Great Australian Firewall and Free Australia Wireless
Now don’t get me wrong - I am totally against the soon-to-be-introduced mandatory Internet censorship filter in Australia on the principal of breach of democratic rights and freedoms as well as the inconvenience it will be upon me personally through either incorrectly blocking access to sites that are otherwise completely harmless or sites being added to the blacklist that shouldn’t be … because no one believes the Government will be responsible and keep the blacklist restricted to just sites with extreme violence and pornography. And now that I’ve just mentioned the P-word I expect my blog will also be added to that blacklist *sigh*.
However I did see one positive outcome from this. A frequent question that comes up while I’m pimping Free Australia Wireless is about illegal content being downloaded by users of someone’s free wireless access point. Well, with the introduction of the Australian clean feed at ISP level this will no longer be a worry because it’ll be impossible for people to access illegal websites thus eliminating the risk of you getting in trouble for hosting a free wireless network.
So it’ll be good from a marketing point of view for the FAW project … but apart from that it’s an absolute disgrace and I sincerely hope it does not go ahead.
I hope you’ve written to your Member of Parliament and signed the petition.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:45 pm
At what level of abstraction does the Government consider someone an ISP? Could the owners of the FAW be deemed ISPs and therefore entitled to a copy of the blacklist?
(Also, I plan to see if I can’t get blacklisted with legal content ASAP when the filter goes national)
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Wonder if IIA membership would be sufficient?
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:03 am
I’ve got letters to Senator Conroy and Senator Milne (Greens senator for Tasmania) printed and ready to post tomorrow.
November 4th, 2008 at 7:27 am
I already use OpenDNS to block pr*n and some other stuff (who needs YouTube), and it works nicely. But then again, open a VPN, connect to Tor or a proxy (which all slows down the browsing experience significantly) and you’re browsing right around these measures, like you will around the Rudd Filter.