Australia To Block BitTorrent 674
Kevin 7Kbps writes "Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy announced today that the Australian Internet Filters will be extended to block peer-to-peer traffic, saying, 'Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.' This dashes hopes that Conroy's Labor party had realised filtering could be politically costly at the next election and were about to back down. The filters were supposed to begin live trials on Christmas Eve, but two ISPs who volunteered have still not been contacted by Conroy's office, who advised, 'The department is still evaluating applications that were put forward for participation in that pilot.' Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."
When will this die???? (Score:5, Informative)
When will this thing finally die? Every man and his dog acknowledges that it is a steaming pile of political rhetoric, yet it still goes on and on and on.
From the article I linked to:
Australia's largest ISP, Telstra, and Internode have said they will not participate in the trials. The second largest ISP, Optus, will run only a scaled- back trial of just the first tier while iiNet, the third biggest provider, has said it will participate simply to show the Government that its scheme will not work.
Re:World of Warcraft and p2p... (Score:5, Informative)
<pedantic nitpick>TCP/IP is a P2P protocol. It was designed so that anybody could be a client and anybody could be a server - there were no special addresses that were client-only or server-only. Anything that flows over TCP/IP is using a P2P network, and I would guess that there is plenty of legal content flowing over TCP/IP.</pedantic nitpick>
Re:Where is he saying that? (Score:5, Informative)
The Government understands that ISP-level filtering is not a 'silver bullet'. We have always viewed ISP-level filtering as one part of a broader government initiative for protecting our children online.
Technology is improving all the time. Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Informative)
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Informative)
The fastest 0day share by topsites is still done with really fast FTP servers.
OpenVPN (Score:3, Informative)
Thing is, you can buy for a little extra money a VPN account using OpenVPN for about 20 bucks a month.
Fully encrypted SSL UDP tunnel with bandwidth that exceeds your cable modem. I've used it for years without any problem.
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Informative)
They were properly tried and convicted of a crime and get to serve out the rest of their sentence.
Freenet? Or some other encrypted filesharing? (Score:5, Informative)
Frankly, I don't know if this is a bad thing. We've been saying for years that everyone needs to encrypt everything by default and it hasn't happened because "normal" people don't see the need for their "normal" traffic.
Take Freenet as an example. It's never reached critical mass and there's little worthwhile content (as of the last time I checked; I gave up on it some time back). But what happens if people can't get their torrents to work and all their mules and limes and kazaas stop working? Freenet with Frost needs just a decent installer package and enough users so that it scales up to reasonable speed. If that happened, how would that get filtered? Would the govt demand the blocking of everything that's encrypted? I can imagine some big players in the e-commerce game might have a thought or two on that subject.
I don't use bittorrent or any emule/kazaa-like applications, but I think I've read that they all can be configured to encrypt all transfers.
If governments want to stop "bad" traffic, they should realize that the tools are available for it to all go underground and flourish in ways the govt can't effectively monitor, much less censor. Are governments really stupid enough to hasten that situation?
I think so. Whether it's Freenet, some other encrypted environment, or just encryption on top of currently popular protocols, part of me welcomes the censorship because I know it will finally start moving people to protect their communications. I think that's a good thing that will come from all this censorsip silliness.
And to think - If the music industry had just bought out Napster and and used it to its potential, how many man-millenia of labor could have been put to productive use instead of wasted in stupid cat 'n mouse games?
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in the UK so we have no senators, but your point stands.
And I have written to my MP about this. Stating clearly my concerns about the massive back end database that will contain masses of information about individuals, be a security nightmare, be abused etc etc. I also mentioned that I had no faith it would be delivered to time or budget, would not solve any of the problems it's supposed to etc etc.
Three months later I got a form reply starting -
"We've listened to your concerns but would like to reassure you that the ID card scheme isn't just about ID cards, it'll be backed by a national database..."
i.e. Making it unequivocally clear that they had not read a damn word I said and didn't care at all about my opinion. This has happened with other issues too.
Look at the Iraq war - Between 1 and 2 million people took to the streets of London, which is a lot in a country with a population of 60M, and to get that many protesting takes some serious feeling amongst the population as a whole. What happened? We went to war.
The politicians in this country are in the business of overriding and ignoring public opinion at every turn. the public are in the business of voting for the best looking, most eloquent, best funded or smartest dressed guy, so long as he's in the same party their family always vote for.
It's useless to try and get anything done this way.
Re:*sigh* (Score:1, Informative)
Concering point 2 I'd like to bring the following quote:
"Propaganda must be limited to a few simple themes and these must be represented again and again. Here, as in innumerable other cases, perseverance is the first and most important condition of success."
-- Adolf Hitler
Re:Ministry of Censorship (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, there is. There's 2 bodies that do censorship in Australia.
OFLC reviews media for compliance. It's an independent body that reports to Parliament.
ACMA is responsible for online/broadcast regulation. It answers to the Minister for Communications (ie Conroy). It refers things that it thinks need to be classified to the OFLC.
Not just WoW (Score:2, Informative)
So long for getting their next album legally over the internet if BitTorrent gets blocked.