How to crack the Aussie $84m porn filter in five clicks

Adam Turner
Saturday, 25 August 2007 22:20

Opinion and Analysis

With an Australian Federal election looming, the Howard government is chasing the Puritan vote with an $84 million porn filtering program aimed to protect the sensitive eyes of the voting public. Too bad a tech-savvy teenager cracked it in minutes.

As of last week, the government's netalert.gov.au site offers a choice of from three free porn filtering applications - Integard, OpteNet and Safe Eyes. Keen to see if my tax dollars were being well spent, I decided to try one out. There's nothing on the download page to tell you the difference between them so I picked one at random - OpteNet. It's a 32MB download, which would take more than three hours on dial-up - but if you're bandwidth challenged they'll post you out a CD instead.

Later I stumbled across another page on the site listing the differences between the software - a page that obviously should be linked to from the download page. According the list, most of the applications monitor the use of chat rooms and instant messaging. All offer porn filtering using black lists compiled by the software providers. They also offer whitelisting - which means you can nominate a list of accept websites, such as ABC Kids, and everything else is blocked.

Anyway, when I installed OpteNet it asked me to set a administrator password, installed itself and then requested a restart. When my XP test machine rebooted I expected to be faced with an introductory spiel and set-up but there was nothing expect a new icon in the taskbar. When we hovered the mouse over it the word "Active" popped up.

I have a list of nasty porn sites I keep behind glass with "break in case of emergency" written on the front, which I use to test such software. Most firewall software I've tested with porn filters has failed miserably when I've thrown a handful of porn sites at them. Zone Alarm 7 blocked all 20 random porn sites I tested it against - but others have performed much worse.

Anyway, OpteNet's porn filtering turns out to be surprisingly good. Twenty porn sites later it had blocked all twenty. Its censoring of Google searches was hit and miss though. Using common terms you search for when scouring the net for porn, it completely blocked the result page for some but not others. The same with a Google Image search - sometimes it blocked the entire page and sometimes it blocked some images but not others. Even when graphic images did show up in a Google search, I was always blocked from visiting the site.

This might be fine for stopping young children from accidentally stumbling on porn, but what about hormone-charged teenagers who deliberately go looking for it? The first thing I tried was installing the Opera web browser, which isn't listed as compatible with the software, but OpteNet still kicked in to protect me.

Now I was becoming more determined, so I decided to attack the software. Foolishly the OpteNet installation folder is sitting out in the open for the programs folder where someone with simplest knowledge of computers could find it. I tried running the uninstall file, but it asked for the password.

While this had failed, I now knew where the application lived and what it was called. Now it was just a simple matter of right-clicking on the task bar, opening the task manager and looking for processes that start with O P T. I found two - optproxy and OptGui. So I right-clicked on them and said end process. Now I fired up my web browser and hey presto, all those porn sites were available again. But my victory was only short-lived. CONTINUED