Attention Aussie Internet Users

boballab
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by boballab »

And thats why it will fail, it will be too broad. Besides getting rid of what you don't want, with to broad of a filter it will block educational materials like online encyclopedias or a site like Web MD. How can someone do online research of say the Roman Empire if the research might contain banned words. Then there will be outside pressure from places like Amazon.com because they would get banned because "gasp" they sell books that have banned words in it, that you can read online in the description or through sample chapters. Spec it sounds like these people need to read some Orwell and Farenheit 451.
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Spec8472
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by Spec8472 »

Oh, UserFriendly did a great comic re this:

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20081109
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dellstart
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by dellstart »

boballab wrote:And thats why it will fail, it will be too broad. Besides getting rid of what you don't want, with to broad of a filter it will block educational materials like online encyclopedias or a site like Web MD. How can someone do online research of say the Roman Empire if the research might contain banned words. Then there will be outside pressure from places like Amazon.com because they would get banned because "gasp" they sell books that have banned words in it, that you can read online in the description or through sample chapters. Spec it sounds like these people need to read some Orwell and Farenheit 451.
There is a huge difference between filtering out a Porn site and filtration of a Online encyclopedia.I cant believe that they would equate them.A encyclopedia is just plain facts and figures, whereas a porn site is obviously not.On the other hand ,just because you want to censor some deviant style sites doesn't make you a Big Brother lover.
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by Mysterious »

Does anybody know when this thing is going to come up?
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

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dellstart wrote:There is a huge difference between filtering out a Porn site and filtration of a Online encyclopedia.I cant believe that they would equate them.A encyclopedia is just plain facts and figures, whereas a porn site is obviously not.On the other hand ,just because you want to censor some deviant style sites doesn't make you a Big Brother lover.
The probelm being to set up a filter this massive they can't ban by site they have to filter by words.
And for what it's worth, Illegal content isn't just Porn - it can include sites describing personal accounts of substance abuse, anorexia, abortions, and others. Plus, given the 'dynamic' keyword filtering - any site happening to trigger a few banned words would also be blocked too.

The 'opt-out' portion will relate only to material that is rated R18+ and comes with an age verification system
See Amazon.com would get banned because they sell autobiographies that in some of them descripe just what Spec listed.

Online encyclopedias could get banned because you will run across important landmark law cases like Roe v Wade which had the word abortion in it.

Web Md could get banned because of the medical terms Vagina and/or Penis.

Now to get "off" the list the way Spec is referring to it you must have age verification, most likely by Credit card (CC), before you actually enter the site. What Sites are specifically set up that way? Porn sites. So little Johhny could sneak into daddy's wallet late at night copy his CC number and experation date and get a "porn" site unbanned on his home computer but legit ones still be banned.

Remember they want to ban ALL of the Porn Sites and they don't have enough time, money or people to have them sit there day after day finding the URL's or IP's of these sites and filtering them that way. Besides new sites pop up all the time and those URL's wouldn't be listed. The only way to get them is to use a very wide range of key words to Ban the site. Something a Computer can do after a program is written form it. It would just log on from site to site scan for banned words and move on. Once the conditions are met to Ban a site it automatically copies the URL to the Ban list. Basically they are taking the Tech the NSA uses to scan the airwaves to search for terrorists and using it to find Porn. People got up in arms over that thinking "Big Brother", This is far worse they are actively seeking censorship and not on a selective basis. This type of system wouldn't work in the US, the Supreme Court would have so many suits drop on their desks it would make your head spin.
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dellstart
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

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boballab wrote:
dellstart wrote:There is a huge difference between filtering out a Porn site and filtration of a Online encyclopedia.I cant believe that they would equate them.A encyclopedia is just plain facts and figures, whereas a porn site is obviously not.On the other hand ,just because you want to censor some deviant style sites doesn't make you a Big Brother lover.
The probelm being to set up a filter this massive they can't ban by site they have to filter by words.
And for what it's worth, Illegal content isn't just Porn - it can include sites describing personal accounts of substance abuse, anorexia, abortions, and others. Plus, given the 'dynamic' keyword filtering - any site happening to trigger a few banned words would also be blocked too.

The 'opt-out' portion will relate only to material that is rated R18+ and comes with an age verification system
See Amazon.com would get banned because they sell autobiographies that in some of them descripe just what Spec listed.

Online encyclopedias could get banned because you will run across important landmark law cases like Roe v Wade which had the word abortion in it.

Web Md could get banned because of the medical terms Vagina and/or Penis.

Now to get "off" the list the way Spec is referring to it you must have age verification, most likely by Credit card (CC), before you actually enter the site. What Sites are specifically set up that way? Porn sites. So little Johhny could sneak into daddy's wallet late at night copy his CC number and experation date and get a "porn" site unbanned on his home computer but legit ones still be banned.

Remember they want to ban ALL of the Porn Sites and they don't have enough time, money or people to have them sit there day after day finding the URL's or IP's of these sites and filtering them that way. Besides new sites pop up all the time and those URL's wouldn't be listed. The only way to get them is to use a very wide range of key words to Ban the site. Something a Computer can do after a program is written form it. It would just log on from site to site scan for banned words and move on. Once the conditions are met to Ban a site it automatically copies the URL to the Ban list. Basically they are taking the Tech the NSA uses to scan the airwaves to search for terrorists and using it to find Porn. People got up in arms over that thinking "Big Brother", This is far worse they are actively seeking censorship and not on a selective basis. This type of system wouldn't work in the US, the Supreme Court would have so many suits drop on their desks it would make your head spin.
It is quite a devilish problem. No doubt about it.
Yeah , The US is quite a different kettle of fish. Though the right to bear arms , has been taken a beating lately.Who says there isn't censorship over here , just ask the Tabaco companies why they get so severly taxed , more than other substances
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by Spec8472 »

boballab wrote:See Amazon.com would get banned because they sell autobiographies that in some of them descripe just what Spec listed.
(snip)
The only way to get them is to use a very wide range of key words to Ban the site. Something a Computer can do after a program is written form it. It would just log on from site to site scan for banned words and move on. Once the conditions are met to Ban a site it automatically copies the URL to the Ban list.
I doubt Amazon would get banned - however it may be required to enforce Office of Film and Literature Classification* standards and not sell material that was Refused Classification* to Australians.

With regards to the keyword filter - they're not talking about pro-actively crawling the web and blacklisting sites using some spider software (although, that may be done also), they're talking about when you type in a URL into your web-browser, or click on a link and your browser requests a page - the filter would kick in, and scan the page as it was being delivered to you. There's other steps before the dynamic filter (like checking against the existing blacklists), but that's one of the killers.

Now, for non-tech savvy folk it might seem like an okay task to set up a bunch of beefy servers that filter this content. After all - if I can install filter software on my home PC and it makes little or no noticable difference to a web browsing experience, then it can't be a particularly onorous task. And that's true, to a certain extent.

What makes it such a difficult task is that you'll have a huge list of words to scan for - and you'll need to scan every single request that comes through - not just 'Give me http://www.example.com' but also 'Give me http://www.example.com/image.jpg' and 'Give me http://www.example.com/script.js'. If you're using Firefox, right click on a page and go View Page Info, then click on the Media tab. On this site alone there's like 30 images - each one of those would need to be checked - sure it might be an image, but the filter will still have all those requests pass through it - even if it does absolutely nothing to it. Add to that probably half a dozen style sheets and scripts that make web pages work, and most sites will weigh in at about 50-100 individual requests, just to service one page.

Of course, people browsing the web is only part of the traffic that would be monitored by the filters - Many many applications exchange data over HTTP (the network protocol that delivers all website content to your browser). Take for example those applications that let you upload photos to Flickr - they speak HTTP. Got a widget that shows the current weather or stock prices on your computer? Speaks HTTP. How about your computer automatically checking for updates. Also HTTP. RSS Reader? HTTP. Game console with an internet connection? HTTP. Use iTunes? HTTP. What about an iPod Touch / iPhone? Lots of HTTP. Media Centre or TV that downloads an EPG? Yet again, speaks HTTP.

The vast majority of applications that you use to do things online are speaking HTTP - because it's easy and relatively efficient at what it does. All of those applications and devices that speak HTTP will generate requests that will be scanned by the filter.

I think you can see where this is heading, right? There's an aboslute mountain of requests every second, many of which are quite legitimately requesting or sending content over the internet. All of which need to be scanned.

For a large ISP to scan millions of requests per second at anything close to real-time, they would need hundreds, if not thousands of very expensive servers, consuming huge amounts of power to run. The Government sure isn't going to pay for that, so what'll happen? ISPs will put costs up. Because the filtering can't happen without you noticing a slowdown, internet access speeds will drop - most noticably during peak times.

So, we'll have more expensive and slower internet access which will semi-randomly block access to legitimate sites because it matched a few wrong keywords for what? Anyone wanting to access something illegal isn't going to be hampered, they're using either Encrypted HTTP (Slower than regular HTTP, but faster than filtered HTTP) which by it's nature can't be filtered, unless the government is willing to completely kill all online commerce**.

The sum total use of the ISP level filter is a 'feel good' blanket for concerned parents, and won't do anything to stop pornography of any kind being distributed or accessed on the web.

One of the nastier side effects of this filter that really SHOULD have parents worried is that anyone that IS doing something illegal (say, distributing child pornography) will be driven to using more advanced encryption to bypass any filtering.
Thus attempts by the Australian Federal Police to perform an "internet tap" will only get to see an encrypted stream of communications.

* = OFLC is the Australian Government department responsible for applying classification ratings to books, videos, films, magazines, tv, video games, etc in Australia. They have a bunch of ratings - however material that is Refused Classification is not permitted to be sold or distributed within Australia. The OFLC's standards also apply to Internet sites.

** If you're wondering what I mean, look up Man in the Middle Attack - that's how they'd break SSL to filter it - by intercepting communications prior to the channel being established. All modern browsers, and anything else that's well developed and is using SSL will see that the connection isn't secured correctly, and refuse to let you continue. SSL Encryption is what makes Internet Banking and Online Shopping possible, by protecting your confidential details as they're being sent to the server. If a filter were able to perform a MITM attack, then there'd be nothing stopping Mary Malicious Attacker from doing something very similar, and capturing all your details.
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by Spec8472 »

dellstart wrote:There is a huge difference between filtering out a Porn site and filtration of a Online encyclopedia.I cant believe that they would equate them.A encyclopedia is just plain facts and figures, whereas a porn site is obviously not.On the other hand ,just because you want to censor some deviant style sites doesn't make you a Big Brother lover.
To a human, yes, the difference is incredibly obvious - to a computer that's trying to process a thousand other requests this second, it's a much MUCH harder task.
Yes, we could whitelist Wikipedia straight off - but that's just one site that's got useful knowledge.

Google are able to apply a lot of very sophisticated machine learning algorithms to indexing the internet, and are able to infer a lot of information about what type of content is on a page. But even with Google's hundreds of thousands or even millions of servers they are not able to do this in real time. Yes, they can do some search indexing in close to real time - but that's only for news stories.

Even though Google has one of biggest (if not the biggest) teams of incredibly bright Machine Learning folks, they'd still baulk at correctly identifying content that's rated R18+ or above according to the OFLC with any consistant degree of confidence.

The best filter providers can do is freqency counting words, and applying some basic word-distance calculations - more than that takes too long, and with thousands of other requests needing to be processed per second, there's only so much CPU power you can assign to processing a single request.
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

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Thats my point Spec they can't pysically do it with a set list going in. New sites pop up all the time so they have to use a broad filter if they want to catch anything remotely useful. To even remotely get near their goal they would have to set the software filters to err on the side of banning a site and let a human decide later on if it was right or not. To loose of a filter and you have a PR nightmare and Media Circus in the making. You know somewhere some reporter will come up with a story of an uncovered porn site and a Banned innocent site on top of the slow down, then watch the fur fly once that happens. Either way they will get hammered by the media for either being too draconian or totally ineffectual, or probably both by the media :roll: . Then of course there will be the watseful spending story, the corruption story as money disappears and of course the whistle blower story of how some of the watchers watch porn at taxpayers expense while the taxpayer has to jump through hoops at home story. God this type of shit is so predictable with governement programs.

With sites like Amazon before they go and spend their money on setting up special software for one country and the cost of operating it, they would check to see how much money they do get from Australia. IF it isn't worth it they just refuse service to Australian citizens. Type in a Australian Address and boom service denied. Doubtful I know for a country of Australia's size but does Amazon want to set a precedent that they do that and have every little country and their Grandmother comming to them with the same crap? Then there is the little thing of Jurisdiction. Depending on treaties with some of these countries where the sites are they could flip the bird at the Australian government and tell them to stick it. It has happened before to the PRC. The chinese government has tried to block online games going into and out of China and failed miserably because of the sheer volume of games that crop up online and the online game companies told them to cry me a river to the PRC. If the PRC cannot do it with the control they have a Democratic country doesn't stand a chance.
Last edited by boballab on Fri Nov 21, 2008 2:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by Fel »

Best thing to do is just vote them all out next election cycle. ;)
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by boballab »

Fel wrote:Best thing to do is just vote them all out next election cycle. ;)

Oh that will probably happen, but since it's a government program it won't get cut even if they are voted out. Nothing harder to rid of then a government program.
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by dellstart »

boballab wrote:
Fel wrote:Best thing to do is just vote them all out next election cycle. ;)

Oh that will probably happen, but since it's a government program it won't get cut even if they are voted out. Nothing harder to rid of then a government program.

That is so true!!
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

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Fel wrote:Best thing to do is just vote them all out next election cycle. ;)
We voted out the last government this time last year - big major swing in politics. It was the analog of what happened just now in the US. We don't get that opportunity for another two years or so.
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

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Spec8472 wrote:And for what it's worth, Illegal content isn't just Porn - it can include sites describing personal accounts of substance abuse, anorexia, abortions, and others. Plus, given the 'dynamic' keyword filtering - any site happening to trigger a few banned words would also be blocked too. The 'opt-out' portion will relate only to material that is rated R18+ and comes with an age verification system.
As much as governments like to regulate video, pictures, and broadcasts, most are unwilling to ban books (including prize winning books) which is what they'd have to do if they applied this kind of principle to the written word. They'll let school boards do it, but they don't want to be seen condoning it on a national scale. There's also the small matter of fees. If you have to pay the OFLC money to consider whether you are to be allowed to write down your thoughts and feelings - then that is not a restriction or free speach, that's the gleeful deletion of free speech. It seems unlikely that they will ask anyone with a blog, story, or art site to start sending them money, hence the scope of this might not be as wide as you fear.

The OFLC's page and the [urlhttp://www.comlaw.gov.au/ComLaw/legislation/le ... 1200016553]actual law[/url] in question.

The OFLC page only lists Publications, not online stories. In legal terms this usually refers to formal publishing, rather than online stories. The definition is tied into distribution rights. Fel for example has put work online but he has never (as far as I know) entered into a Formal And Legal Licensing Agreement for any of his work. Until he does that the regulations don't seem to apply to him.

The law makes repeated reference to 'material likely to offend'. What are the chances that someone will start reading the Sennadar series, like it enough to get a few chapters in and then exclaim, "What's this? Were cats fight each other?! How violent! How terribly unforeseeable! I am surprised, outraged, and morally offended by this depiction of violence!"

Even if this is implemented as a filter system, chances it'll work like the one at my college. You just send in a quick 'false positive' report and the site gets unbanned. Since a simple filter system could never work by itself they'll have to have a 'white list' of domains that don't get filtered. A second's glance at the site and forum would tell someone this is not a porn site, and a second's glance at pretty much any of Fel's stories would tell someone no child will have the patience to slog through this. Hence it can be safely white listed.
Last edited by ANTIcarrot on Mon Nov 24, 2008 9:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Attention Aussie Internet Users

Post by Spec8472 »

ANTIcarrot wrote:How's it going to cope with amazon.com? I'm sure it has quite a few books descriptions with the needed trigger words. When my college had this kind of system installed you were allowed to send in false positives, and they were usually quick enough to unblock sites.
Well, I'm sure after the first half-dozen or so times it blocks Amazon, Amazon.com will just alter their settings so that everyone in Australia browses over HTTPS, and thus bypasses the filter entirely. Yay for bypassing the filter. (Yes, this tactic would also work for any other site also getting blocked by the dynamic filter)


As for getting sites unblocked - the two static blacklists (Unsuitable for Children - opt-out, and Illegal Content - mandatory) will be maintained by the ACMA - there's no word yet on what keywords will be included in any dynamic filter. There's also no word yet if there will be a whitelist also maintained by the ACMA.

All ISPs however would be responsible for implementing the filters on their own equipment. Besides the delays to ISPs getting list updates, even if you get someone from the ACMA to white-list a site (hah! good luck) it'd take 6+ months to get a response.
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