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Comment by gasull | Hacker News Reader

FTA: Currently, it is not illegal for internet users in Australia to click on the sites found on the web blacklist. The people targeted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) are webmasters linking out to the sites that the government have flagged up as inappropriate.

This could all change, however, if a mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme is implemented – something that is being debated at the moment.

In case any Australian is reading this, you can bypass Internet censorship with Tor: http://www.torproject.org/

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>In case any Australian is reading this, you can bypass Internet censorship with Tor: http://www.torproject.org/

Or VPN'ing through your VPS, googling for "start using CGIproxy", using an online translator, Google cache, archive.org, etc. See http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15013 for as much info on this matter as you should ever need.

Or here's something that works on a ton of machines, with no major rocket science necsessary:

1. ssh -D1080 username@host 2. change proxy settings to have http traffic go through a proxy running on port 1080 3. enjoy.

I've always used the ssh -D proxy as a SOCKS proxy, not a HTTP proxy. It works well, though, and it's dead simple to set up.

So, they're only going after "webmasters", rather than the rest of us, who are purely passive consumers of information. That's an incredibly archaic thing for them to say, and it shows that they really don't get it.

There is no hard distinction between the people who make content online and the people who view it. If someone posts a comment on an Australian forum that links to Wikileaks, who gets fined? The person running the forum, who can't possibly police such things? The person who posted the link, who may be identified only by a username? Can Australia's policies deal with an indignant storm of linking to forbidden web sites? A thousand culprits, and not a webmaster to be found in the whole bunch!

The people writing the laws still think of the Internet as television 2.0, as a broadcast medium.

The most important thing here its the censorship. Brainwashing has become very difficult since the internet showed up.

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