Posts Tagged idiots
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.
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?”
Why the iiNet case scares me and why movie and music publishers need to evolve to survive
Posted by Aaron in Random ramblings on April 9th, 2009
It scares me because iiNet have done nothing wrong, despite claims by the AFACT that they “allowed distribution of copyrighted material”. iiNet cannot, by law, monitor what it’s users do with their connections without a court order. The AFACT seem to be assuming that because they believe a user is downloading movies or music via bittorrent, iiNet should know too. After all, they are the ones providing the internet connection. However, conclusive proof needs to be given, and unless iiNet monitors its user’s connections, it cannot confirm or deny any claims by AFACT. So iiNet rightly forwarded the allegations to the police. The AFACT, however, do not like this. They want iiNet to disconnect infringing users. But iiNet does not want to lose customers on a baseless accusation, and they cannot comfirm the AFACT’s claims without breaking the law. How can anyone expect them to act any differently?
The number one reason it scares me, however, is if iiNet loses the case it could mean that ISPs will be forced to disconnect users if they are accused of downloading copyrighted material, regardless of whether they have or not. I don’t want my internet disconnected just because I connected to a torrent tracker to download perfectly legal data, for example: linux distributions, movies for which copyright has expired, etc.
The AFACT shows just how ignorant they are about how the internet works. If they block one medium of distribution, many more will arise from the ashes; look what happened with Napster: it was taken down, but the came Kazaa, and Limewire and the gnutella network, and bittorrent, and so on. The industry needs to adapt to the Internet age if it is to maintain the profits it has supposedly been losing to piracy. It is its unwillingness to let go of past business models that has got it into its present mess.
It looks like ACMA really do have no idea about the Internet
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship on March 26th, 2009
From this, it looks like ACMA haven’t actually looked into circumvention techniques for bypassing ISP-level filtering. They ignore VPNs and HTTP/SOCKS proxies (which are ineffective against PC-level filters) not to mention SSH tunnels or tor (also ineffective against PC-level filters) nor any other kind of tunneling protocol…
So, people with servers in the US, you stand to gain a great deal of money if you were to maybe sell access to a VPN or proxy (web, SOCKS or HTTP) that you have set up on your server…
After all, the Streisand effect will definitely take much greater hold after the sites on the blacklist are actually blocked
Copyright… Theft?
Posted by Aaron in Copyright, Random ramblings on March 26th, 2009
How can you steal copyright? This makes no sense whatsoever. I could walk into a shop and steal a DVD (copyrighted material) but the penalties I would face would have nothing to do with whether or not the content on the DVD was copyrighted. Conversely, downloading copyrighted material from the internet is not theft, because i am simply making a copy of data that exists elsewhere. This is copyright infringement. They are 2 very different things. So when I see a name like AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) I believe that it is simply an attempt to confuse the issue. I’m certainly confused…
Conroy’s finally said something…
Posted by Aaron in Internet censorship on March 25th, 2009
Conroy seems to be changing tack a little :No more accusations about opponents’ supporting CP.
But as my posts on whirlpool have indicated, he is digging himself into a hole. I still have several arguments against the filter:
- The list does contains political content and could be used to limit free speech
- The filter will have an impact on general internet performance
- The government cannot achieve its goals with a filter
Now Conroy has come out and publicy lied about the political content on the list: “It is completely untrue that the leaked blacklist contains political content. This is a list which contains sites that promote incest, rape, child pornography and child abuse.”
Nuh-uh, Conroy. Sites expressing any view on euthenasia or abortion are political in nature and there are sites expressing political views about both on the blacklist. The list absolutely contains political content.
I won’t post links to either the sites I’m talking about or the blacklist, as I don’t want this site to be added too.
However, if you’re curious I’ll give you a hint, if you’re curious, crikey has a recent article about a euthenasia site on the blacklist and wikileaks hosts the leaked ACMA blacklist. That should be enough for an internet-savvy person to verify my information.
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.