Mudslinger's Corner

Article from: ISP filtering not scalable: SAGE | Australian IT

If you’re a doctor I’m pretty sure you’ve had moments when you’ve felt like throwing the lounge cushions at the TV in response to some wildly inaccurate depiction of medical evidence on CSI.
Mark Newton

Filtering is a good workload for your PC at home because PCs spend most of their operational life doing nothing but this isn’t the case for ISP filtering, says network engineer Mark Newton

Lawyers would experience the same cringe when they watch the courtroom theatrics featured in Boston Legal, pilots would shout derisively at movies featuring stricken airliners, and parents of all stripes routinely shake their heads at the unrealistic portrayals of family life and conflict on Home and Away.

If you can identify with any of those reactions, you probably understand what it’s like to be an IT professional listening to a politician talk about the internet. Most of Australia has taken to the internet like a fish to water, but for some reason our political folk behave as if they’re visiting the internet from TV land, prattling on about cyber-this and e-that as if the language they’re using actually has some kind of real meaning, and as if the rest of us are supposed to be so wowed by their technological prowess that we won’t stop to think about what they’re actually saying.

Senator Stephen Fielding provided an excellent example in 2006, in what was probably the first salvo of the current internet censorship debate. Referring to some approaches he had received from product vendors, Senator Fielding told the Senate that arguments against the workability of what we now euphemistically call “ISP filtering” were “… just unbelievable. It is technically possible at the PC level. A PC is just a smaller mainframe.” Mainframe?! Do any ISPs even use mainframes? Senator Fielding clearly isn’t an IT expert, even if he does play one on television.

The Senator’s mistake lies in a concept which IT folk call “scalability.” A system is “scalable” if it copes gracefully with additional load. The Sydney Harbour Tunnel is not scalable because too many cars jam it up. Conversely our interstate rail system is scalable because if there’s too much freight we can usually add more carriages or more trains.

Filtering is a good workload for your PC at home because PCs spend most of their operational life doing nothing. To your computer’s nanosecond attention-span the fractions of a second between your keystrokes are like age-long idle wastelands, time the computer could be spending doing something else but can’t because it’s waiting for you. For some homes filtering represents the “something else”.

But when you put 10,000 or 100,000 or a million users through the same computer, the computer is busy looking after other people when it isn’t dealing with you. There’s a limit to how far it can go before, like the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, it fails catastrophically and clogs up the works. ISP filtering is not scalable.

There’s an argument that says you can scale it up by adding parallel systems all censoring at the same time, but those systems aren’t free, so what you’re really doing is spending multiples of the same dollars to achieve the same result, pushing up the cost of internet access for everybody.

Some vendors have an alternative approach, where the computer doing the censorship only involves itself in your internet traffic if you stray too close to a censored URL, thereby minimizing the traffic it is required to censor. But as the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation demonstrated by wrecking Wikipedia for English citizens in December 2008, even those systems gum up when the definition of “too close” is made broad enough to encompass normal users’ normal Internet activities.

In February 2008 one of these systems controlled by the Government of Pakistan accidentally isolated their entire country from the internet and caused YouTube to become unreachable for almost all of the world’s population. The censorware systems are like booby-traps, waiting patiently for the right confluence of events to trigger them to blow up in their designers’ faces. The world’s IT experts have always known they don’t work even while our politicians fool themselves into thinking we’ll be okay if we all just crank out another trial and wish hard enough.

In 1999 the CSIRO released a study which showed that ISP-level censorship systems are unworkable, expensive and slow. Ten years later we’re treated to almost weekly examples of expensive catastrophic failures of these systems in other parts of the world, and despite the delusional embrace of our political class, ongoing research repeatedly shows that today’s censorware isn’t appreciably better than it was when we first started looking at it.

Perhaps acknowledging its limitations, the ALP Government has set the “speed limit” of its live censorship trials to 12 Mbps, which is the absolute minimum speed required of the National Broadband Network (NBN). Are we looking forward to an NBN future where gigabit speeds would be possible if not for the fact that the mandatory censorship was slowing us down to 12 Mbps? Or can we be cynical enough to conclude that even Senator Stephen Conroy knows these systems are unworkable, and has set the speed limit low because he doesn’t think they can perform any better?

In 2005 the New Zealand Government looked at this issue and concluded that the international deployments it was able to observe were impractical and not-fit-for-purpose, specifically noting that the UK system was only 10 – 15 per cent effective even when it was notionally working. The ALP would do well to learn from our trans-Tasman brethren: If we shackle the Australian internet under unworkable, useless censorship systems, how will our national pride cope with electronic proof that New Zealanders are, once and for all, smarter than us?

Mark Newton is a network engineer with a large Australian ISP, and a long standing member of the System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU)

Article From: Australia’s Internet Censorship Scheme Takes Money Allocated to Pursue Pedophiles

The Great Firewall of Australia, the Australian Government’s Internet censorship scheme that is being sold as protecting children has resulted in significant budget cuts to a dedicated anti online child abuse police team.

$2.8 million AUD ($1.86m USD) originally allocated to the Australian Federal Police’s Online Child Sexual Exploitation Team (OCSET) has instead gone towards Internet censorship. A small figure perhaps, but the total budget for the team in 2007 (without the $2.8m) was $7.5 million AUD ($5m USD).

But it gets better: according to research from Stilgherrian, without that money, OCSET simply doesn’t have the staff to investigate all of the suspected pedophiles it already knows about. Some cases get palmed off to the states — that is, to police who don’t have the specialist training and experience of OCSET, and the rest are simply dropped.

So the Australian Government, in the name of protecting children with a scheme that blocks millions of sites, has created a situation where pedophiles get away, even when they are known to exist, because funding that would have been allocated to pursuing them has been spent on internet censorship.

Won’t somebody think of the children?

I’ve said it before, but this whole scheme is a farce and the Minister should be removed from his position. Even the do-gooders who are backing the censorship regime should be disgusted by this gross misallocation of funds by the Australian Government, as most Australian’s will be. Imagine inversely if the $44 million allocated to censorship was given to this taskforce, and the real outcomes that could be achieved.

Original Article From: Rudd & Conroy On Wrong Side Of Net Censorship Debate – Smarthouse

By Computer Daily News | Thursday | 15/01/2009
Are you listening down there in Australia, Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd? A new US report has found there is no simple technology solution to protect children from bullying, pornography, sexual predation and other online threats.

The report was to be issued today by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, led by Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, but a copy found its way to The Wall Street Journal.

It says the 278-page report is a boon for Web companies, which have long argued that technology isn’t the sole solution to the dangers kids face online. And it is a disappointment for those in favor of stricter technological controls, such as age-verification and filtering tools.

In Australia, the Rudd Government is moving to introduce a controversial, expensive system – at a cost of up to $128 million – that will filter the Internet in a bid to protect children. A trial is due to start this month.

The “clean feed” Internet scheme would impose national content filtering for all Internet connections and would bar Web pages detailed in two blacklists operated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

The proposal has been rejected as draconian, unworkable and a potential invasion of privacy by ISPs, the Internet Industry Association, Digital Liberty Coalition, Electronic Frontier Association and other interested parties.

Just like the real world

The US report was complied by a taskforce that included representatives of several top Internet and security companies, including News Corp.’s MySpace, Google, AOL and Facebook.

They reviewed several types of technologies, including age and identity verification, filtering and auditing, text analysis and biometrics, and found they came up short of a comprehensive way to protect children and teens.

The report also found that deploying these technologies would be costly and could create broader privacy and security problems; and that the risks that minors face on the Web ­ including bullying and harassment by peers ­ aren’t very different from those they face in the real world.

Article from:
DailyTech – 2009: The Year of the Thought Criminal

Give those in power an inch, and they’ll take a mile

Barely a week in, 2009 is shaping up to be an interesting – if somewhat depressing – year for opponents of internet censorship and overpowered copyright enforcement. These last few weeks we’ve seen a number of troubling initiatives from India, Australia, the U.K., and New Zealand, among others, which seek to curtail the delightfully double-edged freedom of information that makes our Internet so great.

While diverse in purpose, each of these initiatives bear a common thread: increased government control in things that it lacks the business, the discipline, and the authority to regulate. Whether it’s heightening the reign of censorship in Australia, disconnecting the internet of anyone even remotely suspected of file sharing in New Zealand, or the increase in police cybersnooping powers in India and the U.K., it appears that many of this world’s governments have had enough of the open internet and now intend to take over and regulate.

The reasons why these developments are a genuinely Bad Thing™ should be both multitude and obvious. The internet gives us, as a people, an almost unthinkably powerful weapon – a weapon of minds, of expression, and of intellectual freedom – that we are free to wield against ourselves, each other, and those who govern over us. In no other time have we had such a power, and yet under the guise of fear – excuses range everywhere from “protecting public morality” to “saving the children” – we allow lawmakers to siphon it away from us.

Clearly, our governments are envious.

The range between these initiatives, in terms of simple power, is wide: while the “Constable HaX0r” police-hacker scare in the U.K. seems largely the result of media hysteria – British police have had the ability to remotely investigate suspects’ computers for quite some time, as Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez points out – a two-year-old Indian bill, which was finally approved last month, gives Indian authorities a sudden and substantial increase in their ability regulate the private lives of Indian citizens.

“Any email you send, any message you text [is] now open to the prying eyes of the government,” writes Indian blogger Binu Karunakaran, as is “the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.”

Binu writes of the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill of 2006, which passed Indian parliament late last month. It grants authorities practically unrestricted authority to monitor all electronic communication, the ability to block any website at will, and the authority to break into someone’s home and inspect their computer – in addition to imposing “Victorian” moral sensibilities on an already conservative culture. Banned activities include e-mailing anything (even jokes) that might be considered offensive or false, surfing celebrity “Bollywood” news, or watching porn.

Meanwhile, bloggers’ christening of the “Great Firewall of Australia” seems to have gained additional relevance, after the Australian government announced intentions to introduce worldwide, ISP-level internet filtering upon its inhabitants. Labor party minister Stephen Conroy writes – in an open-comment blog post, paradoxically – that the move is necessary to maximize the “participation of Australian businesses and individuals in the digital economy,” so that they conduct themselves online as they do offline. Open censorship isn’t an attack on free speech, he writes, because the government doesn’t acknowledge it as such; censors are ordered to avoid blocking any forms of “political speech” while little is said about any of the other kinds.

More troubling, however, is how quickly we’re sleepwalking into the arms of a Big Brother-esque surveillance state. Indian citizens may have had little debate over their Big Brother bill, but voters in the U.K., Australia, the United States, and elsewhere have – and yet we continually ignore the warning signs: Warrantless wiretapping in the U.S. continues to gather indifference from most of the voting public, and most of the lukewarm attempts to slow the rampant spread of traffic, speed, and public surveillance cameras in the U.S. and U.K. have thus far failed. Most people I’ve talked to seem to shrug their shoulders and say that they have nothing to hide – and then go on with their business. Nobody seems to care.

(There’s an excellent counterpoint to the “nothing to hide” argument, by the way, and if that’s your mantra then I demand that you read this.)

It is for these reasons that I wish to tentatively declare 2009 as the Year of the Thought Criminal, because these people will be the only ones worth placing any hope on. They are the people sneaking past the censors, foiling government inspectors, and reporting all things hidden. They are the hackers, reporters, intellectuals, and gatekeepers who safeguard our minds so that we may use them to wander in whatever direction we see fit. They are anyone who actually gives a damn.

There’s a story floating around that says a frog will allow itself to be boiled alive if it is put in a pot of cold water slowly heated. If it’s dropped in a boiling pot, it will jump out. A clichéd slippery slope argument, for sure, but there exists no better imagery to illustrate my point.

My question to you is this: are we the unsuspecting frog? Could you comfortably stand naked before the eyes of your government?

That future might be nearer than we think.