Australia to review effectiveness of ISPs' copyright-defending website blocks

Typical

Just goes to show that the legislation enacted by our politicians is as effective as they are... (good thing for us in this case).

not good enough!

I demand that the government enact legislation to prevent our public road network from being used to transport stolen goods!

What do you mean it can be bypassed by throwing a tarpaulin over the trailer?

Is the Oz gov't a fan of Spock? "The (copy)rights of the few outweigh the needs of piracy for the many"

Right to an income - don't think so.

Re: "... people who could demonstrate their income had been reduced by xxx..."

Welcome to the real world, where many peoples income have been reduced by competition, productivity improvements, asset stripping, greedy management etc since the beginning of time.

Right to the opportunity to earn an income - no problem.

Build a wall round the country - it'll be even more effective.

After all, it's the modern solution to everything.

For role models, see China, Israel, Saudi, US and 65 others according to the Daily Hate.

As a bonus, it'll provide jobs for the unemployed musicians and actors...

Times, they are a changing....

For most of our history, someone with a bit of talent might be able to escape the drudgery of mine or paddock and work in the Baron's court.

Then we had a short crazy period where these people became demigods, rich beyond all common sense. And that happened because technology allowed selling of their talent on media. Maybe that short crazy period is over ? Good !

Technology gives, technology takes away. Adapt.

Silly, unenforceable and unwanted laws are not the answer.

Ah, is that why....

...I was wondering why I could still access Pirate Bay, just thought they hadn't enacted the change yet, not that I had my DNS set to Google anyway as Dodo were hijacking my mis-typed url's and performing searches from them (then injecting relevant ads by the looks of things).

Google have been far less intrusive, and, as a company, Dodo really need to look at themselves if that phrase can be levelled at them...

"Effectiveness" is code

Note that the spokesperson is saying that the future review is into the "effectiveness" of the section. In Australian Public Service policy language "effectiveness" is a very different thing from "efficiency". "Effectiveness" is how well the mechanism works _without regard_ to other factors, such as expense or the robustness of the Australian Internet.

This would signal a substantial policy change from the current s115a, which requires the judge to weigh up the competing interests when approving a proposed injunction to block access to the "online location". That is, the legislators desired website blocking to be "efficient" rather than merely "effective". Therefore "effectiveness" should not be the primary criteria for evaluation of the legislation.

It would have been useful for Simon to have questioned the spokesperson on their choice of words. If the response was written then the expectation is that words hold their usual meaning.

“A future review will consider whether the implementation of these website blocking decisions is operating effectively, and whether improvements are necessary.”

You don't need an expensive review of this. It isn't very effective and can be bypassed by changing DNS settings

Why bother with Google's DNS?

I just configure a script* on my systems to grab "https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone" once a week, dumps it into unbound's zone directory, then reloads the zone. Essentially making them a local root server.

Yeah, it adds a little extra load to the DNS servers for the various domains since my machines aren't taking advantage of the big DNS server's caches, but that also means I'm not susceptible to someone poisoning those caches. I'm also free from advertisers re-writing NXDOMAINs to instead point to their crap.

[*] by script, I mean a crontab entry for "curl https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone > /var/nsd/zones/master/root.zone && pkill -HUP nsd"

But Turnbull and my VPN

I swear I remember Malcolm saying something about VPN's being totally legit (for maintaining privacy) and not being a target of legislation creep, please don't tell me a politician would lie or answer in safe, 'we'll change our minds later' legal speak......... what's the world coming to!