Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Australian Internet Filtering Passed (The Books Are Burning)

Bowdlerize - 16-12-2009 at 01:18

The government has passed the internet filter bill!!
The sites that are being banned will be chosen by "an independent body" any money there are the governments bitch.
They claim its to protect the kids, I think the parents should be taking care of that.

Read more here.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/15/2772467.htm

Email Senator Stephen Conroy at minister@dbcde.gov.au

Edit: Stephen Conroy's personal Email senator.conroy@aph.gov.au

The biggest Anti-Filter group is GetUp with 300,000+ Members https://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet&id=684
[Edited on 16-12-2009 by Bowdlerize]

[Edited on 16-12-2009 by Bowdlerize]

hissingnoise - 16-12-2009 at 03:47

One can only be horrified by the fact that sites containing child sexual abuse and sexual violence are online---but balancing that with one's natural abhorrence of censorship isn't easy.
And censorship of any kind can be the thin edge of the wedge.

User - 16-12-2009 at 04:06

It's a matter of time before this crap spreads world wide.
How can criminal material be defined?
A patent about explosives could qualify?
Drugs related material goes the same way I guess.

Well at least one can still use a proxy server for blocked material.
There is not much they can do about that right.

len1 - 16-12-2009 at 04:34

This is atrocious. I particularly like the deliberate confusion of censorship and violation of OUR freedom of expression, with the violation of children, as if its an either or. This kind of trick is quite common here. See what I wrote under the microsoft thread. The isolation of Australia deepens.

I dont think its too far fetched to speculate that the body entrusted with maintaining the minds of Australians could eventually ban this site. It contains instructions on how to make explosives which is fodder for terrorists, and recepies to make drugs which are ruining your youngsters ..

[Edited on 16-12-2009 by len1]

JohnWW - 16-12-2009 at 06:13

That $ucks! It is the last sort of law that I would have expected a Labor Govt. to pass, noting that censorship of the media is something used only in dictatorships, especially right-wing ones although China and presumably North Korea and Burma also do it. Bu$h would have done it if he knew that he had the numbers in Congre$$ to pass it, and if he had figured out some way around the First Amendment. Likewise, such a law could not be passed here in New Zealand, or if it were, it would fail at its first test in Court, because of freedom-of-speech and related rights being protected by the NZ Bill Of Rights Act 1990, which borrows substantially from the U$ Constitution and Canadian Charter Of Rights & Freedoms. (See http://www.legislation.govt.nz ).

Who is going to be in charge of choosing which sites will be blocked from (direct) access in Au$tralia, what criteria are they going to use (it will not be just porn sites that will be affected, one can be sure), and who will pay their $alaries?

Are they going to prevent http://www.google.com.au from throwing up blocked sites in searches? Google searches could, if necessary, be done on other national Google sites than the Au$tralian one, such as www.google.co.nz , www.google.ca , www.google.co.uk , www.google.fr , www.google.com.br , etc.

Anyway, it is an useless piece of legislation, because any such blocking of foreign websites can easily be circumvented by configuring your browser, particularly Mozilla Firefox, with a foreign proxy-server, preferably an "elite/high anonymity" one, for accessing banned sites, like what savvy Chinese internet surfers do. Regularly updated lists of proxy-servers are given on http://www.samair.ru/proxy .

[Edited on 16-12-09 by JohnWW]

User - 16-12-2009 at 07:27

My provider already blocks some sites for example designerdrugs.
The only way for me to access these servers is by a proxy.
Even a transparent and unprotected one gets me on website.
Funny is that i get a time-out when sending a ping to it (this could have multiple causes).
Still it does pop on google, I just cant access it.

Maybe the Netherlands are doing the same stuff.


A while a go I worked for an ISP.
I often had lunch with this guy that worked on the highest technical level in the building.
He told me that there was a part of the eleventh floor that was restricted from access to almost anyone.
Guy's is grey suits came in there every morning and left in the evening.
The guy told me that the locked section was run by the government.
And he only was there once to fix something.
He actually was not even allowed to tell me this.

He had no idea of exactly was going on there.
It all remains just guessing.
Only god and some other ppl know.

Maybe this is not very relevant but it makes a nice story.
I believe that there is a lot of this stuff going on.
There is enough that we (civilians) are not supposed to know.
(No! i am not a conspiracy ass)

[Edited on 16-12-2009 by User]

quicksilver - 16-12-2009 at 08:11

Quote: Originally posted by User  

A while a go I worked for an ISP.
I often had lunch with this guy that worked on the highest technical level in the building.
He told me that there was a part of the eleventh floor that was restricted from access to almost anyone.
Guy's is grey suits came in there every morning and left in the evening.
The guy told me that the locked section was run by the government.
And he only was there once to fix something.
He actually was not even allowed to tell me this.

He had no idea of exactly was going on there.
It all remains just guessing.
Only god and some other ppl know.
[Edited on 16-12-2009 by User]



I have some distant relatives in AUS and this is just terrible. The Australians & Kiwis are some of the finest allies the USA has. (They have stood with us militarily since WWI & we worked very hard to protect them against the Japanese in WWII - many fine men were lost). Most Americans have great affection for them.
It's makes me very sad that the government would do something like this.
I just don't understand what is happening to the Common Wealth nations....They are loosing their freedoms bit by bit.
Anyone can read a murder mystery; that doesn't mean they are going to run out and harm someone!
This censorship is extremely disappointing. It's easy to read "between the lines" when an ISP has "secret rooms" that only outsiders are allowed to access.



[Edited on 16-12-2009 by quicksilver]

Polverone - 16-12-2009 at 10:37

There are many cheap web hosts operating overseas that won't implement this sort of filtering. I wouldn't recommend using the really cheap providers for actually hosting a web site (as I have learned the hard way), but any that offer SSH access are a great way to bypass web filtering. For example, I wouldn't trust Dreamhost to host anything but unimportant static content, but they offer SSH access and you can get a year of service for under US $10.

All you need to do is SSH in to the web host with the -D option to set up dynamic port forwarding, then configure your web browser to use the connection as a SOCKS proxy. The path between your machine and the web host machine is encrypted, so your local ISP cannot examine or limit the web content you are viewing.

For Windows users, here is a tutorial that uses the lovely free PuTTY program to pass your web traffic (encrypted) through a remote host.

Linux, Unix, and OS X users should already have the command-line ssh program installed. If you have an account on webhost.com with username myname, you can open a connection on port 1080 like this:

ssh -N -D 1080 myname@webhost.com

you'll be prompted for a password, and after the connection is made any software that supports SOCKS proxies can use the connection to bypass any local ISP filtering efforts. Sometimes you want to easily switch between proxied and non-proxied accounts. Firefox users can use FoxyProxy to manage this. It even includes pattern matching to automatically switch proxy use. For example, if your ISP blocks sciencemadness.org but not other websites, you can add a rule to automatically switch to a proxy when visiting Sciencemadness pages but otherwise use the standard unproxied connection.

sonogashira - 16-12-2009 at 13:12

Quote: Originally posted by quicksilver  
The Australians & Kiwis are some of the finest allies the USA has. (They have stood with us militarily since WWI & we worked very hard to protect them against the Japanese in WWII - many fine men were lost)

Have you seen The Big Lebowski? ;)

psychokinetic - 16-12-2009 at 13:14

Wow, I heard nothing of this until reading it here. I would've thought my Australian friends would've been moaning about this all day.

quicksilver - 17-12-2009 at 13:54

Yea, I saw it. but the history channel has some really heartbreaking stuff. The Aussies have been more than just allies. Their roots, much of their humanistic interaction - both social & legal has been something to be damn proud of.
I'm sure they have troubles like anyone else with racism and poverty. And this discussion shows that they have fallen victim to the same overboard "war on terror" mistakes we have. but all in all, they are a damn fine bunch.

psychokinetic - 18-12-2009 at 13:20

Dead right there quicksilver. It may be in my New Zealand nature to mock them for being Australian, but truly they are as you speak. And the war on modern fears such as terror has grasped them in many ways. Has here, too. And here I was thinking their governments were a relatively forward thinking bunch.

hissingnoise - 18-12-2009 at 14:46

Given its location, I'd have thought New Zealand would be relatively free from the WOT. . .
How has it affected you personally, psycho?



psychokinetic - 18-12-2009 at 19:29

Personally? I haven't noticed a lot of difference, but then... I don't really leave the house except to go to university.

Just like the rest of the world, our airport security is progessively getting more nuts.
Now with our new Prime Minister we may be more likely to war against 'terror', as he's starstruck by Obama (and any other US President, it seems).

JohnWW seems to be more hip and down with the state of the nation, perhaps he has $omething to $ay?

Magpie - 18-12-2009 at 20:02

At the risk of someone invoking Godwin's law, I offer this well-known photo from pre-WWII. I think that internet censorship is a much more insidious form of book burning: the perpetrators can hide within the bureacracy, there's no telltale flames or smoke ...



book-burn.jpg - 71kB

JohnWW - 18-12-2009 at 21:02

That is an authentic photograph of a book-burning from Nazi Germany in the the 1930s (a régime that Pre$cott Bu$h, the grandfather of Pre$ident George W Bu$h, helped finance and set up) - you can see the jackboots, swastika armbands, and Fa$cist salutes.

BTW "Godwin's Law", or "argumentum ad Hitlerum", states that the longer a discussion over the internet continues, the probability that someone will liken an opponent to Hitler or Fa$cism approaches 1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law

sonogashira - 19-12-2009 at 02:21

Quote: Originally posted by quicksilver  
Their roots, much of their humanistic interaction - both social & legal has been something to be damn proud of.

I don't want to argue but I will just say that genocide of indigenous peoples and treatment of prisoners especially in Van Diemen's Land is not model of humanistic interaction for me.

I say that as factual statement not to provoke argument. And I agree yes they are very nice people, though I visited only for a few weeks.:)

len1 - 19-12-2009 at 06:05

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Have you heard about the 'white Australia policy', or 'the stolen generation'. Our PM has only just recently apologised for that, after first making sure it will not be cashed in in the courts. A worthless apology literaly. I think 'niceness' like 'nastyness has no race.

quicksilver - 19-12-2009 at 08:38

The USA & Australia did serious genocide to their respective indigenous peoples. - This is a reality.
But it's like growing out of being a school-yard bully; you have to start somewhere and continued shame & guilt stifles the very dialog that is necessary for healing.
I personally did not own slaves nor did I harm the locals. I recognized the wrongs but I will not offer my hand in shame but in friendship; for I do NOT represent those who had done so.

psychokinetic - 19-12-2009 at 23:52

Sad thing is - it worked. Not that I agree with it - but in countries where the native people were treated absoluitely shockingly - the natives have shut up and gone away, basically.

Such an apology here in NZ would be laughed at, then have money demanded from it.

len1 - 20-12-2009 at 02:50

Thats right, if you treat people like s..t for ages they'll be happy just to hear 'sorry'. Theres even going to be a 'sorry' day. Hypocricy enshrined.

The Maori after the last Maori wars have had it much better. They are discriminated against when it comes to things like jobs, but Maori culture is hip in NZ. Its never been like that with Aboriginees in Australia

- and of course they never had their kids stripped from them 'en masse', just because they are Maori, to be mistreated, frequently sexually, in institutions and foster homes, all in the 20th century. There is no stolen generation in NZ

[Edited on 20-12-2009 by len1]

sonogashira - 20-12-2009 at 03:20

It is strange (maybe 'sad' is better word) that the Maori's are now more respected being as they were more war-like people (conquered very much after [more] pacifist Australian people). But it is the story of history that war-like people respect each other... as it is today :(

"All war is civil war because all men are brothers" - It is obvious to men of science but not rest of the world unfortunately. More important to them is pointing out that it is now fashionable to say 'men/women/transexual' - but the point is missed :(

But anyway - discussion of politics is time-less!
Merry Christmas ['Happy Holidays' for the trendy/[facile?] people!] War is over if you want it! :) Hehe! I should stick to chemistry!

hissingnoise - 20-12-2009 at 07:18

Quote: Originally posted by sonogashira  
It is obvious to men of science but not rest of the world unfortunately.

Is it a question of education or intellectual activity?
Or could it be that they're immune to the effects of organised religion. . .?
It has to be one of the three!
BTW, Bowdlerize seems to have abandoned his creation rather precipitously. . .

sonogashira - 20-12-2009 at 13:40

Now the thread is hijacked, lets have world peace for xmas!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9VhD4SccSE

"Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars..."


quicksilver - 20-12-2009 at 15:34

HAPPY HOLIDAYS PEOPLE! Treasure those you love, be safe.
And if you can't be with the ones you love, love the ones you're with.

No one HAS to be alone this time of year. If you're stuck for someone to party with, do something nice for someone - After all, it's your reality that you define each day.

psychokinetic - 20-12-2009 at 15:41

Quote: Originally posted by sonogashira  
more war-like people




Perhaps. They became warlike after they got European guns :P That's another subject altogether I suppose - serves me right for taking anthropology to get away from science at school!

sonogashira - 20-12-2009 at 16:09

Oh, forgive me, I thought it was from the start... Though I only read one book and that was maybe 8 yrs ago now so likely I misremembered... much like hilary clinton...!:D

[Edited on 21-12-2009 by sonogashira]

len1 - 21-12-2009 at 00:19

I think kinetic was joking. The Maoris were war-like the entire 400yrs they lived in aotearoa prior to arrival of the pakeha. The tribes constantly warred, they practiced cannibalism - an aspect of which was the chief of the victorious tribe eating the penis of the chief he had just defeated - so he can assume his manhood.

They annihilated the Moriori who lived there before their arrival.

hissingnoise - 21-12-2009 at 06:25

I believe in some ancient cultures it was the defeated's brain the victor consumed.
I would have gone for the two to get the best of both worlds. . .

psychokinetic - 22-12-2009 at 00:57

I was and wasn't joking. They were definitely warlike, but like many other indigenous cultures - their customs and ferocity were often exaggerated. It made for great commerce in buying their heads ;)

Hmm, Moriori. So many conflicting theories. Most agree that they were treated pretty brutally though :P

Now, back to eating my failed sugar wax...

[Edited on 22-12-2009 by psychokinetic]

Vogelzang - 1-1-2010 at 10:33

Check out this strange problem here http://forum.50webs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12100
It might have something to do with the Great Firewall of Britain.

Nation wide protests have been organized to fight the Internet Filter.

Bowdlerize - 10-1-2010 at 18:28

Nation wide protests have been organized to fight the Internet Filter.

Date: Saturday, March 6, 2010
Time: 12:00pm - 3:00pm
Location: Your nearest capital city
Host: Block The Filter


I'll be there and I hope that all Australians from here can make it too.