[pp.int.general] Mandatory Internet filtering becoming full spread in Australia

[Brian McNeil]

On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 15:14 +0200, Janne Paalijarvi wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I decided to write some bits about the Australian Internet filtering,
> which now appears to becoming full-spread, as described on their
> governmental website: http://bit.ly/IcEZ6 . I'm opposing all kinds of
> Internet censorship and I think many other pirates are feeling the
> same way.

An awful lot of people do. You can count many, many Wikimedians as such
too. After the UK's IWF epic-fail blocking editing of Wikipedia.

> I'll quote shortly here the Australian governmental statement:
> 
> "ISP-level content filtering is already occurring in other countries,
> including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the United
> Kingdom.
> 
> The Government wants to ensure a similar level of protection for
> internet users in Australia."

<snip>

> Technology used in filtering was mainly DNS-based. A Finnish Internet
> activist Matti Nikki (from Sony DRM rootkit discovery fame) used a
> bunch of web crawling scripts and reverse-engineered the list of
> addresses (which is normally classified, and apparently there are next
> to none possibilities to get one removed from the list). He published
> his findings on a dedicated website http://lapsiporno.info
> ("childporn.info"). People audited the list, and found out (IIRC) that
> there was <5% actual child pornography. At some point the list
> contained quite outrageous misplacements, such as a memorial page for
> Thai Queen, violin factory, and at some point even the World Wide Web
> Consortium... There was also very high percentage of legit gay
> pornography sites listed.

I can't access this in the UK. I get a very quick 404 response.

> For references, see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info .

From Wikipedia I can, currently, get at a mirror. The 6 billion dollar
question for me is, can I get the software? I see another name 'n' shame
of the UK's Internet Watch Foundation here.

Just to mess with their heads I shall report the mirror that worked for
me to the IWF.





-- 
Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org>|http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position
of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.
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