

Australia website black out - fs111
http://www.internetblackout.com.au/websites/
Protest against censorship in Australia.
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aneesh
It would be cool if their script could blackout the participating sites only
for visitors from Australia. I wouldn't do this to all my visitors, but I
might do it for the small fraction of Aussie visitors.

~~~
andrewtj
I'd deploy this more if the copy weren't aimed solely at Australians; which it
shouldn't be as globalisation means if you're not an Australian, Australia is
just a test-case for wherever you happen to be.

~~~
sh1mmer
It would be nice for someone to provide a script which did this on rota (or a
single date) for all countries with i18n for each of those countries outlining
their own censorship laws, including UK, France, etc.

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jrockway
I think Internet censorship is great, because it pushes technologies like
Bittorrent and Tor into the mainstream, which improves those technologies.
Every time someone uses one of those tools to do something silly like download
a song or look at pictures of 17-year-old-girls, we are getting closer and
closer to an Internet that the governments can't meddle with. When information
can flow freely without consequence from the organizations in power, society
can advance. Imagine how much more useful information will end up on Wikileaks
when the leaker can truly be anonymous and safe from the established power
structure their action is hurting. It will be very good for society as a
whole. (And there is the whole issue of "Tor is just for child pornographers".
When you have to use it to see the New York Times, nobody will think that
anymore.)

Anyway, Internet censorship is just something that looks good in the
headlines, but it is not a real issue. These technical measures are easy to
get around, and will keep getting easier. (When I was in China, I just ssh'd
to my home machine to browse websites that the Great Firewall blocked. Oh
yeah, damn the global nature of the Internet...)

~~~
ytinas
I want what you say to be true, but what happens when governments simply say
that encryption is illegal (e.g. "It's the only way to fight the terrorists!",
"To support encryption is to support child porn!")? If any ISP would drop your
connection immediately if it saw anything it even thought was encryption what
would you do?

Personally I think the only solution will be peer-to-peer devices [1], but we
couldn't do that with software only as the phone companies have already shown
they couldn't be trusted for something like this [2].

[1] If you're familiar with the "one laptop per child" project then you can
see what I mean. Every device will peer up with any devices it can see, so
your network is simply all your peers plus all their peers (recursive). This
can be attacked too, but it lacks the single point of failure that our current
ISP oriented networks have.

[2] [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/wsj-nokia-and-
sieme...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/wsj-nokia-and-siemens-help-
iran-spy-on-internet-users/)

~~~
jrockway
It's easy, you hide your crypto in innocent-looking communication.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography>

Will governments ban photo-sharing sites? Probably not. So your encrypted
messages can still be distributed.

Also, banning cryptography will mean that online banking, VPN access, ssh,
remote desktop, etc., etc. will no longer be possible. So I doubt this will
ever happen.

~~~
ytinas
>Will governments ban photo-sharing sites?

No, but that's a horrible way of communicating. I can't image a future where
people have complex programs to decode pictures and re-encode them to post to
innocent looking sites. Plus, how are average people going to get these
programs in the first place without being busted?

I think a better method might be to create a big complex MMO that everyone
plays that happens to have a news forum inside it somewhere. Then the data
doesn't have to be encrypted per se, but it would be harder to see from
outside and wouldn't be complex for users to participate in.

>Also, banning cryptography will mean that online banking, VPN access, ssh,
remote desktop, etc., etc. will no longer be possible. So I doubt this will
ever happen.

I wouldn't have to become impossible, it would simply have to be changed in
such a way that the government can always see all communications.

As I say, I __hope __you're right, but as a programmer with a background in
network engineering I don't see anything (outside of P2P) that couldn't easily
be stopped.

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brc
I had a long and detailed argument about this, with someone who I would
consider mostly rational. They just can't see the problem with internet
censorship, because TV, Movies, Newspapers and Games are all censored, and
theer is some deplorable sites on the internet I think don't have any benefit
to anyone. Free speech always involves allowing people to say things you don't
like or agree with, but ultimately the good outweighs the bad.

My line is (and will always be) that hidden censorship is the thin edge of the
wedge for greater control, and that a faulty technology easily circumvented is
pointless. I also have a large problem with any government of any kind telling
me how my family should spend it's time, when there is no externality to the
activity. But the argument I had really opened my eyes to how the general
public (and thus politicians) see this issue. And because of this, I think the
filter is coming whether we like it or not. Because tech-literate educated
people make up a fraction of the voting public, I fear this is going to
happen.

Oh, and I'm not willing to black out my site. I'd hate to think what it would
do to my conversion rate.

~~~
zmimon
I think arguing against _all_ censorship is doomed because people will always
come up with examples that are very hard to argue with. For example, "what if
someone puts detailed plans to make a nuclear bomb on the internet"? Would you
really argue nothing should be done to prevent that?

What is really the problem here is the method. We can usually all agree that
censorship must be an exception, not the rule. In fact, we can usually agree
that in a democracy we have a set of important principles without which the
pillars that support the democracy itself and the freedom of people within it
will break down:

a) We try as hard not to censor as we can.

b) We try everything except censorship before we try censorship

c) Even then, we censor only when such censorship has a provable chance of
preventing the serious harm that we have identified must be prevented

Filtering the internet fails all of these.

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shimi
Good on the Aussies for making a stand!!!

~~~
JacobAldridge
You're welcome. Shame that we have to.

~~~
shimi
Too True!!!

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TomasSedovic
I think you shouldn't do "modal HTML dialog boxes" neither for evil nor for
good.

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chunkyslink
I would do this for a day, but not for 5.

