I can already see
Whack-1-Out-A-Week Jacqui Smith's tongue hanging out. All the way down to her
Aussie ISP pulls out of firewall trial
iiNet, Australia's third largest Internet Service Provider, is withdrawing from the government's censorship trial. Communications minister Stephen Conroy is pushing ahead with a trial of filtering technology to clean up the internet as seen by Aussie citizens. Conroy claimed the list of banned websites were all related to …
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Monday 23rd March 2009 14:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Straight talkers
Strictly speaking, not EVERYONE is repulsed by child pornography, otherwise the issue wouldn't exist would it?! But in general, you have to love these aussies' tendency to say what they think and not pussyfoot about: calling the minister the "worst in history" is certainly not trying to dress things up is it??
Good stuff :-)
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Monday 23rd March 2009 14:49 GMT Chronos
Malone is correct.
"Malone said the vast majority of child sexual abuse content was distributed using peer-to-peer networks - untouched by the Australian government planned blacklist."
It is this that is the unforeseen result of censorship: Take away the right of access from people, and you drive them onto such things as TOR and darknets, which has the unwanted side-effect of making it harder to track such online child abuse due to the sudden hike in what should be legitimate content burying the very traffic you're trying to stop and forcing these technologies to expand to cope with increased usage. It also makes the technology more robust and legitimises it in the eyes of the general public. They really do seem to be making it difficult for both their law enforcement people to operate efficiently and the general population to support their efforts.
Kudos to iiNet for pointing it out, albeit in a round about way.
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Monday 23rd March 2009 17:07 GMT Rob Crawford
@Chronos
Err I hate to say this but such individuals tend to amongst the 2nd wave to drift to less traceable methods of accessing their material. With the 1st being us 'normal people' who simply value their privacy. You know the wierd sorts who prefer their bills to be inside envelopes to prevent strangers from reading stuff addressed to us.
The great firewall idea doesn't work and anybody with 1/3rd of a clue knows this already. But the stated reason for the blacklisting (and the only one with a vaguely sensible reason for existing) is to stop people from accidently browsing those sites. I won't get into the whole thing of goverment control of information.
The kiddie porn freaks have long since been tunneling (and using p2p) long before any great firewalls or national monitoring systems have been implemented. They may be sick puppies but they (on the whole) aint as dumb as rocks.
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Monday 23rd March 2009 23:41 GMT Charles
At this rate...
They're gonna outlaw all encryption since encryption prevents the po-lice from seeing what you're doing. "Nothing to hide" and all that. And as for their legitimate uses? Want to shop? Go to a store. Want to bank? Go to the bank. Your grandparents did it the old fashioned way and never had to worry about identity theft. Why should you be no different?
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Tuesday 24th March 2009 10:37 GMT Lindsay
Re: Good to see
The fact that iiNet saw fit to involve themselves in the process in the first place is cause for concern. They knew what they were doing, so they deserve no applause for having realised what bad PR it was and abandoning it.
Why would you continue to give them your custom as opposed to, for example, an ISP that refused to be involved and made its position clear from the outset?
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
