First, China. Next: the Great Firewall of... Australia? | Hacker News Reader

First, China. Next: the Great Firewall of... Australia?

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30 pointsMikeCapone18 comments

As someone just getting started with my own small tech company I find this quite alarming. I particularly find the technical cluelessness of senator Conroy the most disturbing thing. With technical absolutes that the filter will be ineffectual and easily bypassed and an impediment to broadband speeds it seems to be just ignored and the technological costs are treated as malleable when they're not. My main fear is that when this is found to not be effective protecting children or stemming child porn it won't be removed, rather will be extended and creep deeper and deeper into our infrastructure.

It just means whenever I look for hosting, internet services etc it means I'm already deliberately using services not based in Aus which I think will be a long term trend and detriment to the technology industry here. Just adding latency to any service as it has an extra few hops through the filter is a cost I wouldn't expect customers to bare.

The impact on Australia's technical reputation I think is the major thing. Previously travelling a bit and being involved in a US-AUS acquisition; Australians tended to be pretty well respected technologically, and with this, I fear that we're going to have that reputation quashed and look like luddites.

I plan on writing a series of letters to the ministers and chronicling the results if anyone's interested. I also encourage any other fellow aussies to do the same. Here's some good tips on writing letters to parliamentarians and get a good chance of reply http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/lobby.html and this one for the more subversive http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/16/dont-waste-your-time-was...

Hopefully, adding "Australia is rapidly becoming an international laughingstock" to the list of reasons to drop this stupid law will convince Conroy. I doubt it, though; "it won't work", "most people oppose it" and "it's on shaky legal ground" don't seem to have convinced him.

This was inevitable, this isn't going to be the aberration, this will be the norm. There will be no laughing, there will be other governments thinking 'why aren't we doing that'. There will be the Daily Mails declaring a breakdown in law because of our failure to legislate. (The Daily Mail being the popular conservative newspaper in the UK, substitute with your regional equivalent).

Censorship to TV, to Movies, to CDs, to all forms of media has long happened because most societies, irrespective of our personal beliefs as hackers, libertarians, free thinkers, believe there are lines that should not be crossed.

To lambast the list itself is purely pedantic, to despairingly declare 'why a dental surgery?' without speculating that it had probably been hacked and was hosting something distasteful is pathetic. We know exactly how vulnerable the web is, we know how many sites get hacked like that all the time. How easy it is to hide stuff.

Did we all seriously believe the wild west of the web would continue as it has?

My honest assessment is that we have been living in a censor less utopia only because the web was initially too small and minor and too hard to understand for legislature. Everything was moving too fast. The microscope is finally turning to it and the Iceland's will be the minority, not the majority.

And ultimately, for purely tax receipts and business reasons, those lines that can't be crossed will include copyright violations.

I mean look at the quote in the piece "Nobody likes it," says Scott Ludlam, a senator from the Australian Greens Party.

The Green Party? That's the best they could come up with? If you are being truly objective, that's almost as bad as quoting the BNP saying that no-one likes immigration or the KKK saying no-one likes blacks. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but Greens are pretty far on the left-wing of politics.

Australia's heading to an election later this year and with the series of missteps by the Rudd/Labor camp (mining tax, education revolution, dodgy insulation implementation) it's likely that the greens will hold the balance of power in the senate, so if the greens don't like it, there's a fair chance it won't make it into legislation.

I'd say the Australian greens are closer to the democratic party in the US or the liberal democrats in the UK. So I'd put them center left on average.

I'd say the Australian greens are closer to the democratic party in the US or the liberal democrats in the UK. So I'd put them center left on average.

Um, no.

The Australian Labor party would be on the center-left wing of the US Democratic party. Even the strong right wing faction of the Australian Labor party is well to the left of the "Blue Dog" Democrats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition). For example, one member of the right wing faction of the Labor party is the federal health minister (Nicola Roxon - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Right#In_Victoria), and her biggest policy is a take over of state-run health systems by the federal government. No blue dogger would support that, and I doubt it would get majority support within the US Democratic party.

Both Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan are right faction members (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Right#In_Queensland), and they came up with the mining tax! That isn't exactly a centralist policy (by US standards anyway)!

The Greens are well to the left of Australian Labor on both social and economic issues. I suspect they are close to the UK Liberal Democrats on social issues, but to the left of them on economic issues.

I guess what I was trying to point out is that they're not the crazy greens social enviro anarchist party that you'd tend to think of if you heard of the 'greens' for the first time (generally). They're 'closer' but I agree I wouldn't consider them equivalent or overlapping on an absolute scale. The US center being quite different from the Aus center of course, but normalising across countries is bound to result in a loss of direction.

I do wonder if voting wasn't so constrained to party lines what we'd end up with though.

I agree that they aren't a crazy greens social enviro anarchist party, but I think many people might be surprised just how left wing they are. Their economic policies include things like:

only allowing losses from an investment to be offset against income from the same investment;

introducing a tax on extreme wealth applied to the wealthiest 5% of people.

return the company tax rate to 33% and broaden the company tax base by reducing tax concessions.

etc etc

http://greens.org.au/policies/sustainable-economy/economics

Having said that, I'll probably be voting green (and have before). Not sure about my preferences, though.

I wish there was a socially progressive, economically centralist party in Australia. Pity the Australian Democrats collapsed.

Actually, several Conservative MPs and at least one Government MP have spoken out against the Internet filter. I don't know why they chose to go with a Greens Senator.

There has been Internet censorship in Australia for some time. What is at issue here is mandatory filtering. The current regime is summarized here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australi...

"99% of the 88,645 people who responded to the survey said they were against the Internet filter" Perhaps the percentage is less for a random sample, only 90% maybe. It doesn't help to use numbers from an obviously flawed data collection method to support the cause.

True, that number of responses is unlikely to have come from a 'proper' polling company, where samples of only a few thousand are used. So it's most likely an online or activist-driven poll, which is hardly a representative or random sample.

Edit: Re-read the section which noted it was an online poll for one of the larger newspapers (SMH). Hardly reliable as representative of the population.

China says they built the Great Firewall to stop child porn, foreign-manipulated political views, etc. But a year ago, they extended the blocks to entire sites, e.g. all of Blogspot, Google Groups, and Youtube, not just the specific pages dealing with taboo subjects, like they do with Wikipedia. Obviously aimed at the company that runs those sites. Australia could go down the same road.

And they have now just unblocked pornsites(I know you said childporn, but plain old regular porn is also illegal here, and is one of the main reasons for the GFW).

Sites such as redtube etc. were blocked until about a month ago. They've all been unblocked for some reason.

Yep good point RC refused classification is typically anything above R. So for example a porn store owner was just jailed for selling gay porn http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2927840.htm . RC != childporn and is quite broad, so if it is the bar quite a lot could be filtered and caught up in it. I'm sure some content would definitely be RC on youtube for example and with the general malaise of large swathes of the public service IT; I wouldn't put it past a ham fisted approach that catches up quite a lot.

Was this on your connection? AFAIK none of this is blocked and no one was actively filtering. What ISP are you with?

To my knowledge content which is Refused Classification (RC) is illegal to sell in Australia, however it is not illegal to own such material.

Here is an interesting link regarding the black hole of material which is refused classification.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10128

A pertinent quote being: With Refused Classification, Australia has a category that is not illegal, but the government would prefer that we thought it was.

I think he was talking about China.

I doubt it. Australia has an implied freedom of political communication (per the Lange and Coleman v Power cases). This law is on shaky legal ground already. Blocking entire sites will make it more likely that the law will be struck down.

It would also be more politically risky.

No doubt they could try - it's technically possible - but I think they wouldn't.

I agree that the fact that this law could be abused in such a way is a compelling objection to it.

Political sites in Australia have already been refused classification (ie, would be blocked).

There was a candidate in the recent South Australian election who ran on an anti-abortion platform who's website was later refused classification. See http://lifenetwork.org.au/_bpost_2642/Australian_Government_...

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