Nov 3, 2008 11:13 AM | 17 Comments

The Australian government wants to introduce draconian censorship and cripple internet speeds with a mandatory filtering system which any child can bypass in five minutes - Adam Turner shows how easy it is.

Communications Minister, Senator Conroy, is pandering to a handful of fundamentalist luddites with his plans to introduce mandatory internet filtering at the ISP-level. The government's own research reveals the filters will slow down everyone's internet access by 20 to 75 per cent, which makes a joke of plans to build a faster national network.

Of perhaps greater concern is the fact that supporters of filtering are already talking about expanding it to include other stuff they don't like, such as online gambling and "illegal" sites. Censorship is a slippery slope and the fact the government has tried to censor people speaking out against the filtering plans should be ringing alarm bells.

The government already tried giving away free desktop filtering software, but no-one wanted it. Now it wants to inflict filtering on everyone by introducing it at the ISP-level. The government's own research has shown filtering is not foolproof, yet talk of a "clean feed" could give many Australians a false sense of security when online and actually make them less safer rather than more.

The biggest joke is that plans for filtering won't stop anyone who is determined to access banned content, as there are free and easy ways to bypass any efforts at censoring the web in Australia.

One simple trick is to use a free web proxy, which acts as a middle man between you and the site you want to see. You'll find a long list of free web proxies and other such sites at FreeProxy.ru. Just enter the name of the site into a proxy site's search box - such as banned-site.com, and the proxy site will then call up the site for you. This way banned-site.com doesn't know who you are, but also your ISP doesn't know you looked at banned-site.com. Kids are already using these kinds of sites to bypass school filters so they can access Facebook from the classroom. It won't take horny teenagers long to use such sites to bypass ISP-level filtering.

Another trick for bypassing filters is to dig an encrypted tunnel to the United States. It sounds complicated, but it's free and ridiculously easy to do and not even your ISP can see what you're up to.

Two popular free VPN applications are HotSpot Shield (Mac and Windows) and AlwaysVPN (Mac, Windows, Linux). They add an advertising banner to your browser, but if you're prepared to spend $5 per month you could look at Witopia or VPN out. You don't need to know anything about networking and there's no messy configuration, you run the installers and they just work.

These applications give you dual citizenship as, with the click of a button, your computer looks like it's in the United States. This means you can access US-only content from sites such as Rhapsody, Pandora, YouTube and Hulu. It also means you're bypassing any content filtering performed by your Australian ISP, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Such tools are not illegal. They're primarily designed to protect your privacy when you connect to an insecure wifi hotspot. If mandatory filtering is introduced in Australia, you can expect many of the local ISPs to start bundling a VPN service with their internet packages - of course just so their customers are "safe" online, not so they can bypass the filters.

Australia's plans for mandatory content filtering will screw up the internet and give right wing nutjobs the power to censor what we see, yet it won't actually stop people who want to access banned sites.

If you're concerned about the government's plans for filtering the internet, it's time to speak up before it's too late. Visit NoCleanFeed.com, run by Electronic Frontiers Australia, for information on how to voice your concerns. Do it quickly, before some holier-than-thou git decides you're not allowed to see that site either.

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drwarm Nov 5, 2008 10:42 AM	I sincerely hope that this doesn't go ahead. BTW using proxies and such will cripple you internet speeds, like down to 5kb/s so I really hope it doesn't come to this!!!!
Adam Turner Nov 5, 2008 1:59 PM	I've found VPNs offer better speeds than proxies. Witopia seems to be good and the price is right at $US40 per year.
htcs Nov 6, 2008 9:04 AM	Are there other VPN services that don't rely on going through the States? Which is more efficient: Routing through the USA or Singapore for example?
Adam Turner Nov 6, 2008 9:41 AM	To be honest I don't know. I suspect from Australia you'd get faster speeds from Asia than the US - assuming the country you're VPNing to isn't also using filtering. Of course if you went for Sinagpore you'd lose the bonus of access to US content.
Nick2039 Nov 6, 2008 10:44 AM	How long before they start blocking witopia.net, freeproxy.ru, alwaysvpn.com etc.? Better get in quick ;-)
Adam Turner Nov 6, 2008 11:35 AM	They'll never manage to block all the proxies. As for VPNs I don't think they'd have the guts to block them because of the outrage from legit business users. Just like DRM, anyone who wants to bypass it will while everyone else pays the price.
marburg Nov 6, 2008 11:42 AM	i wonder what level of filtering they'll place on the theme of computer security.
RandomWookie Nov 6, 2008 2:10 PM	Problems with idiots in power, they just want to be seen to be doing something. Any way what’s there justification for filtering? Is it piracy or just, to protect young people from seeing bad material, or what. If it is just to protect young people, it’s up to the parents to do it not society. It won’t stop piracy as we have already seen some one will find a way.
wednesday Nov 6, 2008 5:22 PM	thought that we lived in a free country, obviously must be wrong
wednesday Nov 6, 2008 5:22 PM	thought that we lived in a free country, obviously must be wrong
senken Nov 6, 2008 5:36 PM	I think you're missing the point of the filter which is to protect kids. From an adult point of view I want unfiltered access, but from a parent's point of view I want it to be as hard as possible for the kids to access anything dodgy. Of course the most determined of users will bypass the protection and that's up to them but a child wont be able to - those free proxies sites you mentioned can be easily blocked - it's not hard and there's not that many of them that you think. Plus I'm sure there are technical ways in which a filter can test for proxies and block them automatically if necessary. What it will achieve is protecting the underage because they will be too young to have the technical know-how to bypass the protection unless it's a 13-year old whizz-kid with access to the parent's credit card to set up a US server.
SirSquidness Nov 6, 2008 7:58 PM	I have an even better idea than using proxies etc. Hire your own Virtual Server in the US. Go splits with a mate. Cheap unmonitored interenet access without the lag of a free/commercial mob. Look at this one. http://www.spry.com/vps-hosting/2008-coupon/ Take a look at the first cPanel & WHM option. "Unmetered bandwidth usage" (I call bullshit on that. I haven't read the ToS or anything). I can't find what the bandwith is (as in speed), but it's in a "brand new datacenter" in Seatle, so I imagine it'd be >10Mb/s. It is a virtual server, so if you want to do some webhosting or offsite backups, it's perfect. It's your own PC in the US. Just set up OpenVPN or even Hamachi if you're lazy and get it with Windows on it, and just like that you have a website, a backup of yoru stuff (this mob even backup your server, so backups of your backups) etc Go three or four ways, not much more than just a plain VPN access, and infinitely more win. Win!
Gerry Nov 7, 2008 11:12 AM	Congratulations! This is by far the best written article I've found on the topic. You managed to include many of the important problems in such few lines. Good work. I can not keep the rage out of my words whenever I try to explain how bad it is to somebody else and I end up ranting on for hours if they let me. BTW, you might want to check out Tor/Vidalia as it works even better than hotspot and doesn't have any ads or anything like that. http://www.vidalia-project.net/
ozofriendly Nov 10, 2008 5:25 PM	Congratulations on a blinkered, alarmist and politically naive perspective on what is, essentially a good plan. There may be little that is technically wrong with your viewpoint, Adam, but the way you have presented it is risible. "The Australian government wants to introduce draconian censorship and cripple internet speeds..." Do they, really? I mean, do you honestly believe that the same government that has bandwidth-for-the-masses on its agenda actually *wants* to cripple that bandwidth. Don't be ridiculous. Do you not also think that a great deal of technical consideration is being giving and advice offered by all concerned parties on the most appropriate and least obstructive way to achieve their goal: that is to make it the responsibility of ISPs in Australia to protect the vast majority of Internet users from the potentially damaging affects of extreme content. Has the government actually stated that it intends to extend the categories of such content to include gambling sites and other "illegal" sites, as you put it? As a security admin, I know all too well how poorly implemented content filtering can affect bandwidth; it's not like industry - public and private - doesn't do this all the time and if SaaS content filtering - which is essentially what we're talking about here - doesn't cut it, there are appliances that have all the grunt we need to filter our own traffic locally without incurring too great a bandwidth hit. As a parent, I roundly applaud the endeavor, even if I would agree that implementing this measure at the ISP is too big an ask of their infrastructure. "The government already tried giving away free desktop filtering software, but no-one wanted it..." - a patently absurd statement. There are a number of pretty reasonable off-the-shelf content filters available for parents wishing to implement some measure of control. PCA routinely reviews such software - perhaps they should qualify any review of the content-filtering component of, oh let say Kaspersky Internet Security, by suggesting ways to circumvent the filter. Perhaps the most effective filters are built into Modem-Router-Firewalls, which is just a localised version of what the government are looking to achieve. It saddens me that the common inference is that the government is somehow criminalizing access to extreme content. As I understand it, this is simply an effort to address the concern that many people have, parents or otherwise, that they may be unwittingly exposed to offensive or abusive content, whatever form that might take.
dazweeja Nov 11, 2008 11:42 AM	ozofriendly, you are the one who is politically naive is you don't think this will be used as a bargaining chip by this or future governments. Fielding and Xenophon have already suggested that pornographic and gambling sites should be blacklisted and we all know that the government needs the support of both of them to get legislation passed. Surely you remember Brian Harradine? This debate is really about whether it should be an opt-in system. I don't have a problem with you wanting to protect yourself and your children from extreme content. You obviously believe that the downsides are worth it - slower speeds, false positives, control over what you can and can't see being controlled by the government of the time, etc. I don't. I don't need protection and for me the risks outweigh the costs. Why do you insist that my choice be taken away when we can both be happy? How about this: the government teams with Netcomm (or Linksys, D-Link, etc) to sell a heavily subsidised modem/router with a custom firewall built into the firmware. It will be offered on all plans by all ISPs. You can choose to buy it or not. ISPs agree to push updates out to these routers when the firewall rules need to be updated by the government (Optus already push out updates to their cable modems). You have your government protection, I have my freedom and faster speeds. How is this not better than the government's proposal?
ozofriendly Nov 12, 2008 10:50 AM	dazweeja, please understand that I agree with you completely in principle and I did not imply that my support of the scheme in priciple was an endorsement of the governments proposal. I would never insist that yours or anyone's choice be compromised; I may be a parent, but I am also a techie in the best tradition. In my rush to address the flagrant tone of Adam's blog, I didn't elaborate on the point I too-briefly made that such an implementation at the ISP would be technically, very difficult to achieve without seriously compromising QoS. Businesses are typically mandated by HR policy to protect staff from offensive or abusive content; implementing a content filter is usually the best approach. The decision about which of the various solutions is contingent upon their impact on business productivity, whether it is the administrative overheads of managing exceptions and false positives or the negative impact on bandwidth. Local appliances may be a better approach than hosted solutions from a technical point of view, but hosted services are now easier to administer, and may significantly reduce TCO. Adam made no mention of the critical side debate about whether subscribers should be able to opt in, or out of such a scheme; I understand this to be a key consideration of any such implementation and I would cheerfully sign any petition demanding that option. One can only speculate, at this early stage, about how successful powerful lobbyists may be in pushing for broader censorship in the longer term. I do not consider it naive to believe that the government's stated objective has anything but the best interests of the majority at heart. Fielding and Xenophon are both intelligent and moderate, liberal campaigners and I doubt that they would wish to impose entirely draconian measures to prevent access to content that they consider harmful to that same majority if it was at the expense of democratic values. Your suggestion has always seemed to me to be the best compromise between the software approach and the ISP approach (some vendors, such as Netgear already offer this service in the router as a subscription service); ideally such a government-issued service module would be vendor-independent. One drawback is that the database of categorised URLs easily runs to a few GB so the router would still need to refer to an external service. Image filtering might not be possible on a domestic router, but keyword filtering could be handled pretty easily - as it is now on most SOHO routers.
JalenR Mar 26, 2009 5:47 PM	If filtering is for good why not? But I hope it will not affect the internet users who use it for their research, business transactions, communication or in any other important matters.Off topic..Slacker Radio is actually quite the thing. Slacker radio may well outpace Sirius for ad-free radio that leaves their local based counterparts in the dust, partially because of ease of use, convenience, partially because unlike satellite it's free and also because Slacker isn't staring down the barrel of possible bankruptcy. You won't need installment loans to get this ad free radio, its broadcast for free over the internet. All you need to do is register for free with an email address, and you're good to go – which you can also do with its counterpart Pandora. No ads, no self important and really annoying deejays, and you pick the playlist.