Australia - Welcome to the Orwell continent | Hacker News Reader

Australia - Welcome to the Orwell continent

computerworld.com.au

61 pointsdanielh31 comments

I remember an article where a guy got a hold of the Finnish police's list of child pornography sites that were blocked at the ISP level by law. The guy decided to go through all the sites to see whether they were indeed child pornography, and he found that 95% of them were just normal porn sites operating legally. It turned out that the list bore resemblance to the US terror watch list insofar that it was primarily false positives, it seriously hurt legal companies, you got no notification of the fact that you were placed on it, and that it was almost impossible to get off it.

This begs the question: Who will guard the guards?

> Who will guard the guards?

The Free Marke.. Hahahahaha, jk. The People, like always. Unfortunately The People are typically dosing while on guard duty.

Well the free market is made up of The People? I think that's close enough.

Unfortunately even the most zealous of the "free market solves everything" advocates don't think that the free market can solve the problem of government regulation.

Which is why free market types spend most of their time complaining about government regulation, the one problem the free market can't solve on its own.

Oh, the free market can solve that too, you just don't want to be around when it happens.

Cryptography safeguards free speech. Off-shore internet gambling companies work hard to get around US government restrictions. Tax shelters have been around for as long as there have been taxes. Hippies grow and sell pot on the black market. The Seasteading Institute is addressing the problem of geographical government monopoly.

Freedom (sometimes) finds a way.

I just don't understand the thinking of anyone who thinks this is a good idea - if, of course, they are thinking at all.

Take all of the bad stuff throughout history that was caused by the balance of power resting in the hands of individuals and compare that the damage caused throughout history by the balance of power being held by the government, and the latter is so much more damaging the two don't even come close.

This filter restricts freedom and moves the balance of power towards the government just that tiny bit more. Of course it's for a good reason - who wants primary school kids looking at porn? Who could be against blocking terrorist training manuals from being accessible (remembering that some people are naive enough to think that such a thing is possible).

But when has any government ever taken away freedoms WITHOUT a good reason? It just doesn't happen. And the prospect of giving government just that little bit more control is frightening.

Even if we completely trust Mr Rudd and the current Australian Government, this is just another governmental power that's open to future governments who may or may not be corrupt to take advantage of.

Of course, I'm sure everyone on here understands this issue at least as well as I do, so I'll shut up now and just say that $5 was taken out of my pocket to fund this, and I am furious.

I don't think you will find such people online. Certainly not the sort of people who could touch type, let alone participate in an online community.

Now you know the big push to "internationalize" the internet -- every nation out there is going to have its own list of approved and non-approved (illegal) sites.

I wonder how long it will take for us to start seeing stories about some of the completely benign sites that the Australian government doesn't want folks to see? Or companies get squashed because they fall on the wrong side of the filter police?

Better still, is it possible for start-ups to purposely bypass the filters? Perhaps this is good news, eh? New line of business opening up -- accessing "bad" sites that aren't really bad. (And I don't mean simple proxy services, more like finding popular commercial sites on the other side of the firewall and being the man-in-the-middle between the two parties. Heck-- you could charge on either, or both, sides of that arrangement)

Crikey. Maybe the new PM speaks Mandarin a little bit too well!

and I bet we have the same Cisco routers that China has, and so it would be trivial to switch on, in terms of technology.

This was dodgy enough when it was opt-out rather than opt-in... Now there might not even be any real opt-out? Fuck off.

Senator Conroy's contact details are here:

http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/contact

I would recommend sending snail mail or email to Conroy's office and/or you local member.

Inability to distinguish between 'this is wrong' & 'this should be illegal.'

And now we have a censored internet.

This doesn't feel like progress. Feels dirty. Feels like the dirty thin edge of a dirty wedge.

Please don't editorialize in titles. That's mentioned in the site guidelines.

You are right, thanks for pointing that out.

"... Australia - Welcome to the Orwell continent ..."

Shouldn't that be Welcome to the "Orwellian" continent? ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

I hope this pushes more innovation in large scale mesh networks.

If they were going to beat this through the legislative process, it would have happened already. It's only a matter of time until the other "free" nations implement the same filtering, using whichever bogeyman is conveniently in vogue.

We need new protocols, designed such that politically unpopular traffic is indistinguishable from "normal use". We need an overlay network that allows entry into the cloud at a myriad of points, defeating network analysis and routing black holes. We need a secure naming system that prevents addresses from being arbitrarily removed by a third party. And we need to make these capabilities seamlessly available to common users who may not even be seeking them out - so that the idea that they're looking at "censored information" doesn't even cross their minds.

Hackers write code that creates internet reality. Get to it!

You have to create something of utility that would need something like this in the first place. Until it has enough utility, it work get popularized and it wont catch on. Look at the bit-torrent crypto arms-race between government and clients. Actually, something like an extended bit torrent would be the thing that would catch on.

Oh, completely. There's already designs and implementations of such things, but unless they're coupled with a useful service, they're not going to see adoption.

The internet has been relatively unencumbered so far. Now that the governments are taking notice and looking to censor it, the demand for useful services based on privacy is only going to grow.

"... The government will iron-out policy and implementation of the Internet content filtering software following an upcoming trial of the technology, according to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy ..."

In September on "Software Freedom Day" which I attended, I happened to catch the tail-end of a talk by Colin Jacobs ~ http://www.efa.org.au/about/board/colin-jacobs/ and Dale Clapperton of "Electronic Frontier Australia" discussing the "Clean feed" testing mentioned in the article ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2871574175/in/set-72157607... The description of the filtering tests was along the lines of - "500 odd test sites, on an internal network (effectively at Ethernet speed)" didn't inspire confidence in the testing of the proposed approach. Access speed will be a real issue. I'm not sure this implementation will be workable.

You can read a description of the blocking in the report, "Mandatory ISP Internet Blocking Plan" here ~ http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory-isp-blocking/

Hmm. My globe has "Oceania" printed just to the right of Australia. Perhaps it was a misprint and meant to go on Australia. (Hint: Oceania was the country in "Nineteen Eighty-Four".)

Technically, the continent of Australia was part of the super-nation Oceania in 1984.

Australia is part of Oceania in most usages of that term (both outside and including 1984):

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

I should point out that after some searching I haven't been able to find any other sources for this.

Terrible news if it is true though. Many people who voted for Rudd would switch sides if this was true.

> Many people who voted for Rudd would switch sides if this was true.

No "many" wouldn't. They'd argue that it isn't happening, that it isn't that bad, and then they'd ignore it. Most will skip steps 1 and 2.

well there goes the neighborhood. Anyone wanna house swap with me?

I would support this... If it also came with the proviso that any politician implicated in sleaze was banned from politics for life.

For the 30 seconds that it will take to break this. This measure is not so much orwellian as it is idiotic and a waste of time. Its sole purpose is to put up a PR stunt and that politicians can get away with using $128 million of taxpayer cash for this is unacceptable.

yeah but with the potential to be a pain in the ass and increasing latency..

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