Archive for category at stupidity
Internet Censorship in Australia… again
Posted by Aaron in Filter Circumvention, Internet censorship, Ranting, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on January 17th, 2010
It is with huge disappointment that I see Conroy still pushing ahead with his brainless attempt to censor the Internet. The policy has morphed slightly, it’s now only blocking “RC” content.
Conroy claims that this is to “bring the Internet in line with other media, like publications, radio, TV and Movies”. However, anyone who knows where the word “Internet” comes from will (hopefully) immediately see the problem: The word “Internet” comes from shortening “Interconnected Network”. The Internet isn’t a media for publication or broadcast. It’s a communications medium like the telephone or postal systems. We don’t “filter” them, so how, exactly, is the “filter” going to bring the Internet in line with similar mediums?
The results of the government’s 12-month-late live pilot were unsurprising, for the most part. After all, the government left it up to Enex to determine what were acceptable success criteria.
As a result, we end up with gems like the claim that a 10% speed reduction is “negligible”. Let me explain why this is just wrong. I have an ADSL2+ Internet connection. Being around 2km from the exchange, I get around 13Mbps. A 10% reduction in speed equates to around 1300kbps, or around 160kB/s. While it is true that this is not much, it does not meet the definition of “negligible”. According to wikipedia: “In engineering, mathematics, physics and similar disciplines, the term negligible refers to the quantities so small that they can be ignored (neglected) when studying the larger effect.”
The result of the test? A success, of course. It was a foregone conclusion, due to their being no success criteria specified. Not to mention that it failed to test the really important things. For example: whether the filter will still be effective in 10 years, when we have 100Mbps internet (the filters weren’t tested above 8Mbps) and are using IPv6 (none of the filters can handle IPv6 traffic, but Enex didn’t even test it), or even if the filterboxes are susceptible to DoS attacks.
Now to explain again why we still shouldn’t go ahead with this:
- The Internet is not a broadcast media like TV or radio, nor a publication like a magazine or newspaper. Trying to classify it as if it is is just stupid.
- The majority of RC content is not illegal to possess or view anyway. It’s only illegal to display (in public) or distribute (within Australia).
- An ISP filter cannot hope to block even a tiny fraction of the RC material on the web. The blacklist will be compiled by a complaints system. Complaints have been shown to take months to process. The current ACMA blacklist currently contains considerably less than 1000 RC URLs (1000 is actually very generous, since the ACMA blacklist contains stuff all the way down to MA15+). There are well over 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique pages indexed by google. If there is only 1000 out of 1,000,000,000,000 URLs on the Internet that are actually RC (0.0000001%), then the problem is so small that there is no need to spend millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars (both taxes and increased ISP fees to cover the cost of implementation) on such a small problem. If there really is so much RC stuff on the web, then such a tiny blacklist, that takes months to add new sites is not going to have any appreciable effect upon people “accidentally stumbling” across it.
- It will not work. Anyone suitably determined is not going to be stopped by a blacklist-based ISP filter anyway. As I have pointed out on this very blog, it is incredibly simple to bypass the majority of filters. The live pilot results confirmed this, showing that none of the products tested were able to block even the majority of circumvention techniques. The Internet is not designed to be censored. There are many, many ways to bypass censorship, and the only way to make it effective is to do what China is doing (cutting itself off from the rest of the Internet) at which point it stops being the Internet.
If Conroy wants to continue with this mad scheme then he should not be surprised when it blows up in his face.
Just in case you thought Conroy knew what he was doing…
Posted by Aaron in Filter Circumvention, Internet censorship, Ranting, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on July 1st, 2009
http://www.privacy.gov.au/internet/tools/#6
I find it a little ironic that the government’s own internet privacy website includes sites that would allow people to bypass its proposed censorship system. Conroy’s view about the ease of bypassing this little farce of a “filter” seems to have been that only the smart, spotty nerds or computing experts will be able to bypass the censorwall. And yet, on a GOVERNMENT SITE, no less, there is a simple-to-understand guide to bypassing it.
Now I know that a mandatory blacklist is pointless
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship, Ranting, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on April 14th, 2009
- The blacklist will contain “almost exclusively RC material”.
- RC material (excluding “child abuse material”) is legal to possess and view within Australia, in addition anything classified is definitely legal to view and possess.
- Child pornography websites rarely exist for more than a couple of weeks.
- The filter is/will be trivial to bypass.
- Bypassing the filter will not be illegal.
These are all facts. Given that adding sites to the blacklist can take months, it will be ineffective at stopping access to the illegal content (child abuse material). In addition, access to any other blacklisted content is not illegal and can be done easily.
The government knows all this, but is pressing ahead nevertheless. I must wonder: Is there something else that the government wishes to do with this filter?
The only thing I can conclude is that the government actually wants scope creep to occur, but won’t say so in public. It wants to silence its political opponents. It wants to stop access to all pornography. It wants to stop so-called “copyright theft” (even though internet filters cannot hope to achieve this). If it didn’t want to do this, it would have no reason to keep the blacklist secret. The blacklist contains “the worst of the worst” no sane person would want to access stuff on it if the blacklist was only CP.
Above all the government wants to be seen to be “doing something” for all the lobby groups screaming out pleas like “won’t somebody think of the children?”
EPIC RAGING RANT TIEM! THIS IS FUCKING RETARDED!!!
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship, Ranting, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on March 13th, 2009
In quick succession, there are 2 more news articles that further reduce my faith in *any* australian government.
This and this are what I am talking about.
Now, I’m NOT FUCKING SURE HOW HARD THIS IS TO UNDERSTAND CONROY. HOW IS THIS A SCARE CAMPAIGN?
The filter
- Has no judicial oversight or appeal
- The blacklist is maintained by an unaccountable government-controlled body?
- You cannot opt-out of this mandatory filter
THESE ARE FACTS! I DO NOT LIKE THESE FACTS. I AM NOT TRYING TO SCARE ANYBODY, JUST TELL THE TRUTH BEHIND YOUR AND CHAIRMAN RUDD’S LITTLE MORAL CRUSADE AGAINST THE INTERNET.
Sorry Conroy Conjob, I can’t have any faith in you filter while you continue to ignore these 3 very valid facts.
It doesn’t help that while you claim that the xFOADx’s anti-abortion page submission was not about political speech, you can’t argue that ACMA’s takedown request wasn’t. There is NO FUCKING REASON TO TAKE DOWN A LINK, BECAUSE IF YOUR FILTER WORKS, PEOPLE WON’T BE ABLE TO GET TO THE PAGE ANYWAY, RIGHT? OH, RIGHT… YOU KNOW THAT THE FILTER WON’T WORK…
I just realised how stupid some people are…
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship, Ranting, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on March 13th, 2009
During a energy-drink fueled all-nighter I had a great idea for a blog post. But I forgot what I was going to write. Here is what I remember: The law is does NOT stop people breaking the law. It seems obvious, but some people don’t seem to realise it (I’m looking at you Clive Hamilton, Conjob, Jim Wallace and Michael Atkinson). Just because there’s a law about something does *not* mean that people CAN’T break it. The point of laws is not to prevent people breaking them. That is the point of criminal courts. The laws themselves are not meant to stop people breaking them. If that was the case, we wouldn’t need the courts for criminal trials. So, making a law like this: “Video Games (that would be) rated R18+ cannot be sold in Australia” or “ISPs must prevent their customers accessing illegal/unwanted content” MISS THE ENTIRE POINT OF HAVING LAWS. Yes, laws can be broken, but that is the responsibility of the one who breaks them and there are consequences for it. THAT is the point of laws.
Jim Wallace’s Lies and Misinformation and the Idiocy of the Mandatory Filter
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship, Ranting, Uncategorized, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on January 29th, 2009
In response to Mark Newton’s factual statement that the ACMA blacklist (the mandatory component of the government’s proposed ISP-level filter) will block legal content including:
- All R18+ and X18+ material that does not have a government-approved age-verification page (none of them have this, currently)
- MA15+ material that is used for commercial purposes
- All RC material (which is legal to own and view privately in most of Australia)
Jim Wallace’s response to this fact is that it is “utter nonsense”. Well Jim, I think you need to do a little more research. These four responses from Senator Stephen Conroy prove that you are wrong and misleading the public, unlike Mark, who states the facts.
Not only that, but who gave you or the government the right to decide what is right for all children in Australia. Household values differ. In some houses, parents might not want their children to have access to internet chatrooms and social networking like facebook or myspace while other parents might be 100% happy to let their children access these types of sites. These sites are possibly harmful to children who ostensibly might run into online predators (a recent study shows that this risk is smaller than was thought by many) but the an ISP-level opt-out filter provides no flexibility to provide for differences in parental values. Surely you aren’t suggesting that your own conservative christian values are the only values that parents have, or worse that those should be the only values that parents should have.
As an adult, I am becoming more and more worried about the future of our internet. If, according the the above blacklist, MA15+ content used for commercial purposes is blocked, does that mean that subscription-based online games such as Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings online, etc. will be blocked? While on the topic of online games I would like to restate that anything (such as a filtercensor) that increases australia’s internet latency is completely unacceptable to me as a gamer. Finally, the mandatory filter is not there to protect children, it is there to prevent access to “prohibited” content. At this task it fails dismally: it can be bypassed in less than 10 minutes by anyone with even a slight understanding of the internet and it doesn’t block the major source of “prohibited” content: peer-to-peer. If my opinion (and the opinion of the majority of internet users) matters at all, scrap the mandatory blacklist. It fails at its task, it cannot succeed. So why have it at all?
Australian Internet Censorship Pt. 2
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship, Ranting, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on January 20th, 2009
This is a continuation of my previous rant about the proposed Australian mandatory ISP-level filtering.
The final problem I have with the filter is how what is blocked is determined. The blacklist is not public. It is not public because it can be bypassed and contains the addresses of illegal material. However, because it is not public, the public can not know what is being blocked. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation. If the blacklist is public, people who want to access the illegal material know where to go when they bypass the filter. If it is not public it raises freedom of speech and censorship issues: What if the government doesn’t only block illegal content, but anything it doesn’t agree with? This is proof that the filter can’t work: If it worked perfectly, the blacklist wouldn’t need to be secret.
Now to address the arguments of the people in support of the filter.
1. Porn is easy to find accidentally on the internet
In my experience porn is actually quite hard to come by unless you go looking for it or for other illegal stuff. This being the case, kids who find porn on the net were looking for it. Implementing a filter won’t help since kids who want to find porn will find it regardless – They generally know a lot more about the net than their parents or Stephen Conroy. Remember the 15-year old who broke the previous government’s filter in 30 minutes?
2. You can find kiddie porn easily on the web
I, who use the internet more than most people my age have not EVER come across kiddie porn on the web. The AFP said that most kiddie porn is transmitted using other protocols (P2P, email, VPN) than the web. The internet and the world wide web are 2 different things. This is further proof that the people who want this filter don’t actually understand the technology.
3. It will help protect children
In addition not blocking the main protocols over which child abuse material is distributed, the filter does not address other major forms of danger to children online: Online predators in chatrooms, cyber-bullying, etc.
Rant now continues:
As I’ve already stated, the blacklist is secret and unavailable under the freedom of information act. And the definition of the “other unwanted material” is hazy at best, including:
- Anything X-rated
- Anything R-rated and, in some cases, MA15+-rated, if it does not have a government-approved age verification page
- Anything that ACMA believe would be rated R, X or RC (refused classification), were it submitted to the OFLC
This is scary because people won’t know if something has been blocked or why. We could see the government blocking anything it doesn’t agree with, possibly including it’s competitors (unlikely, but possible under this plan).
Speed is another issue. In my opinion any delay created by a filter is unacceptable. Why? because a filter which introduces delay is only going to get worse as internet connection technology improves and will need to be upgraded. Many ISPs struggle to maintain quality connections when network utilisation is high without mandatory filtering.
Finally, peer-to-peer filtering. Stephen Conroy has stated that the technology to filter peer-to-peer communications exists and that they are testing this in the so-called “live trial”. Now deep-packet inspection tech does exist, but the processing power required simply to determine the type of a packet (used to throttle peer-to-peer) is already very high. To determine what specific data is being transmitted and then stopping that data being sent is even more difficult, maybe possible with a few megabytes per second and today’s equipment. ISPs today have to deal with gigabytes of peer-to-peer traffic every second. To filter this amount of traffic is, to put it simply, impossible. And there are legitimate uses for peer-to-peer as well. Blizzard pushes it’s patches out to customers via bittorrent, because they simply do not have the bandwidth to send (often 500MB+) patches out to 11 million people in a week. Steam (Valve’s electronic distribution software) uses a peer-to-peer distribution system for a similar reason. Simply put, peer-to-peer is the best way to put large files (eg. HD video) on the internet and its use is only going to increase so destroying its performance in Australia will be a sure-fire way to make sure we are stuck with 20th century internet in the 21st century.
Please, if you read these rants and actually care (and you should) go to http://www.nocleanfeed.com to find out more about the issues surrounding mandatory ISP-level filtering in Australia and how to take action.
/rant
Rant Tiem: Internet Censorship in Australia
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship, Ranting, at stupidity, at the Australian Government on January 13th, 2009
This may or may not be a post that will not be followed up for months but here goes:
Internet Censorship in Australia.
My mum likes the idea of mandatory ISP-level filtering. As people go she’s not the most computer-literate; she doesn’t know the difference between a wireless network connection and an internet connection, for example. I asked her about it and she said: “There’s so much pornography on the internet, there has to be some way of blocking it all.”
Along comes the “honourable” Senator Stephen Conroy with his plan for mandatory ISP-level filtering in Australia. To the uninformed majority, his plan seems great: block all the porn and bad stuff (like child porn) on the internet before it comes into out homes. The problem is, like most great-sounding things, there’s a catch. In this case the “catch” is pretty massive: It won’t work. It can’t work. If it worked, spam would be non-existent the fact that spam still manages to get around the best filters is solid evidence to support that a technological solutions to this kind of problem simply do not exist. The nature of the internet is such that this can’t work: To quote some guy as Sun, “The network treats censorship as damage and routes around it”.
In addition to this major problem, the filtering scheme proposed only filters HTTP. I don’t know exact numbers but I can be fairly sure in saying that OVER 9000% over 60% of internet traffic is Peer-to-Peer. That’s over half the traffic on the internet that this filter will not even touch. Once convinced of this, he comes out and says that technology to filter peer-to-peer exists and may be included. Obviously he and his panel of “industry experts” have no idea of what kind of hardware that is needed to perform deep packet inspection on terabytes (petabytes in the not-too-distant future) of data every day without slowing the entire internet to a crawl (more on this later). “But, ” (they say) “won’t somebody think of the children?”.
Even deep packet inspection is useless agaisnt a VPN or other forms of encrypted traffic, which leads me to the next major problem: The very thing they’re trying to stop – child abuse – will, not aided exactly, but forced even further underground. A law-enforcement approac has resulted in recent arrest of a kiddie-porn ring in Australia. Implementing this filter will only force sich groups further underground, making them even harder to catch. Worse than this: the blacklist of sites, including known kiddie-porn websites WILL be leaked. When tens of thousands of people have access to a secret it WILL be leaked. Then, Australian polititians will be responsible (indirectly, but responsible nevertheless) for aiding child-abusers. People looking for kiddie-porn and other illegal sites – in Australia and around the world) will look at Australia’s leaked blacklist and go to sites on it, using whatever methods they already use to get around filters and remain anonymous.
Now, the speed issue. Any filtering will impact on speed, this is a fact. When a packet hits a major router, the router has nanoseconds to decide where to send it. If it has to first check a blacklist to see if the packet should be blocked, this WILL add latency and latency slows down the internet. Scale this to the billions of packets per minute that pass through major router and you have very large delays. Secondly, Australia’s internet is a joke by world standards. Anything that slows it down anymore is unacceptable. This is the same Senator Conroy who wants to introduce a new high-speed national broadband network (NBN) and yet the “live trials” only require ISPs to test up to 12Mbps. Our internet is currently at 12Mbps+ (in metro areas, anyway) and the NBN should increase this to a maximum of 100Mbps for us to be competitive with other countries (it won’t, but that’s a rant for another day) so testing at anything below this is going to give misleading results at best.
That’s all for now, I’ll continue my rant later, if I can be bothered.
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