In Australia, Censorship vs. DNS, and Porn As Network Driver

daria42 writes "Remember how Australia's planning to censor its Internet? Well, it looks as though the country's second-largest ISP, Optus, has made a stumble right out of the gate. Optus today confirmed you could circumvent its filtering technology simply by setting your PC to use a different DNS server than the default. Yup, it's really that easy. Oops." And why would anyone want to change their DNS settings? angry tapir writes "While the Australian Government has extolled the virtues of its currently under construction National Broadband Network (NBN) in delivering e-health and government agency services to every Australian, adult content will be the major driver of consumer adoption."

Re:No problem!

[Anonymous Coward]

As do I (and I live in AU), so I thumb my nose at these measures. I made the decision early on to DIY with as much as possible: mail, DNS, NTP, web and whatever other servers I need. Mainly for my own education. At times I've wondered whether it's easier to just use free services, but now I can sit back smugly and say "Ha!" The next part of my education is adding encryption to those protocols that aren't already so.

Re:Not for techies

[snookums]

Thing is,once the NBN is setup, the gov will have complete control over the data, and where to route it.

No, it won't.

The NBN will simply provide layer-2 pipes to ISPs. The ISPs will issue IP addresses, handle routing and all that jazz. If an ISP wants to set up a fully encrypted back-haul (say using L2TP/IPSec VPN) then they're free to do so.

If the government want to control the data moving over the NBN they'll do it by legislation, just like they would do with the current model (ISP-over-Telstra-copper), not by deep packet inspection or DNS blocking.

Re:It is not about porn

[The Archon V2.0]

The filter is not about porn, it is about kiddy porn, the sort that they arrest people for.

Indeed it is, and I'm sure of this because they're so open and... oh, wait, they're not even telling us WHO is contributing to the list, so their promises of WHAT is on it are a bit suspect. Reputable international organisations [news.com.au] with such good reputations that they don't want to be associated with this? Really?

Perhaps they don't want to be blamed the next time a dentist [couriermail.com.au] is mistaken for a pornographer.

For everyone not in Oz

[mjwx]

One of the big reasons Telstra and Optus are doing this is because they want to restrict traffic on their mobile networks. Optus and Telstra are our oldest ISP's so they have a large historical customer base but their landline services are so expensive they have been haemorrhaging customers to other ADSL providers for years, so most of their customers are mobile. Mobile services are so horribly oversubscribed in Australia due to lots of new customers signing up for cheap data plans but no new investment in infrastructure. Vodafone already had a massive crisis last year when it's data network fell in a heap, now it seems Telstra and Optus are headed for the same thing so they want to restrict users from using what they've paid for (as retroactively changing the contract enables customers to leave with no penalties).

Re:Money

[WhitetailKitten]

The exact same week Telstra and Optus were awarded massive contracts to migrate their customers across to the NBN, they also 'volunteered' to implement the filters Conroy couldn't pass into law. iiNet (the third largest, nerd friendly ISP) flat our refused to implement censorship, and were coincidentally told that they wouldn't get any contracts.

Quelle surprise.