Australia website black out | Hacker News Reader

Australia website black out

internetblackout.com.au

89 pointsfs11118 comments

Protest against censorship in Australia.

It would be cool if their script could blackout the participating sites only for visitors from Australia. I wouldn't do this to all my visitors, but I might do it for the small fraction of Aussie visitors.

I'd deploy this more if the copy weren't aimed solely at Australians; which it shouldn't be as globalisation means if you're not an Australian, Australia is just a test-case for wherever you happen to be.

It would be nice for someone to provide a script which did this on rota (or a single date) for all countries with i18n for each of those countries outlining their own censorship laws, including UK, France, etc.

Yes, after deploying it on 2 sites I'm thinking of taking it down and "doing my own thing" because it's just going to baffle non-Australians.

Australia is just a test-case for wherever you happen to be

Too right. As an Aussie I've long since learned to stop gloating over the latest inanities out of Canada, the UK, and USA because grim experience has shown that it's just a matter of time before the remainder embrace whatever moronic "innovation" one of them implements. It's like the politicians in each country, being completely deaf to the actual wishes of their electorate, simply try and outdo the others' misguided policies in a perverse "keeping up with the Joneses" kind of dynamic.

This can and will happen everywhere.

Could always do it off geoip, for example in php:

$loc=geoip_record_by_name($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

if($loc['country_code'] == 'au') {

    // echo out js

}

I think Internet censorship is great, because it pushes technologies like Bittorrent and Tor into the mainstream, which improves those technologies. Every time someone uses one of those tools to do something silly like download a song or look at pictures of 17-year-old-girls, we are getting closer and closer to an Internet that the governments can't meddle with. When information can flow freely without consequence from the organizations in power, society can advance. Imagine how much more useful information will end up on Wikileaks when the leaker can truly be anonymous and safe from the established power structure their action is hurting. It will be very good for society as a whole. (And there is the whole issue of "Tor is just for child pornographers". When you have to use it to see the New York Times, nobody will think that anymore.)

Anyway, Internet censorship is just something that looks good in the headlines, but it is not a real issue. These technical measures are easy to get around, and will keep getting easier. (When I was in China, I just ssh'd to my home machine to browse websites that the Great Firewall blocked. Oh yeah, damn the global nature of the Internet...)

I want what you say to be true, but what happens when governments simply say that encryption is illegal (e.g. "It's the only way to fight the terrorists!", "To support encryption is to support child porn!")? If any ISP would drop your connection immediately if it saw anything it even thought was encryption what would you do?

Personally I think the only solution will be peer-to-peer devices [1], but we couldn't do that with software only as the phone companies have already shown they couldn't be trusted for something like this [2].

[1] If you're familiar with the "one laptop per child" project then you can see what I mean. Every device will peer up with any devices it can see, so your network is simply all your peers plus all their peers (recursive). This can be attacked too, but it lacks the single point of failure that our current ISP oriented networks have.

[2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/wsj-nokia-and-sieme...

It's easy, you hide your crypto in innocent-looking communication.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Will governments ban photo-sharing sites? Probably not. So your encrypted messages can still be distributed.

Also, banning cryptography will mean that online banking, VPN access, ssh, remote desktop, etc., etc. will no longer be possible. So I doubt this will ever happen.

>Will governments ban photo-sharing sites?

No, but that's a horrible way of communicating. I can't image a future where people have complex programs to decode pictures and re-encode them to post to innocent looking sites. Plus, how are average people going to get these programs in the first place without being busted?

I think a better method might be to create a big complex MMO that everyone plays that happens to have a news forum inside it somewhere. Then the data doesn't have to be encrypted per se, but it would be harder to see from outside and wouldn't be complex for users to participate in.

>Also, banning cryptography will mean that online banking, VPN access, ssh, remote desktop, etc., etc. will no longer be possible. So I doubt this will ever happen.

I wouldn't have to become impossible, it would simply have to be changed in such a way that the government can always see all communications.

As I say, I hope you're right, but as a programmer with a background in network engineering I don't see anything (outside of P2P) that couldn't easily be stopped.

I had a long and detailed argument about this, with someone who I would consider mostly rational. They just can't see the problem with internet censorship, because TV, Movies, Newspapers and Games are all censored, and theer is some deplorable sites on the internet I think don't have any benefit to anyone. Free speech always involves allowing people to say things you don't like or agree with, but ultimately the good outweighs the bad.

My line is (and will always be) that hidden censorship is the thin edge of the wedge for greater control, and that a faulty technology easily circumvented is pointless. I also have a large problem with any government of any kind telling me how my family should spend it's time, when there is no externality to the activity. But the argument I had really opened my eyes to how the general public (and thus politicians) see this issue. And because of this, I think the filter is coming whether we like it or not. Because tech-literate educated people make up a fraction of the voting public, I fear this is going to happen.

Oh, and I'm not willing to black out my site. I'd hate to think what it would do to my conversion rate.

I think arguing against all censorship is doomed because people will always come up with examples that are very hard to argue with. For example, "what if someone puts detailed plans to make a nuclear bomb on the internet"? Would you really argue nothing should be done to prevent that?

What is really the problem here is the method. We can usually all agree that censorship must be an exception, not the rule. In fact, we can usually agree that in a democracy we have a set of important principles without which the pillars that support the democracy itself and the freedom of people within it will break down:

a) We try as hard not to censor as we can.

b) We try everything except censorship before we try censorship

c) Even then, we censor only when such censorship has a provable chance of preventing the serious harm that we have identified must be prevented

Filtering the internet fails all of these.

Good on the Aussies for making a stand!!!

You're welcome. Shame that we have to.

Too True!!!

Too easy, mate!

I think you shouldn't do "modal HTML dialog boxes" neither for evil nor for good.

I would do this for a day, but not for 5.

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