Speaking up against our would be soviet overlords.

 

The great firewall of australia is a bipartisan move in australia to erect a firewall similar to china. The rallying call is "for the children", the claimed purpose is to stop child pornography. Any politician who opposes it is labeled a child pornography supporter. One of the chief private proponents of it is a high ranking manager in australian telcom, his boss received a personal letter from the minister of communication to shut him up. (instead they published the letter).

Recently, a law was passed (but quickly repealed) to temporarily suspend free speech rights to blogs in australia due to "their use to spread lies about elected officials during election periods".

The kicker is that when (against their wishes) they were forced to publish the current banlist, it was found to be mostly NOT illegal porn, illegal porn is less than 50%, legal porn makes another big portion, and perfectly legitimate non pornographic sites make the rest. (and a good portion of those don't actually fall under any of the ban categories, seemingly banned by mistake)

the ban list also includes political positions, for example, anti abortion sites are on the ban list. Recently a bill was proposed to add any website that criticizes the deploying of the great firewall of Australia to the banlist.

Oh, it is also easy to bypass, has a 10% false positive rate, a 20% missed negatives rate, and an 80% slowdown. (aka, browsing speed going from 10mbps to 2mbps). And that is on HTTP connections which are the only ones which the government has allowed to be tested as of yet.

 


Comments
on Feb 11, 2010

Sounds like another slippery slope.

on Feb 11, 2010

indeed. or more like the eventual end result of a slippery slope, as they have eroded their rights for years to get to such a sorry state.

on Feb 12, 2010

You know it really amazes me how nations that were so diametrically opposed to socialism are now embracing this ideology. Why do people that are free to choose sell their freedoms away, piecemeal, without a thought. Is this how democracies die?

on Feb 12, 2010

I truly think so.

We get to watch the death of democracies around the world in real time; it is happening right before our eyes.

on Feb 12, 2010

new bit of news:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/pakistan-iran-australia-lets-censor-google.ars

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, the man currently pushing the nation into a broad Internet filtering scheme that would be run by ISPs, gave an interview this week to the TV show Hungry Beast

"What we're saying is, well in Australia, these are our laws and we'd like you to apply our laws," Conroy said. He added, "Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government."

So, the australian government wants google to self censor on their behalf, like it did in china (before pulling out over the issue). Can we expect google to pull out of australia too?

on Feb 12, 2010

I was going to ask you for a link, but I see the Ars Technica one.  I want to send it to some Oz mates of mine for their input!

Thanks

on Feb 12, 2010

So, the australian government wants google to self censor on their behalf, like it did in china (before pulling out over the issue). Can we expect google to pull out of australia too?

Don't get me wrong, I don't want kids exposed to porn, or excessive violence on the internet, but were is personal responsibility, where are the parents? Hey if your 18+ and want to see "girls gone wild", I don't have a problem with that. I'm sure Google will do whatever supports their bottom line in the long run.

I don't know if you recall the Patriot Act here in the US. Remember the outcry against privacy over it? Well it is still in force by this administration (and unchanged), but now that the socialists are in power you can hear the crickets chirping on this issue. I guess it was only bad when Bush did it.

on Mar 05, 2010

Don't get me wrong, I don't want kids exposed to porn, or excessive violence on the internet, but were is personal responsibility, where are the parents? Hey if your 18+ and want to see "girls gone wild", I don't have a problem with that. I'm sure Google will do whatever supports their bottom line in the long run.

Nobody mentioned protecting kids from seeing porn. that is impossible without banning all porn outright.

they are claiming to be trying to prevent adults from watching child porn... but that is less than 50% of the sites banned. the rest are political opponents such as pro-life websites are banned and websites criticizing the great firewall.

Whats wrong with just taking down websites that serve CP and going after people who download CP? why implement a system that spies on every single packet you send and blocks out any political dissidents? power lust that is why. This system is not designed to stop child porn, never was and never will... it is designed to further strip people of their freedoms.

I don't know if you recall the Patriot Act here in the US. Remember the outcry against privacy over it? Well it is still in force by this administration (and unchanged), but now that the socialists are in power you can hear the crickets chirping on this issue. I guess it was only bad when Bush did it.

Ironically, when I last heard of the evils of bush (from someone who extolled obama) I responded with "your precious obama is doing the same thing... links"... his response was "well I guess its not that bad as I thought it was; its stll worse when bush did it because bush is a war criminal"

I didn't know if I should laugh or cry.