trenchant
critics of this scheme, including Senators Simon Birmingham
http://www.aph.gov.au/SEnate/senator...ors.asp?id=H6X
(for the Liberal Party) and Scott Ludlam
http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/senator...ors.asp?id=I07
(for the Greens) following another shift in emphasis by Communications
Minister Stephen Conroy in evidence to the Environment, Communications
and the Arts committee on Monday.

The Australian government launched a trial of its filtering software on
11 February, in association with a number of ISPs, including Primus,
Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1. The focus for
this trial was "illegal sites" under the Broadcasting Services Act.

Last October, in evidence to the committee (pdf)
http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/senate...tee/S11346.pdf , Senator
Conroy was at pains to stress that only material that is currently
illegal would be blocked under "mandatory filtering". Given the chance
to repeat this assertion on Monday, the Senator did not do so, stating
instead that although the trial was based on sites hosting illegal
content, decisions on what would actually be filtered would be taken "on
the basis of the trial".

A part of the problem lies in the piecemeal way in which material is
censored in Australia. Policing of online material is carried out by the
Australian Communications and Media Authority
http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/LANDING/pc=INTERNET_MAIN . A spokeswoman for
ACMA addressed the committee and explained that they would seek to block
"any online content that is classified RC or X18+ by the classification
board€”I will come to what that means in a moment€”and content which is
classified R18+ and not subject to a restricted access system".

In practice, that definition can include actual sex between consenting
adults, as well as material that might quite legally be bought in a
newsagent or adult shop. However, the focus for their blacklist remains
child abuse material ACMA recently sealed an agreement with the UK€™s
Internet Watch Foundation http://www.iwf.org.uk/ (IWF), giving them
access to the IWF€™s block list.

/El Reg/ spoke with Senator Ludlam. He was not sure that the government
had shifted the goalposts €“ as they had never really said where they
were situated. His major concern is that although the Government are
testing with a current blacklist of around 1300 websites, the fact that
they are testing a much larger list seems to indicate the direction of
their thinking on the issue.

He said: "The ACMA list takes in 1300 sites: the broader list extends to
10,000. But there is also talk of dynamic filtering, according to
content and categories: the use of computer-driven algorithms to
establish categories, rather than any human insight into what may be
blocked.

"That is when under and over-blocking occurs €“ and our real concern is
the way in which they are testing such material whilst being ambiguous
as to their real objectives."

Senator Birmingham also condemned the government€™s lack of clarity. He
worried that a scheme that was originally positioned as being about
child safety had evolved, since the election, into something much broader.

"Since the election, Senator Conroy has mixed his language between those
earlier versions related to child safety and far more restrictive
comments about illegal content," he said. "It is little wonder so many
concerns are running rife about the Government€™s intentions.

"Most recently, in Senate estimates this week, Senator Conroy again
shifted his language, moving to talk about the comparable classification
codes for other media and how they are interpreted in regard to the
existing ACMA blacklist. This does present a possibility of capturing
content that is restricted (ie €“ to adults) but not illegal.

"What is desperately needed in this policy area is clarity. Senator
Conroy must explain precisely what it is that he intends to restrict
access to. His failure to do so is the cause of most of his troubles,
with many people justifiably assuming the worst.

"While I have grave misgivings about the effectiveness and value of any
mandatory ISP level filtering, at a minimum he must confirm that banned
content will purely be that which would be illegal for anyone to view in
any medium. The internet must not burdened with censorship that is even
tighter than that in other mediums. To do so would be even greater
lunacy than mandatory ISP filtering is in the first place."

At least in this week€™s hearings, Senator Conroy dropped his earlier
attempts to tar those opposed to his plans as closet paedophiles with an
interest in looking at paedophilic material. "There is a very strong
case for blocking RC or €˜refuse classification€™ material that includes
child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed
instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that
advocates the doing of a terrorist act," he said.

The change in Government language was attributed by Senator Ludlam at
least in part to the very public campaign drawing attention to the
government€™s plans and dragging the issue out into the harsh light of
day. He said: "This can only be a good thing, and for this, thanks are
owed to the online community, who have been quick to respond and
determined in their reaction." ®

*
* comments
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02..._net/comments/

[Torurot]

More in the never ending saga

Aussie firewall blocks Wikileaks

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03...all_wikileaks/
What's that Skippy? There's bad stuff on the internet?
By John Oates €¢ Posted in Government, 18th March 2009 10:56 GMT

The Great Australian Firewall has claimed another victim - some pages of Wikileaks have been added to the blacklist of websites which Australians are not allowed to look at.

The reason for the block is that Wikileaks published a list of websites banned by the Danish government. Australian websites which link to the pages face the threat of a A$11,000 fine.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki....eb_2008

The move is part of a trial masterminded by Communications minister Stephen Conroy to test technology to block sites considered unsuitable for Australians. The idea is that there will be two lists of approved websites - one for children and one for adults.

The plan was already looking increasingly ludicrous http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03...a_link_banned/ when an anti-abortion website was added to the list after a complaint. Although unpleasant - the page including apparent pictures of aborted foetuses - it was not illegal child abuse imagery.

Popular broadband discussion forum Whirlpool was threatened with fines because one of its users posted a link to the page. Conroy had previously claimed that only illegal child sexual abuse content would be included on the list.

Aussie ISPs have also railed against the idea, warning it will be expensive and ineffective, and could end up slowing internet access for everyone. ®

*
* comments here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009....omments
*