Perhaps someone should complain about Senator Conways own website and maybe get that banned.

The first casualty of war is truth.
So it seems our Government is at war with it's citizens.
I am now seeing the wisdom of those who insisted the Australian Labor Party were communists. It's now clear, the level of control they aspire to.
Tell the commies to rack off and go to live in China. The religious fanatics have enough in common with fundamentalist Islam, perhaps they could go to Saudi Arabia!
I say bring back the easy-going Aussie jocular openness that made us the one-time darlings of the world.

As an Australian I compeletly oppose this moronic idea. Just to let the rest of the world know, our best internet deal in Australia is free wifi in an American hotel, now that you all know how terrible our deals are you can only think how this will impact on our already slowed speeds

Please watch my anti-censorship video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXmcw4HjpBM
Rate, comment and subscribe if you like it.

Lincoln Phillips you couldnt of said it better.
no american can criticize any other government, just look at what yours has done.

anyways read this the other day on another forum. thought it was a pretty good point.
"The Senator is claiming that his filter is 100%. That it will not slow any connection, but more importantly, it is 100% accurate in filtering out child pornography and other RC/illegal material. It has to be 100%, any admission of flaws in it's ability to filter the internet would be an admission that it does not work.

By making it mandatory, it is taking the freedom of choice away from the individual. But it also means that the filter is also taking away the responsibility from the individual.

Because if the filter is as foolproof as is claimed, ALL internet material that can be accessed in Australia MUST be legal. Otherwise the foolproof filter would have blocked that material.

The scary? This filter means it will be IMPOSSIBLE to prosecute any person for accessing child pornography on the internet. Senator Conroy is in fact making it EASIER and LEGAL for pedophiles to collect and exchange their sickening material."

Australian Federal Police Protective Services don't have enough staff to protect Conroy if his lunatic legislation somehow gets passed. Ok we don't have freedom of speech enshrined in a Bill of Rights but said freedom is one of the fundamental tenets of being a DEMOCRACY - citizen's choice. Censorship belongs with communist or other types of dictatorships. I think perhaps given the problems Rudd and the ALP nationwide are suffering they will seriously re-think the introduction if they really want a 2nd term...

after they censor the net will be cut the balls of all aussies to bring down to zero the violence numbers...
Seriously, they already ban violent games. Not even US puritans do that!
Thank god other countries doesn't follow these absurd aussie laws.

You sir, are a moron, and have embarrassed your country.

Servers for the internet are placed in many locations, around the world. The US Doesn't own the internet.

Don't blame Australians for their Government when the US Government is clearly worse.

If I were to use your logic, Everybody in the US is a xenophopic simpleton, simply because you are one.

Signed:
Everybody but Rich Wargo (or those of a similar irrational mindset)

"It will be an offence to describe technical measures to avoid the filter."

Er - in which country.
The obnoxious Dr Töben was daft enough to visit Germany, a state which not surprisingly feels rather strongly about the Holocaust. If the author of articles about, or the provider of services for avoiding the filter lives outside Oz (or works through a proxy outside Oz) just what do the Oz thoughtpolice intend to do? Invade Fiji or Khazakstan or San Marino?

the average 12 year old is too sophisticated for any firewall ever built.

It will be an offence to describe technical measures to avoid the filter.

If someone lodges a complaint with ACMA your "instruction in matters of crime" (using a VPN to avoid the filter) could cause The INQ to be Refused Classification and added to the List.

You see how a filter promoted as removing "the worst of the worst" ends up a a censorship tool for everyday content?

As an Aussie myself i've been posting and commenting on Australian forums that are already full of rage for the filter.

People really really dont like Conroy.

...the test also didnt filter P2P, emails, im chat services, ipv6 and anything else that's pretty much standard these days. It literally just checked DNS entries against local and network stored records, you could bypass this thing by browsing to the IP address of the blocked client!

If that was the case, according to the leaked list, all of groups.google.com and www.geocities.com, not to mention other popular sites would be completely blocked. To my knowledge it only blocks HTTP...

etc.

Here's one forum

http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php?showtopic=6088&st=420&start=420

Also if there is anyone who does want to write a little hate-mail, make sure you read this first

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/16/dont-waste-your-time-waste-theirs-a-guide-to-writing-to-ministers/

cut poor wargo and the usa from the internet, wouldn't need anymore censorship than that.

Considering how easy it will be to bypass the so called filter , it is really just a storm in a Tea cup..as for the comments by rich wargo...Personally being cut off from the USA would be good for all of us.

Germany was among the first Western democratic nations that introduced a controversial internet censorship in June 2009 - which is marked by technical flaws that resulted in October 2009 in a temporary removal of those bans. Interesting, UNICEF had pushed for the review.

The government's move triggered some collective organised resistance in Germany, in the general election in September 2009 the Pirate Party (based on the Swedish party founded in 2006 with an aim to regain more ) gained 2% of the votes.

Having said that, Germany's history of control-obsession and it's position as nation with the lowest birth-rate world-wide make it prone for success of such kind of censorship. Half-baked as it was in its technical conception the main aim is and remains to reassure voter - and secure votes. Censorship never deals with the underlying issues (child porn is still produced in the real world) nor does it prepare citizens to deal with the thoughts and actions deemed necessary to censor in the real world.

As an Australia I find this latest move by the Government disgusting. The ramifications of this are truly frightening.

Hey Rich Wargo, is there room for one more over there?

We must have full public access to the master control list of internet sites and personalities to be VERBOTEN. This way we accurately judge its validity.
Examples : is the web site of Dr. Toben of Adelaide Institute, imprisoned for THREE MONTHS for having alternate view of history and alternate perspectives on Reality, to be banished ?
Or will the Pentagon Syndicate MILITARY.COM website, that fully captures and portrays Iraqi men being tortured by World Zionist Military, be left completely off the list ?
What is unfair for one will not be fair for all. God Bless the People of Palestine.

VPN, Too easy.

So....I'll keep quiet...what time is the Inq gonna show porn?

Well if they go ahead with it and annoy too many people someone might give someone the Berlusconi treatment.

So it's good not to treat your people like animals and start being a nuisance. And who remembers kennedy. As well as many who were assassinated like the isreali guy cant remember his name.

bye. Jon.

This is a joke, im really disliking this government trying to control everything,
firstly the guy introduces alcohol tax and basically destroys Australias drinking coulture without reducing violence at all, and now trying to do this, but oh wait a second it's to "protect the children" he uses this one line as a reason to do what ever he wants really hiding the governments agender to block torrent sites, back up disk sites etc, other wise they could have come up with something like advertising and making parents more aware of windows internet content monitor, this government wont last another election i hope or they may try to introduce communism... oh wait it basically already is.

According to reports, the censorship is 'community based', i.e. if I have a beef with Nick Farrell, I could blacklist his site for sprouting hateful speech not suitable for our 'vulnerable' kids.

That's how they claimed 100% accuracy. A monkey can filter a shortlist.

On the flip side, if The Inquirer starts showing porn tomorrow it could still slip past the filtering if everybody keeps quiet...

You just put forward a case FOR censorship, you git.

if they also agree to ban all blog sites, celebrity news, "gamers", facebook, forums, IRC, and anything to do with Apple.

egil is right about that the Norwegian police have been blacklisting websites and through cooperation with ISPs blocking access to them. I disagree with that practice, on the general principle that people should not be blocked from viewing websites. Such blocking of websites does taste too much of sensorship in my opinion.

However, it is a fact that the only websites that are being blocked in Norway, and not even by all ISPs (although by most of them), are websites with child porn. Norway's biggest ISP, Telenor, have stated clearly that they have no intention to block any other websites. Now, I wouldn't automatically believe what they say, but so far I do believe them. They have refused to block access to file sharing networks or sites, that the music business have demanded and even gone to court (Telenor won at the first hurdle) to get them to block.

I am very sceptical to all kinds of sensorship, but there is still a difference between blocking child porn sites and blocking loads of websites about this or that that the powers that be happen to dislike.

I, as an Australian, can say that I have yet to meet a single person that thinks that Conroy's filter is a good idea. Yet he is going ahead and doing it anyway!

Please, Australians, write a letter to your local MPs and to Stephen Conroy and tell them that you don't want them taking away our rights and censoring the internet.

I have written my own letter to Stephen Conroy in which I debunk the whole filter scheme. I will mail it tomorrow. You can read it and steal from it ideas for your own letters here: http://www.digitallycreated.net/Blog/index.php?id=46

Censorship is an extremely bad idea.

Censorship is not needed.

Black lists?

Form a democratic comittee who lists and qualfies unwelcome sites.

Make them public, in real time.

If you are a parent, you might want to chose to include this democratic black list in a filter ON YOUR OWN COMPUTER.

It's not the government's business.
It's not the provider's business.

It's a democracy's business
using democratic (public & transparent) ideas, methods and tools.

Period.

Surely not because we thought that some abhorrent criminals who slaughtered other people etc. did not deserve to die.

We did let the Death Penalty go, because it could be abused. By the Government. Some day. Who knows.

For the very same reason we should not allow the Government to censor the internet in any way.

Censorship is not a government's business.
Period.

.

They banned L4Dead 2 because of the content, and now this daft idea of net censorship. The Land of Oz needs to grow up and stop being so anal retentive. No wonder all these Ozzies want to come to live in Blighty. Mind you, Ben Elton's living in Oz now, so maybe that's not the only reason why the Billabongs are coming here.

G'day Mate! Decent cobbers could all go pear-shaped if you don't come up with something more Australian sounding than "Big Brother".

What did the original English 'settlers' call the government that exiled them?

Foiled by one pimply faced Australian boy with some free proxy software.

It was only ever going to be a matter of time. Remember those carefree days of the 1990s, when we thought the Internet would give us a permanent new dimension of freedom, tolerance, and intelligent discussion?

Well, what we overlooked is that politicians take a long, long, long, LONG time to become aware of new ideas. 50 or 100 years is often par for the course - that's about how long it took them to hoist scientific management (Taylorism) on board.

But with the Internet, a dim comprehension is already dawning that plebs the world over have found a way of talking things over and spreading news without permission from their political masters.

Naturally, once the pointy-haired politicians (PHPs) begin to feel threatened, they will quickly do everything they can to thwart this menace. Given another few years, some of their brighter advisors may even click that it would be even better to take control of the Internet and use it to flush out their enemies.

Those beacons of socialist enlightment in Scandinavia have also been censoring the net. a 2sec look at Wikileaks mentions Denmark and Finland - I am sure there are more.

sentimental to the great olde times?

The Norwegian police (Criminal investigation unit - KRIPOS) have been blacklisting websites and, through cooperation with ISPs, blocking access for a couple of years already.

This will be as easy to walk around as the Great Firewall is. (How do I know? I've been walking around the Great Firewall for eight years now.) It won't even be a speed bump to anybody who wants out. What's the point?

It's not only "useful for controlling and monitoring the Australian public". Oh, no. The Enex report suggests that regex URLs be allowed to be automatically loaded into ISP filters from a censor's office in Canberra. So our public servant makes a typo --- http://* --- and goes out to buy some tea and bikkies (whingeing about the removal of tea ladies back in the 1980s whilst he does so). While he dunks his Nice biscuit into his tea, the Internet in Australia has stopped, awaiting for him to check hos voice mail upon his return to his office. Let's hope he isn't taking the rest of the day off on flexitime. It's the sort of technical advice to the Minister that thought that automated loading of URLs could ever be a good idea that we're dealing with here. Let alone the pollies trying to tie in the Deep North Chrisstian vote prior to the election.

This article is incorrect. This Labor government is very popular with 68% approval rating compared to the low 30%ish Coalition opposition parties.

Considering that the Rudd government is only in it's first term, it makes it extremely likely that they will be re-elected. This will give them the false "mandate" required to pass this legislation in their second term.

I hope this comment reaches you, I think my internet is bein..

A better idea: take an axe and chop up the Internet links to Oz. Sorry about this, my Aussie mates, but until you and your fellow citizens get rid of those rude, condesending, Stalinistas you have running your so-called "governments", you have no right to be part of the Internet.

Clean up your act and we'll consider letting you back on.

Signed,

Citizens of U.S.A., who paid for the freakin' Internet, so yes, we own it.