Why national Internet filters are pointless
IT SEEMS THAT the world plus dog is falling over itself to filter the World Wide Wibble in a desperate bid to protect children from things they can handle on their own.
Australia, Germany and other so called free societies are signing up for mandatory filtering schemes. The technology involved in such screening is similar to that tried more or less successfully in China and some of the more extreme religiously oriented countries.
It involves a list of sites that the government does not want its citizens see being blocked at the ISP. Since this list requires much updating, the filtering software has a list of dodgy words that it does not like and will block pages containing those too.
Such country's creeds are against the individual and more in favour of state or religious stability being considered more important. So they will spend a lot of money and resources monitoring and checking. Otherwise they will find their citizens will wake up and work out they really don't want a government like that.
Western nations which have been advocating filtering have done so solely on the basis that they are protecting kiddies from seeing things they shouldn't. When they tend to mention the fact that they would like 'illegal sites' blocked they usually talk about it with hushed breath or mention the handy cover-all of terrorism.
However there is a fear that public servants will decide what is illegal and what information the great unwashed should see. Censorship is always about maintaining the status quo and keeping people ignorant if that is threatened.
Tony Blair would have loved to stick the phrase 'weapons of mass destruction' on any UK block list, for example. 'Conservative Party' could be on Scottish Prime Minister Gordon Brown's list.
But evidence from Australia seems to indicate that sticking such filtering at the ISP level either breaks the internet or causes the whole thing to slow down to the days of dial-up modems.
Free speech issues are abstract but if you can't get your emails because the government is checking that you are not accessing porn then the Internet is in trouble.
This leads to another problem. Algorithms that are 99.999 per cent accurate in identifying 'bad' material might be technologically obtainable. Filters seem to have got past the day where they blocked references to the town of Scunthorpe or renamed references to athelete Tyson Gay as 'Tyson Homosexual'.
But with the huge numbers of Web pages going up every day you are still going to get a large number of false positives.
China has found that some of its more technology savvy minions have worked ways around its Great Fire Wall of China.
In the West, where the motivation towards censorship is not as fanatical, we suspect any filtering system will be cracked within minutes. Proxy servers, encryption and tunnelling are all tools that can and will be used.
Finally it will not actually stop paedophiles. The serious kiddie fiddler Internet rings are extremely secure encrypted operations. Filtering won't even see the material they are shifting.
Yesterday the Italian press was full of a story about Cathgoogle.com which is a search engine set up by father Fortunato Di Noto, founder priest of Meter who has been fighting kiddie porn for years.
Cathgoogle.com was supposed to be a 'religiously correct' search engine with search words like 'sex', 'contraception', 'drugs' and 'abortion' not generating hits.
However on a slow news day rainnews24 hacks played around at the site and searched their way to all sorts of sites that would not have been approved of by the Pope. This led to a somewhat unfair claim that paedophiles and pornographers have 'infiltrated' Cathoogle.com.
There are companies out there which have been blocking staff access to some sites for years. Firms find that employees will use a variety of high-tech and low tech ways of getting around the filters. Simple techniques such as going through a site such as Babelfish with the translation set to English is surprisingly effective as is looking at the blocked site through Google cache.
That is even before staff start playing with proxy servicers.
If a company with a limited Internet access point and a small number of users can't stop staff from going where they like, what chance does a government, with millions of users, and a world load of Interweb access points have?
Finally there will be the question of how much governments want to spend on web filtering. Some think it will only be a matter of a few hundred million and it will be sorted. China has spent a fortune and even that has been circumvented.
If the governments of Germany and Australia are prepared to keep paying for an unpopular system that will not do anything, in the middle of a recession, then they deserve to find out how pointless that is. µ
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'If the governments of Germany and Australia are prepared to keep paying for an unpopular system that will not do anything, in the middle of a recession, then they deserve to find out how pointless they are.'
The Governments of the world don't give a toss, it's the publics money they're spending, and there's always more ways to ring more cash out of them.
Once they make circumventing the mandated filtering a crime, they create a new class of criminal for the establishment to incarcerate and marginalize. Turning law-abiding citizens into convicts with the stroke of a pen is perfectly standard operating procedures for burgeoning police states.
Article 5, paragraph 1 of the German constitution guarantees the right to expert an opion in speech, writing and picture. It also guarantees the free access to such opinion, and the freedom of the press. The last sentence of paragraph 1 says "Eine Zensur findet nicht statt." (Censorship does not happen.) But paragraph 2 of article says that this right is limited by laws, and explicitly mentions the protection of the youth. Paragraph 3 then underlines that art, science and research are free (as in speech).
Now, the first part of paragraph 2 is extremely inexplicit, while its second part, the protection of the youth, is absolutely explicit. It would not look good for the government to call on the first part of paragraph 2, which is why they use the second part, the protection of the youth. The whole act has of course nothing to do with protecting the youth, or fighting terrorism. There is another parallel development in Germany, and other European countries, namely a change of privacy. So far privacy was regarded as right worthy of protection. However, the current draft of a new law not only forces ISPs to record and store all information about connections made by users (IP addresses, phone numbers), but now also ***allows*** ISPs to inspect their customers' traffic, store the information, and ***forward*** the information to authorities and (!) copyright holders of the entertainment industry.
Wow Nikki, I thought you were like, totally in favor of the nanny state, because it makes you so safe. What ever made you pen such rubbish?
HB
Business idea
Once the filter is implemented, does that mean that anything I can get my hands on without circumventing the filter is ‘approved’? If so, does that mean we will see government officials charged for distributing illegal material?
Will copyright layers take the next step and put filtering on music files? Will gambling sites and foreign bank websites be filtered next to raise revenue?
So here is the idea.
Create a site called ‘reverse.[insert site name]’. All data in that site will be in translated format eg. swap bits around so that 1=0 and 0=1. Since the data will become meaningless, the filter fails to pickup positives and become useless. Yet, your browser/decoder will be able to cope with this without any issues. This is legal and there is nothing filters can do about it. It also takes 10 hours of programming (if you lazy or new to this sort of thing).
Sites get blacklisted, so do subdomains. And if a "special" browser is needed for that scheme, then the researchers working on the filtering tech will have their own copy. And don't even think about legal implications, that crap will never be stated "as is" legally. It goes just like law enforcement: they try, but don't blame them if they fail. But I gotta admit, when you consider there are huge piles of cash being invested in this kind of tech, it has to be for obscure reasons (from my citizen's perpective). Smart people work on restrictive technologies, but when the public finds out about the implications, they get smarter hella fast!
Arsepurgers is contagious amoungst politicians.
There are numerous ways to get around just about any censorship imposed on the internet by ISPs and/or governments. The easiest is to use non-censored DNS and proxy servers that are outside the censored region or even create and use your own DNS. There are several ways listed in an article here: http://www.zensur.freerk.com/index.htm
Down with censorship!
It's pointless a typical filter problem is the Dutch town: Sexbirum
That town has been filtered more then once, but it's the name of the town :-)
BTW, filtering is silly, parents should talk to their children and explain good versus bad.
Not leaving their job in the hands of others.
It's so typical these days, parents not knowing what their kids do, let alone be home for the kids.
Too much people work, while there should be somebody home for them, and I don't mean somebody you pay to do it.
If you take kids, make damn sure you have time for them! Then the Internet is not a problem either.
1) It won't work.
2) It won't been finished on time.
3) By the time it's out it will be so oudated that I will disappear into obscurity.
4) The way this Labour government is going they will be out by May next year. People are sick of them trying to diminish our civil liberties (I.D. cards etc) and many MP's in the Labour party are against these policies because they know how unpopular they are. Gordon Brown is acting like he is Tony Blair in 1997 but he is a fool to neglect the fact that Labour's popularity is in the toilet and trying to ram through this kind of idea is going to get them kicked out.