Bypass Australia's internet filters for free

By Adam Turner
Monday, 03 November 2008 04:27

Opinion and Analysis

Bypassing ISP-level filtering is child's play and makes a mockery of government plans to censor Australia's internet access. The government wants to force all local ISPs to censor what Australians can see online, putting the country on par with the likes of China and North Korea. The joke is that school kids are already using free and simple tools to bypass such restrictions.

According to the government's own research, the filtering will degrade network performance by between 20 and 75 per cent - which makes a joke of plans for a faster national network. Civil libertarians also argue that censorship is a slippery slope, a concern heightened by the fact that those supporting the filtering are already talking about expanding it to include other stuff they don't like, such as online gambling and "illegal" sites.

The proposed filtering with give a handful of right wing nutjobs the power to control what we can see online. The fact the government wants to keep the list of banned sites a secret, and has tried to censor people speaking out against the filtering plans, should be ringing alarm bells.

Any school kid will tell you that bypassing internet filtering is ridiculously easy. One simple trick is to use a free web proxy, which acts as a middle man between you and the site you want to see. You'll find a long list of free web proxies and other such sites at FreeProxy.ru.

Just enter the name of the site into a proxy site's search box, such as banned-site.com, and the proxy site will then call up the site for you. This way banned-site.com doesn't know who you are, but also your ISP doesn't know you looked at banned-site.com. Kids are already using these kinds of sites to bypass school filters so they can access Facebook from the class room. It won't take horny teenagers long to use such sites to bypass ISP-level filtering.

Another trick for bypassing filters is to dig an encrypted tunnel to the United States. It sounds complicated, but it's free and ridiculously easy to do and neither the government nor your ISP can see what you're up to. CONTINUED