Stephen Withers
Monday, 10 November 2008 12:05
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The other argument put forward by opponents of the move is that filters either ignore channels often used to exchange illicit or illegal material, and that they can easily be bypassed.
The former charge seems to be correct.
The ACMA report found that while all of the tested filters work with HTTP traffic (and five of the six also filter HTTPS traffic, which sounds to me like a man-in-the-middle attack), none of them could filter instant messaging, peer-to-peer or newsgroup traffic (though most are capable of blocking such traffic which is an even bigger worry).
And how's this? "[N]o products are capable of distinguishing illegal content and content that may be regarded as inappropriate on non-web protocols, excepting two products that can identify particular types of content carried via one email protocol, and one product that can identify particular types of content carried via one streaming protocol".
What about bypassing ISP-level filtering? The suggestion that people will use proxy servers in other countries seems a bit simplistic to me. Commercial proxies could themselves be blocked (they would likely rely on permanent domain names or IP addresses for business reasons), and I don't see that it would be any harder to filter for proxies than for 'offending' web sites.
And while commercial interests would presumably rule out a prohibition on VPN connections crossing Australia's digital border (the technology is too widely used by trans-national businesses), what's to stop a government adding public VPN services to the blacklist as well?
One of the
VPNs identified by Adam Turner was the free AlwaysVPN. The company says that "unlike many other commercial VPN's that may be blocked by firewalls our program can work on any Internet connection that allows you to browse web sites."
The decision about what to block and what to let through is inherently political - and that means people will be playing political games over it. See
page 3.
