[url=]http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/filter-goes-ahead-regardless-20100529-wmg7.html[/url]
It seems, unsurprisingly, that the Internet filter is going to go ahead. I found some very interesting things in the article.
- Stephen Conroy states that 85% of ISPs, including Telstra, Optus, and iinet, support the filter.
Uh? What? This is the same iinet that pulled out of the trial because they disagreed with it? It seems that Conroy is assuming that a willingness to take part in the trial equates to agreeing with the filter, even though Optus explicitly states this is not the case.
- The article mentions that internet users can apply to have a webpage blacklisted. Perhaps Australian internet users could gang up and all submit Stephen Conroy's webpage for blacklisting?

I heard its easily defeated so i'm not to worried.
Hey do you think gog will be banned? I read that they will be banning sites that sell r-rated games like ebay and amazon and postal 2 is banned for sale in Australia.

They use the terms; 'web sites' , 'URLs' and 'Pages' when describing what they will block, making things a little confusing. Could be everything on a site, could just be the R18 pages. And only if someone complains or it's on the list already. Phantasmagoria 1 & 2 are also banned here, quite possible more games will turn up that are RC as well.
It may be a web poll, but 79812 votes at time of writing is probably the biggest response seen. I'm happy 99% said no, even if it's from a small amount of people crashing it.
Conroy's also mentioned there will be no penalty for bypassing the filter. I'm not worried, just annoyed and angry at him.

Seems iinet has fired back at Senator Conjob :
http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/outright-lie-that-iinet-supports-filter-20100531-wqyl.html

Does *ANY* politician on this planet actually live in the real world at all? Or are they all in Cloud Cuckoo Land? :facepalm:
Seriously losing all hope for us as a species when things like this appear on the radar.
"no penalty for bypassing the filter" : then why in the name of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and DARPA are you pushing this?!
The WWW was designed to be a portal for sharing information easily, over the whole planet, and not for blocking. Alright, there are some things that really shouldn't be out there, but that's what ISPs and the IWF are for. For really bad material (Child Porn, and the like) you can even inform the police, and/or InterPol as well (assuming the IWF already don't do this).
Blocking of information, games, books, whatever, just because you disagree with some of their content, is just wrong. On many levels.

I'm thinking of moving to China, I hear that they're pretty liberal.

At least they're blocking fewer sites than we do in Sweden.

Labour rammed through the Digital Economy Bill here, on their way out...
I expect the part dealing with ISPs will also result in a severe blocklist of sites. It's already law that ISPs *HAVE* to now cut off people on the government's say-so for illegal file-sharing. Of which our ISPs were pretty much in agreement with Australia's - unworkable, inefficient and expensive, amongst other reasons.
Maybe if we're lucky, this new government will repeal it as they did the ID Cards ^_^

Who, China? Our 'blacklist' is completely transparent.. AND secret. Conroy, at least lie convincingly.

come over here.They aren't blocking anything .

Yes, China. We use DNS poisoning though, which isn't exactly difficult to get around, and I believe China does as well. I don't know what you use, but It'll be interesting to see what solutions will be found.

Given the fact that its ordered by politicians who have no idea how netowrking functions and that there's a pretty damn good chance the IT guys designing it will want it not to work at all, it'll probably just be a domain name resolution blacklist that you can avoid by hardcoding your illegal, pornographic or free thinking URLs into your hosts file and be done with it.
Frankly if thats how it works, I'll take the bet that someone will get hold of the full list of blocked sites and have a 'free internet' hosts file on the net within a day

DNS poisoning or the hosts file (same thing really) can only redirect entire domains/subdomains, not URL's which your upcoming filter seems to do (similar to those "child safety" apps that overly protective parents can install).
The former is easily averted by changing DNS servers, or editing the hosts file (the latter being shitloads more work for thousands of domains that may change IP address every ow and then). The latter may be more difficult.

Does this mean they can actually filter the entire internet for the entire country? Sounds stupid.

WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN