Oz to censor the internet?

[Rum]

I see from the news that the Oz government are working on a massive firewall to keep 'undesirable' internet content out of Australia.
It isn't in legislation yet - but it looks like it might well be soon.

Aside from the fact that anyone who wants the stuff bad enough can almost certainly get round it, what do people think (particularly Ozies) of this.

Strikes me as weird to say the least. Is there much other censorship there?

[charlou]

I hate that sections of our government (and our community) want to do this, and even worse that they seem to be intent on actually going through with it.

[Feck]

Time to get some serious encryption ?

[JimC]

Its intent is to block really hard-core stuff, particularly child pornography, but the concensus that it is clumsy, will be worked around by the serious hard-core groups, and has at least the potential to be used by future governments in a repressive way. Many oppose it, but the government still seems keen; it may however run into serious technical hurdles in any case.

[Feck]

A fire wall is not the way to go anyway ...you need to know who is distributing child porn and get them ..not just block it !

The way these things go is laws and rules are pushed into law to stop Abuse but end up being used to limit personal freedoms .

[JimC]

A fire wall is not the way to go anyway ...you need to know who is distributing child porn and get them ..not just block it !

The way these things go is laws and rules are pushed into law to stop Abuse but end up being used to limit personal freedoms .

That indeed is what many people are saying here...

Anyway, I suspect it will be on hold for a while, with a likely early election coming on. The opposition Liberal Party (here, that means Tories in effect) are probably even more likely to do it than Labour anyway...

[Rum]

A firewall would stop nasty stuff coming in from outside, but I assume home grown stuff could still be circulated inside the 'barrier'. Surely the whole point is that perverts become experts in the technology anyway and find ways around it.

Looks like the rest of you are going to have to suffer for them!

[BlackBart]

A firewall would stop nasty stuff coming in from outside, but I assume home grown stuff could still be circulated inside the 'barrier'. Surely the whole point is that perverts become experts in the technology anyway and find ways around it.

Looks like the rest of you are going to have to suffer for them!

Absolutely right. The firewall will stop casual access to 'extranational' sources of nasty stuff, but those sources are usually transient anyway, by the time the firewall is updated to block them, they'll have moved. Anyone who really wants any kind of illegal data, will use encryption, virtual private networks and proxy servers to circumvent detection and censorship.

And of course it won't block 'intranational' sources at all.

[nellikin]

I thought I read a headline that this was being postponed. Probably till after the election...

[Trolldor]

Its intent is to block really hard-core stuff, particularly child pornography, but the concensus that it is clumsy, will be worked around by the serious hard-core groups, and has at least the potential to be used by future governments in a repressive way. Many oppose it, but the government still seems keen; it may however run into serious technical hurdles in any case.

From what I've read, it's worse than that.

Any sites with child pornography are almost guaranteed to be already known and monitered, or established in order to fuck you up for visiting them.
That's because putting it on the web is a good way of getting yourself a twenty year stay in a five star cement room, with complimentary anal rape. Easily traceable to a source.
Almost all electronic child pornography is distributed over private networks, making any firewall useless.

[Hermit]

The way these things go is laws and rules are pushed into law to stop Abuse but end up being used to limit personal freedoms .

That's pretty much it in a nutshell, and that is precisely why I oppose the proposed legislation. No matter which government gets elected, and despite the mostly sincere motive to protect us from child pornography and such, "mandatory filtering" is going to turn out to be an irresistible temptation to engage in the internet version of book burning and other forms of repressing information that is politically undesirable to the powers that be, rather than criminal in nature.