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Internet Filtering In Australia


Maigrets

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Hmm interesting topic , since i am an Aussie i am also against it , not in principle but in practicality ( like some liked minded people ) . Even if ( I'm pretty sure someone might have mentioned this point before ) a Child Porn site is blocked or shutdown another one will always pop-up Government Filter or not and of course the REAL[\b] concern why stop there

 

and this when 1984 nonsense comes in. I've read the book and written two big Essays about it and I'm sick of the conspiracies. :wallbash:

 

My 2 cents :unsure:

Datamining has you writing your own profile for the FBI. =)

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Hmm interesting topic , since i am an Aussie i am also against it , not in principle but in practicality ( like some liked minded people ) . Even if ( I'm pretty sure someone might have mentioned this point before ) a Child Porn site is blocked or shutdown another one will always pop-up Government Filter or not and of course the REAL[\b] concern why stop there

 

and this when 1984 nonsense comes in. I've read the book and written two big Essays about it and I'm sick of the conspiracies. :wallbash:

 

My 2 cents :unsure:

Datamining has you writing your own profile for the FBI. =)

Yeah, and my dentist has implanted listening devices in my fillings...

 

There is no great, all powerful government agency because there is nobody alive who is competant enough to actually work a job that consists entirely of recording the mundane acts of people who may be crazy, but are otherwise not significant, in excutiating detail. Much less, making their presense known to those people, and allowing those people to go on and tell others about their presence. Conspiracy nuts want people to be watching them, if only to give their lives some sort of ultimate meaning, and create something by which they are known. The only people being watched by the FBI, or any other government agency are those people who are found with enough evidence that might link them to a crime. All the cloak and dagger, enemy of the state, stuff is just fiction. It's a story of "what if". The government has better things to do than to sit around and watch some hick living in the middle of nowhere. It's all baseless paranoia.

 

As far as the internet goes, I frankly hope the FBI, or any government has something better to do than monitor all the e-drama out there. The point I was trying to make was that for the most part, the government has little knowledge or control over what you do on a daily basis. Instead, it is really private organizations, who have invested interest in your patronage, that really hold any control over your life, or pay any real attention to what you do online. Look at how many tracking cookies there are from advertising agencies. Look at how much spyware, look at how much of your life is dictated by these private organizations. Take a count of how many advertisments you see durring a normal day some time. Everything from the obvious ads on websites, and TV, to the things people mention to you, the logos they wear, anything distinctly linked to a company. THAT is where the real frightening thing lies. This act was never really about protexting children, it's all about controlling which sites are allowed, and which ones aren't. And as anyone who has seen Law and Order, SVU, most of the really seedy stuff online tends to go through annonymous things like message groups, forums, or unlogged chatrooms. These things go on now, and will continue to happen simply because they are so hard to track down.

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This is an interesting development in England. Police monitoring and hacking into home PC's remotely without warrants. I doubt the normal person sitting at home browsing the web would get caught up in the net but stranger things have happened.

 

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/...?referrer=email

 

Still strangely quiet here. We're like mushrooms.....kept in the dark. :unsure:

 

I'm not a conspiracy freak by any means, but I'm objecting on the principal of invasion of privacy and being put into the same basket as the criminal the Govt are "trying" to block.

 

If it happens that even some of the problems occur that we hear about, like slowed net speeds etc I will be downgrading my Internet plan. I think in the end it will be the ISP's who have the biggest say in this since it will lose them millions of $'s in business.

 

We have to sign up for a two year plan here so it's not so easy to get out of without a huge fee.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Lantern_(software)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

 

It's automated. Certain criteria must be present to alert a human agaent for further digging. Do not doubt that everything you've done on your computer is stored somewhere. It's easy to track down a person's history. I'm not talking about the gov. watching some hick in the woods. Or anyone. I'm talking about their ability to track down everything you've ever done on your computer once they've taken an interest in you.

 

To recap:

Monitoring is automated.

Datamining stores transmissions containing key words on government servers for review, depending on the number of communications from the source and the level of severity assigned to each communique.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Austin

An associate of mine. A particularly cute episode. Nope. It's obvious. Nobody's watching. =)

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When I heard about this, I was pretty pissed off. Let me point out some things.

 

Australia pays the highest amount of money for 'high speed broadband' in the world. As an example, here it costs $30 a month for "broadband" that is capped at 30kb/s. Every Australian ISP has a download limit, the average being 1 GB. Seriously. ONE GIGABYTE. Not only do we have a small download limit, but we have capped speeds. 30kb/s is -bullshit-, that is not broadband speeds. That is dial up*2.

 

Now, introducing this filter is taking away the only advantage we had over some other countries. Freedom to visit whatever we want. But instead, we cant. Instead the global average speed of broadband is decreased by 70%, so 30kb/s now becomes less than dial up speeds, and dial up speeds (not sure) become.. 0.1-0.2kb/s (if on a 56k modem). Honestly, this is terrible. I thought our new federal government was great, but they aint going to last long. Anyway, I'm done.

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well it's a lot harder here in iran... 75% of sites are filtered. even sub-sites are filtered. articles in Wikipedia are filtered, Music sites are filtered, You-Tube is filtered, Photo bucket is filtered even people are filtered!

it's some sort of Democracy up here that we call it "Dictatorship"(?). I am surprised that this site isn't filtered.

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It's perfectly possible to bypass something like this if you know what you're doing... just pay for a VPN service, and do everything through that - all the filters would see is you connecting to the VPN computer, and not what computers youre connecting to through that.

 

An onion proxy like Tor would probably do the trick as well, and that free - though not as fast or secure as a VPN.

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I live in rural Australia right, and we have a satellite dish to get our internet. The people in the city pay $50 for 50gb of super-fast internet connection, we pay $150 for 5gb of internet connection barely faster than dial-up!

 

Its absolutely stupid.

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  • 1 month later...

Yes, I'm in rural Australia as well, and I pay $50 a month for a 1.5mb connection with a 30 gig allowance a month downloads. That's 15 gig at peak times and 15 at off peak which is during the night when it's a bit useless unless I want to stay up all night to download anything I may want.

 

I swapped from our biggest ISP because they charge for uploads as well as downloads and the limit is half what I have now. And it's twice as expensive. I was paying $69.00 a month for half what I have now.

 

Today I downloaded a huge mod from FO3Nexus. Over 600mb worth and it took nearly 4 hours. My friend in the US got the whole thing in 40 minutes. I would love to pay for a premium membership, but finances don't allow. I can only just afford to have the internet.

 

But even then we are limited by speed at the ISP level, so it would be no advantage anyway as far as downloads go. My speed cap is what the non premium speed is and is usually a lot slower anyway.

 

As far as VPN goes, I doubt it would be of any use to us since all this proposed filtering and blocking sites will be done at ISP level so bypassing it is unlikely to work.

 

Also, there is no public outcry because people don't seem to know about it. I've still seen nor heard a thing on the TV or radio about it. I've spoken to people who have no idea about the proposal and will be ill informed when or if it finally goes ahead.

 

I was happy to see the change of Govt at first too, but if they last another term it will be a miracle, or I should say, a disaster.

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