These applications give you dual citizenship as, with the click of a button, your computer looks like it's in the United States. Your digital Green Card means you can access US-only content from sites such as Rhapsody, Pandora, YouTube and Hulu. It also means you're bypassing any content filtering performed by your Australian ISP, and there's nothing they can do about it.

Australia's plans for mandatory content filtering will screw up the internet and give right wing nutjobs the power to censor what we see, yet it won't actually stop people who want to access banned sites.

If Australia goes through with plans to censor the internet, you can be sure civil libertarians will do everything they can to make bypass software freely available to everyone - as they've done in other totalitarian regimes.