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

Adam Turner
Saturday, 25 August 2007 22:20

Opinion and Analysis

My victory over OpteNet was only short-lived because within a few seconds optproxy had launched again and the sites were blocked again. The laughable thing is the file logging my attempts to access sites is simple to open and edit, so you can keep disabling optproxy whenever you want to look at a new site and then go into the logs to delete the times you were caught in the act. You can also keep poking the software for weaknesses without getting caught.

When I restarted the computer the task tray was up and running again and when I check the software's logs there was nothing to indicate that the software had been disabled for a quick spot of porn surfing. Nothing popped up to warn dopey parents that their tech-savvy kids had outsmarted them.

Sure this isn't a very elegant solution, but a hack is a hack and a glimpse at porn is a glimpse at porn. Be careful though. Some of the changes I made affected the TPM security chip on my notebook, locking me out of the machine. It took a Ghost system restore to get it up and running.

Now don't have a go at me for explaining how to do this, any kid capable of reading a blog is capable of figuring this out for themselves - that's my whole point. I'm no expert, I was just fooling around. Sex is a powerful motivator and an horney teen with even a basic knowledge of Windows could figure this out. Parents are delusional if they think this software will stop tech-savvy teens looks for porn - they need to know the truth.

The really disturbing thing is some kid actually discovered an elegant hack after only 30 minutes, which makes it look like the filter is still running. Then he hacked the upgraded version within 40 minutes. Why on earth are we wasting $84 million of software that a teenager can hack in minutes?

So that's how the government spent our tax dollars - on porn filtering software that can be disabled with a few mouse clicks. But it will win votes from fools who don't know any better, which at the end of the day is all that matters.