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Bluelight and the Aussie Internet Filter – Will it affect us?

headdah said:
Just one question, if this idea was doomed to fail, how does China filter out sites and stuff for their general public ?

:)
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badly. :) their system is by no means perfect, but the governing party have a massive 'advantage' over the people there - communism. they can basically force all the non-state run service providers to feed from a central hub, thus the problem of filtering is a far easier one to tackle.
 
not so much on the topic of whether or not bluelight will be blocked by this piece of shit filter.

me and my housemate had sent a scathing email to the ministers address, after obtaining the .pdf of exactly what will be implemented.

with direct quotes copied and pasted out of their proposal.
with our counter arguments, stating how and why these ideas were wrong, ineffective etc.

as a response, we received an email in response.

basically reassuring us that the filter is good and will work
and sent us the .pdf file attached as proof?

the same .pdf we had already copied and pasted from.

its not often i'll agree with telstra, after working for them, and seeing first hand just how shitful they are, but conroy is THE WORST communications minister, we have ever had.
 
js2k6 if you received the standard BS form response from the government you might wish to send them the standard form response right back.
He has made it available for people to use as a template here:
http://users.on.net/~newton/form-letter.html

Has anyone else been following the debate on whirlpool? I had been but it moves to fast now. Up to part 25. Each part roughly 50 pages long.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1133143&p=28#r546

I wouldnt be so confident that bluelight wouldnt make the blacklist. The Danish and Thai lists were leaked in December. Both had blacklisted sites beyond their original scope. Besides even if you trust the current government (ha! not me, Rudd is a fundamentalist Christian) who's to say the next government wont bend the rules and sneakily add sites as they wish.
 
^^No they dont filter the internet - yet.

Our snivelling little weasels aka our politicians (from BOTH major parties) have been toying with the idea of internet censorship for the last 10 years or so. Last election Labor promised to provide a "clean feed" internet option for families. Then some time between the last election (November 2007 ?) and about September 2008 they changed the policy to be mandatory censorship of "illegal" material. ie child porn.

Since then various conservative lobby groups suck as the family first fuckwits and the Australian Christian Lobby group have been pushing for euthanasia, anorexia, drugs and regular porn to be added to the mandatory list.

So far they have run a small simulated trial of a few filters for the blacklist. (not dynamic content filtering) The results showed speed degredation of 87% for the most accurate filter down to about 5% for the least. Even the best filter failed to block all of the blacklist and overblocked sites out side the scope.
 
I know little about what the filter could do, and there's so much disagreement. Does anyone know whether it would /could filter usenet, particularly if files are in WINRAR or similar? And what about FTP?
 
phase_dancer said:
I know little about what the filter could do, and there's so much disagreement. Does anyone know whether it would /could filter usenet, particularly if files are in WINRAR or similar? And what about FTP?
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http://www.itwire.com/content/view/22459/1103/

http://apcmag.com/christmas_surprise_australian_government_to_trial_p2p_filters.htm

Reports suggest they might be trialing peer to peer filters. I'm sure if they could filter on a file level then they could also filter compressed files based on common compression formats - e.g. antivirus software can scan files within a zipped file.

It's completely flawed though. There is no way for a computer to say analyse an image file and decide whether it is child porn or not. Only a human can do that. So what would they actually be filtering with a P2P filter? It's not as though every file in existance that could be shared comes with a metadata tag "illegal" or "legal".
 
belarki said:
It's completely flawed though. There is no way for a computer to say analyse an image file and decide whether it is child porn or not. Only a human can do that. So what would they actually be filtering with a P2P filter? It's not as though every file in existance that could be shared comes with a metadata tag "illegal" or "legal".
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I have always wondered how Google image search done this. When safe search is on all porn images on image search are somehow filtered by the computer.

It's like Google image search just knows somehow?
 
8ft-Sativa said:
I have always wondered how Google image search done this. When safe search is on all porn images on image search are somehow filtered by the computer.

It's like Google image search just knows somehow?
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The images have associated tags/metadata added by hand. I think google pictures uses the "alt" attribute of img tags?

Theoretically it is possible to train a computer to identify patterns in images (research hidden markov models) however this is so far beyond the scope and capabilities of the filter software in question it's not funny.

I think the best current real-world example is military software used to identify aircraft from a single low-res picture. Off the top of my head I can't remember which country developed it though.
 
yes and given the budget for au censorship i don't think they can afford a server farm large enough for deep packet inspection of the amount of P2P we generate here.
 
what a shame it would be if this site were/could be effectively shut down. look at the speed at which the thread regarding the tragedy of Gemma in Perth who died at the big day out has grown. there is always two sides to an argument. except p_d can so eloquently crush the weak argument. My point? for balanced opinion, the media(main) is sorely lacking
 
^ If it ever did happen, then we'd just have to start again and set up something using auto abbreviations for keywords. For sure, we'd find a way around it.

I'm still finding it hard to see how they can filter undesirable P2P stuff, particularly bit torrent files. If a user has a firewall, then how can they find out what's in the file, particularly if there's only one seeder and heaps of leachers with only parts of a file?
 
The internet is the first time when any infomation is accessiable to everyone. If they give us propagander we can search for the truth. With everything people are becomeing less like sheep and I dont think they like this.
 
Actually there was protests back in December. I attended the perth one.

It had its good points but there wasnt that many people. A large portion of the crowd looked like gamers worried about what the censorship will do to their ping times. Unfortunately rent-a-crowd elements showed up and to some extent hi-jacked the protest. (9/11 conspiracy theorists in perth, apparantly raelians in brisbane)

I have written a few letters. One to my MP, one to Rudd and one to Conroy. When I have some more free time I might write to some senators about the issue. I feel that they are probably a better bet than labour MPs.

There is a lot of noise about censorship, but so far it has mostly been confined to the IT community. Thousands of posts at www.whirlpool.net.au
 
phase_dancer said:
^ If it ever did happen, then we'd just have to start again and set up something using auto abbreviations for keywords. For sure, we'd find a way around it.

I'm still finding it hard to see how they can filter undesirable P2P stuff, particularly bit torrent files. If a user has a firewall, then how can they find out what's in the file, particularly if there's only one seeder and heaps of leachers with only parts of a file?
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I have not seen any technical specs on how these filters plan to be implemented.

However there are a few ways it could be implemented, most torrent clients bind to a standard port, any packets on this port are dropped. Quick fix, change your port, not very effective, easily by-passable.

Another simple method, watch for a lot of ip's connecting to the one port transmitting in short bursts. Sent a RST to these ip's. This method will hit a lot of legitimate traffic. There were reports of lotus notes being effected by comcasts bit torrent filters.

The third and most worrying is what is called deep packet inspection. Just as a Spectroscope breaks down a chemical to its individual parts, rules are applied to your traffic to break it down into its individual request/packets, these requests are looked at, simply matching on strings present in headers, or more sophisticated stat models that match behavior of packets, bit torrent uses a tracker to track your pieces, so looking for something as simple as a small http request, followed by a UDP packet of larger size would indicate bit torrent traffic. A lot of clients offer encryption standard now, however during the comcast filtering people were noticing that their encrypted traffic was being blocked, simply because they couldn't inspect the packet. Encrypted traffic has a lot of legitimate uses as well, SSL, any thing that uses pgp or even something as simple as a ssh tunnel.

How they will know that traffic is legit or `illegal` traffic i do not know, but there will be a lot of angry wow players if they don't find out how ;)

I am wondering that if sites similar to blue light, which while in a grey legal area, has not been deemed illegal in a court of law, has its traffic blocked because of over zealous religious government that gained income through advertisement on the site, would have any legal ground to at least get it removed from the filters?

Register a new domain, require access through ssl so that no one can see the content. If it gets blocked, rinse repeat. Just one idea :P
 
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tripmonkey505 said:
they filter the fucking internet in australia!?!?!?!?!!?!? what the fuck
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not yet they don't... but they are trying to!

I have a feeling it isn't going to go ahead though. There are a number of sites and groups devoted to fighting it so join those and get updates on what you can do.

I wrote an email to Conroy and actually got quite a lengthy response (in the mail). It still didn't make me like the idea!
 
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