AUSTRALIA TO BLOCK WEB

[Richard]

Karen Dearne

THE Federal Police commissioner will have the power to block and ban websites believed to be crime or terrorism related under an internet censorship amendment bill introduced into Parliament today.

Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan proposes to include terrorism and cyber-crime sites on ACMA's hit list

The bombshell web ban bill was tabled in the Senate at 9:58am, without prior notice.

Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan proposes to expand the "black list" of internet addresses (URLs) currently maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to include terrorism and cyber-crime sites.

At present, ACMA has the power to act against websites containing pornography or offensive content.

Under the proposed amendment, Federal Police will inform ACMA of websites to be blocked, and the agency must then notify the relevant internet service providers. ISPs will be required to "take reasonable steps" to prevent users accessing the website or content.

Australian Privacy Foundation chair Roger Clarke expressed disbelief that "the government of any country in the free world could table a Bill of this kind".

"Without warning, the Government, through Senator Coonan, is proposing to provide Federal Police with powers to censor the internet," Dr Clarke said.

"Even worse, ISPs throughout the country are to be the vehicle for censorship, by being required to block internet content."

Greens Senator Kerry Nettle said the Bill would give the Police Commissioner "enormous power over what political content Australians can look at" on the web.

"This gives the Commissioner sweeping powers which could potentially be applied to millions of websites," she said. "The Government has dropped the Bill into the Senate on the eve of an election with virtually no explanation."

Senator Nettle said environmental organisations such as Greenpeace had been accused of crime or terrorism-related actions. "Will the Police Commissioner call for Greenpeace's website to be shut down?"

The requirement to filter or block content would impose another enormous burden on local ISPs at a time when the IT industry faced growing costs related to other national security legislation, she said.

Meanwhile, Senator Coonan today extended the Government's $189 million NetAlert - Protecting Australian Families Online program to agencies such as Medicare, Centrelink, Child Support and the Tax Office.

Information about internet filtering and the free content filters from NetAlert will be promoted through the agency shopfronts as part of the plan to prevent children accessing inappropriate material online.

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/stor...06,00.html

[AndrewX]

Hey Rick!!!

I hope this site doesn't get listed mate. 

Is it possible to get sites that are listed on it to keep changing URL's and emailing the viewers of the site of such changes?

OR perhaps Aussies could re-route through an overseas provider and soemhow bypass the banning?

There has to be a way around this if it's implemented, and I think it best we work out how as soon as we can.

That's all we need here now.:discust: 

Suggestions anyone?? 

[Sily]

Yikes.  :eek:

[AndrewX]

Hi again, 

I put out my feelers through other forums I attend about this issue.  I openly asked if anyone knew of a way around this if in fact they would implement it in future. 

I received the following answer from a person who is a professional computer programmer and resides in France: 

Simple fix AndrewX... just bypass them via a proxy

I use  http://www.megaproxy.com (paid version is $9.95 / 90 days not much) works very well

with a cool feature (fortunetaly I don't have to use it )
censorship bypass

OVERVIEW

Anti-censor is a unique Megaproxy® feature that allows your browser to securely connect to our service using non-standard TCP ports. TCP is the one of the most commonly used Internet protocols and carries the majority of Internet web traffic. It is therefore extremely prone to interference by Internet censors and network packet filters. In each TCP network packet there is a destination port that is frequently mapped to a receiving application. For example, all Email SMTP servers receive TCP requests on the TCP port 25; similarly, non-secure web servers listen on TCP port 80 and secure (SSL Enabled servers) responds to the requests on TCP port 443. More information on TCP port assignments is available from IANA.

OUR SOLUTION

By connecting to the service using non-common TCP ports, it may be possible to bypass the Internet Access filtering device and allow traffic to go by unfiltered and unmonitored. The effectiveness of this technique clearly rests on the intelligence and configuration of a filtering solution or intermediate network device that redirects web traffic to the filtering appliance.

Important Note: It is highly advisable that the Custom TCP Ports (Anti Internet censorship) service feature only be used by experienced users who have a complete understanding of what this feature does, and can make an educated assessment of the benefit of enabling this particular option.  We can not provide specific recommendations in regards to individual filtering solutions or network environments.

HOW IT WORKS

In simplified terms, our anti-censor service feature has two main modes of operation: custom and random. In custom mode, you can select the permanent TCP port that should be used to connect to our service. For example, if you select TCP port 1755 under "browsing options," your browser will communicate with the service on the non-standard port 1755 instead of the common SSL port 443. You can always disable this feature and switch to default (TCP 443) or use another custom TCP port on the fly.

Another choice of operation is random mode. When the Anti censorship feature is enabled and the TCP random ports option is selected, our service will automatically randomize the requests to our service over a group of various TCP ports during the surfing session.

LOGGING-IN

With the introduction of our Anti-censorship feature, a user may login to the service by directing a browser to one of the TCP ports listed below. For example: https://www.4aa.com:15871/LoginPort.jsp , etc. Please take note the that URL path must start with https:// (secure) and should be entered in the absolute format presented in the examples above, including ../LoginPort.jsp

The following is the list of TCP ports that can be selected to connect to the service:

    * 1257/TCP - Shockwave 2 This port is assigned to Shockwave 2 application
    * 1755/TCP - Windows Media server. This TCP port is frequently used by multimedia applications.
      Ex. NetMeeting, a popular conferencing application from Microsoft uses this TCP port.
    * 1723/TCP - PPTP Control Connection. Another TCP port that is frequently used by various VPN implementations.
    * 4827/TCP - HTCP. Hyper Text Caching protocol. Often used by Internet caching servers.
    * 15871/TCP - Available TCP port. This "admin" port is used by a fairly popular Internet filtering software (IAM).

hope this help

stay safe and strong

So to all the Aussies here, all is not lost in case they do decide to start banning all your favorite sites.:big grin:

[Richard]

Andrew, I hope OZ doesn’t block this site. That’s good info you came up with. I was wondering if a proxy would work.

[Richard]

The Orstrahyun

Australia's Plan To Block Websites Copies China's Extreme Censorship

Howard Government Big Brother Internet Role "A Ludicrous Joke"

Like most things concerned with the internet that the Howard government dabbles in, its suddenly announced plan to block "terror" and "cyber-crime" websites from Australian eyes will prove to be an embarrassing and expensive failure.

As this story details, the only way the Howard government can do what it claims it intends to do when it comes to banning "dangerous" websites is to follow the 'block-it-all' steel fist approach of the Chinese government. An approach the Chinese government has already all but given up on.

The Australian website and internet industries are swinging between a state of shock and gails of laughter as it takes a closer look at the new legislation the Howard government rammed into Parliament with no notice or preliminary briefings.

They'll get down on their knees and open wide for coal and oil companies, but when it comes to working in a calm, open-minded and industrious manner with Australia's rapidly expanding internet industry and web-based business communities, to build a prosperous future for all, the Howard government is still locked firmly in the 20th century.

In short, they have no idea, and they show it every time they unfurl new plans to censor the internet, or to introduce "Won't Someone Please Think Of The Children" level content filtering :

The proposed legislation, introduced without notice into Parliament last week, also gives the commissioner powers to order take-downs of Australian sites related to terrorism and cyber-crime.

The amendment allows federal police to notify the Australian Communications and Media Authority of banned websites, and the authority must then notify service providers. It anticipates ISPs will block access to offshore sites with filters and other technical means.

Industry insiders say the only way a service provider could prevent users accessing banned material is by blocking the internet protocol address on the host server.

"Australia is only one tiny fraction of the global internet and there are numerous places where constitutional protections ensuring free speech mean all sorts of objectional stuff can be hosted, and at present there's no regime here actually requiring ISPs to block access to such sites," Internode carriage manager John Lindsay said.

"If such a request were made, the most fine-grained way we could actually do it would be to block access to the IP address. That's the Chinese approach. They basically block by IP address.

"Now, if that IP address happened to be MySpace, or Facebook, that would have the effect of blocking everything from those sites."

According to an Ovum report to the communications department, many hosting services carry thousands of domains on a single published IP address.

Telstra, Optus, the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association, the Internet Industry Association and others are currently reviewing the legislation, which caught them by surprise.

Electronic Frontiers Australia chair Dale Clapperton said the proposal had nothing to do with terrorism.

"These laws will be open to massive abuses by the police," he said. "They could, for example, be used to prevent access to websites organising protest marches or rallies against the government, or advocating the legalisation of euthanasia.

"To the extent that it allows police to ban access to material discussing political matters, it is probably unconstitutional."

ISP-based filtering was "a blunt instrument" that gave users no control over what material had been censored, Mr Clapperton said.

"Unfortunately, filtering will not make the internet safe for children. If parents are deceived into thinking a filtered service is safe they will be less likely to supervise their children while they use the internet."

A requirement to provide filtered services would impose serious costs on local ISPs, while also exposing them to liability when "the filters inevitably fail" to block banned material, he said. Filtering were also likely to cause a reduction in internet speed. Microsoft internet safety regional director Julie Inman-Grant said the company was concerned to ensure it could provide its content services to consumers on substantially the same terms globally.

"It would be very difficult to have the capacity to check every single link that is posted on a user's individual webpage." Internode's John Lindsay said ISPs fully supported the government's efforts to remove violence and child pornography, race hate and other objectional material from local sites, and would be happy to extend that to sites promoting terrorism.

"(But)...once you start building up enormous lists of things you want to block, the list gets endlessly larger even though the original content has gone." This would have the ultimate effect of slowing down internet performance. "You might have fast broadband, but you won't get any speed from it because there's a whole room of servers between you and the internet that are picking over everything to make sure you don't see anything objectionable," he said. "That would be a ludicrous joke."

Go Here For The Full Story

The latest Howard government plans for censoring the internet will be "re-tooled" in the coming weeks, but they've already made the industry extremely nervous with this absurd, fascistic, anti-free speech legislation.

http://theorstrahyun.blogspot.com/search...censorship