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War settles nothing. To win a war is as disastrous as to lose one - Agatha Christie
Aussie Web censorship trials to exclude large ISPs
THE AUSSIE GOVERNMENT which is desperate to bring in a Chinese-style web censorship programme, is fudging tests on the software to do it by refusing to allow big ISPs to take part.
Most techies believe that the net will fall over, or at least slow down, if the Great Rabbit Proof Fence of OZ is switched on.
The government has said that it will await results of the trials, but it seems that it does not want the big ISPs to take part.
Optus and iiNet are not involved with the government instead using six smaller ones: Primus Telecommunications, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1.
What's that Skip? The Government has thrown its credibility down the well?
Analysts say that the smaller ISPs are more likely to be sympathetic to the government's agenda. After all they want to control and limit traffic as much as possible to save themselves bandwidth.
However, more cynical observers would say that the reason the government does not want the larger ISPs onboard is because the smaller ones do not have the ability to see the global picture of what will happen when the bizarre censorship filter is switched on.
A large ISP could see how the filter will effect the whole country, and it seems the government does not want that information to get out.
It's true that the country's largest ISP is involved, but the second and third largest ISPs are not, despite expressing a willingness to be part of the trials.
The Australian Greens' communications spokesman Scott Ludlam said the trial was too small.
What is even more amusing is that the trail is voluntary.
In other words, if punters don't want to take part they can tell the ISP to go forth and multiply.
So someone who wants to watch Internet porn, or look at illegal sites, will opt out and no one will know how they are getting on.
Quite why the Australian government is being so dumb about the trials is anyone's guess. If it says they all worked and, when the filters go onto the national arena, the Internet breaks, then it is going to have a national state of emergency on its hands.
Perhaps it is hoping that the it will lose support in the Parliament and be forced to shelve the idea. It could then say, "We had an idea it would have worked but the opposition wouldn't let us put it through." µ
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Awesome article dude.
As an Australian national, I'm just dumbfounded on how this whole situation is playing out. If this was somehow an option for parents or businesses that wanted filter and it didn't affect my bandwidth in the slightest, I'd be all for it. As it is though, it's embarrassing that this kind of fascism can take place in a Western society such as Australia. Shame.
"It's true that the country's largest ISP is involved, but the second and third largest ISPs are not, despite expressing a willingness to be part of the trials."
This is actually wrong - none of the three largest isps in Australia (Telstra, Optus, iiNet) are involved in the trial, nor are any ISPs of any significant size really. Telstra and others like Internode flat out refused from the get-go to participate due to how ludicrous the entire situation is, while everyone else was just excluded.
The largest ISP on that list is Primus, which in the scale of ISPs in Australia is still extremely small. The other five are practically unknown, with Webshield already providing their own content censoring fwiw.
This entire trial has no credibility. I mean, just go to the sites of some of the ISPs that are involved like Tech2u (http://www.tech2u.com.au/) and tell me if they seem even remotely reputable.
You called this the "Chinese-style web censorship programme". Curious, are the masters behind this plan closer to China, or closer to the MAFIAA?
"The Great Rabbit Proof Fence" doesn't sound right, how about "The Great Barrier Reef"?
They need to fix our infrastructure before they do anything else. Great to see the moral minority working hard to control everything.
Once again this only serves to punish the honest.
The crooks will ultimately be the vicors for anything like this.
As an Australian I am horrified that even one dollar would be wasted on this idiot scheme - we have thousands of homes to be rebuilt after a devastating bushfire, a worldwide global economic crisis - talk about shuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic! The government already offers free net filtering software for anyone who wants it - why slow down our already pitifully slow net speeds even further?
In a flat country like Australia, with most of the population concentrated on a small area, what exactly keeps the people from implementing their own network with wireless devices? Don't you have encryption software, wi-fi devices, amateur radio operators (to cover the farms) and a few bored developers who can put everything together? Use encrypted communications via proxies in other countries for the connection to the rest of the world.
"The government already offers free net filtering software for anyone who wants it " - One of the first actions of the current government was to discontinue these free filtering applications (they disappeared from the ISPs about 8 months ago). After all, what use are they with the net filtering that they are going to push through irrespective of the wishes of the population?
"It's true that the country's largest ISP is involved".
Not even close. The largest ISP on the list is Primus, which is just outside the top ten.
There's a quantitative difference between small and large ISPs. Small ISPs have a single upstream link -- an obvious place to filter.
Large ISPs have multiple redundant paths to other parts of the Internet with no real upstream.
A large ISP may have upwards of twenty sites where filtering is needed. That's financially insane, so there will be less filters installed, which will decrease bandwidth and reliability and increase latency (which is already outrageous due to Australia being a good 14,000Km from the US west coast epicentre of the Internet).