Adam Turner
Monday, 03 November 2008 05:27
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
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
