Monday, May 4. 2009Who Could Possibly Object To Black Listing Child Pornography Sites?.....John Linton ....apart from those relatively few people who suffer from paedophlia? .......it would be hard to find anyone I would have thought. So the 'debate' about banning child pornography on the internet should never have existed in the first place - as Stupid Stephen and Krudd attempted to do in trying to kill the opposition to their attempts to legislate using a completely different 'black list' which was not restricted to child pornography at all but to a whole range of wowserism and political doctrine issues which was also riddled with errors. So, their, (Stupid Stephen's and Krudd's) lying and then gross stupidity in labelling people who objected to banning on line gambling sites et alia as child pornographers has completely destroyed 'the debate' but worse than that it has shifted opposition to "banning child pornography" to actually objecting to government/wowserism censorship - a very, very different issue entirely. So the real issues now are quite simple: 1) Does operating a child pornography black list impose any slow down at all on non-child pornography users of the internet 2) Is it possible for the Labor Party government to now convince, firstly the Senate and then the Australian electorate, that it can be trusted to move from it's ACMA list of God knows what URLs to one that had only child pornography. Following the trial Exetel has just completed it seems to me that: 1) above is capable of being demonstrated as being totally achievable as the results published here clearly indicate which replicate results achieved in Sweden: http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=31857 For those people who believe the IWF is something different to what it actually is this recent article should clarify some of the more ridiculous assertions: http://www.prlog.org/10222199-iwf-hits-back-at-censorship-and-secrecy-claims.html The Exetel trial showed that 'false positives' can be eliminated and that no user noticed slower speeds as indeed the monitors that Exetel ran clearly indicated. 2) has been made much more difficult now for the Labor party because of the sheer dishonesty constantly deployed by Stupid Stephen and Krudd in claiming that any one opposing the use of the ACMA list was a child pornographer and thus consigning themselves to being regarded as liars, charlatans and discussion bullies and therefore incapable of being trusted not to impose political and ideological censorship rather than a flawed attempt at reducing the availability of child pornography in Australia. (flawed because of the ease of which it can be 'got round') This trial also demonstrated WHY a child pornography filter is necessary; in that in a five day period there were 20,000 'hits' on the 198 urls (that allegedly are part of an IP range that do contain child pornography but not necessarily the actual IP; i.e the figure of 20,000 doesn't represent that there were 20,000 hits on the actual CP IP only on the IP range) and if you consider that Exetel has only around 1% of internet users in Australia then.......you might, as I was, be more than a little surprised at how many paedophiles that implies there are in Australia (not 20,000 at Exetel but perhaps 100+). When I checked it may be possible based on the BT figures cited here from three years ago: http://www.out-law.com/page-6615 ....bearing in mind that these ban lists have been in operation in the UK since the late 1990s and it would be reasonable to assume that as paedophiles realise they can be tracked by accessing child pornography sites they will find ways round the ban list and therefore you would expect the numbers of "old" paedophile net users to be aware of the blocks to not register after the first two or three experiences - in Australia this wouldn't be the case as there have been no ban lists in operation. Of course the trial Exetel did, or the trials anyone else has done or might subsequently do, will not stop the mildly technically competent internet users availing themselves of the myriad of tools to use some form of remote proxy to access any list of blocked sites and, personally not knowing any paedophiles, I don't know how their internet knowledge ranks in them being able to do that. So I think the Labor party has got itself in to yet another major mess and in, yet another, situation (like the NBN, Global Warming, The about to be canceled tax cuts replaced by the about to be tax increases and the.......nominate your own total screw up inflicted on the country since those of you who are responsible voted these muppets in to running Australia). Basically they have to decide on shelving black listing child pornography (because that is what a back down will mean) or they have to scrap their ACMA list and find a substitute that is acceptable to the Senate and the wavering Labor voters before the next election. They no longer have the cop out of "it won't work technically". They now have to demonstrate that they have a few principles - well......at least one of the ones they "won the last election with". ...and you know what?....and I know you think I'm biased.....I think you'll find that this bunch of uneducated and pig ignorant clowns don't even have ONE principle between them as will be evidenced by their actions on this issue. Perhaps after Whine/Krudd's budget next week neither you nor I nor any other Australian will care any more when the wasteland that Australia has been made into by these economic Vandals will become more apparent. Never mind, Krudd thinks that Australians don't need promised tax cuts and an optimistic future he thinks $A300 billion (which will have to be borrowed so you can pay even more taxes to pay the interest on it) is better spent in the US and the EU buying obsolete military toys which will never be used. No previous Labor 'government' has ever been that stupid - it was almost the only thing a Labor government could be relied on not to do....Krudd continues to set new standards in egotistic incompetence that make Whitlam look like, well, someone other than Whitlam who defined the new high of gross incompetence married to a giant ego in Australian prime ministers and the ability of one man's mindlessness to destroy Australia's economy in the shortest possible time. Trackbacks
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20000 hits from a what... 80000 customer base?
Scary! How many different IP's was it from? Hopefully nowhere near 20000!! Oh, and for $300 billion I hope we get a decent RAAF Air Show or two. T. Comment (1)
I would think that the 20,000 'hits' was from a relatively small proportion of the customer base but we kept no record of the source of the hits.
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Probably the man convicted of accessing child porn when he downloaded a ponographic simpsons cartoon.
http://www.watoday.com.au/national/cartoon-parody-child-porn-says-judge-20081208-6u1m.html Great job on the trial. It's never really a technical problem to solve, it's more of a law and government policy problem that needs to be addressed. Comment (1)
John, can you drop me a note about the trial conclusion? interested to hear some more of your thoughts. rgds Ry/iTnews
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If you want detailed technical feedback you would need to contact:
stevew@exetel.com.au Comments (13)
John
Thanks to Exetel for taking part in the trial and showing that there are filters that don't slow down the Internet and are easy to implement. Just a correction on the URL list. It actually contained around 2000 URLs of child sexual abuse sites. These worked out to be 198 individual IP addresses. There were 16,413 actual accesses and attempted accesses to the URLs that do contain child sexual abuse content. Comment (1)
Thank you for the correction - I am depressed that Exetel customers tried to access child pornography sites so man times.
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I actually thought there would be next to none, or none...
So naive I'm totally against the filter plan, for most of the technical/ideological/political reasons, but gee... makes it seem like a good endeavor when you hear stats like that. Comment (1)
It appears there are no technical problems to blocking known child pornography sites.
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It would be interesting to know if those who were blocked were also trying other similar sites. I briefly toyed with the idea of getting the ScrapBook extension on Firefox to fetch all pages on the Wikileaks list; but thought better of it.
Perhaps some others went out of their way to try to trigger the filter out of curiosity? Cheers, Mike. Comment (1)
John,
Are the "20,000 hits" to the list of blocked IPs or the blocked URLS contained within these IPs. Cheers Comment (1)
It would be interesting to know if the spread of access attempts were evenly spread across the list, or were disproportionately skewed towards any one site (whether or not that site had multiple pages on the list).
Going by the "pages removed from this search because they are on the IWF list" error with a google site-specified search, I beleive that img.4chan.org/b/ **WARNING NSFW** is on the IWF list. This page is EXTREMELY high volume, experiencing over 111,000 posts per day. Being an anonymous board for image posting, it occasionally has Child Pornography posted to it, however it has a very effective moderation team which removes illegal content within minutes, if not seconds. if 4chan is on the list used in this trial, I would not be in the least bit surprised if >99% of the blocked attempts were to that page. It operates legally from the US. Comments (2)
What if said site is (very) high volume, and has an anonymous instant image posting facility? What if the moderators on that site mostly keep up, but the sheer volume of posts means that literally everything is visible for at least a few seconds, and more reasonably a minute or two?
What then? Comments (2)
I am not totally familiar with the technology, but could an explanation be the number of exetel users using a TOR style service on their PC's?
While it looks like the request originates from an extetel IP address they are in fact simply an intermediary for someone else’s request. It certainly seems to be a disturbing drawback to this software that by participating in a TOR network you could be inadvertently facilitating this sort of behaviour. Comment (1)
Watchdog's reply was that over 16,000 were IPs of Child Pornography.
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For our purposes of a technical trial it was irrelevant.
If it is ever imposed it will be a list used y the government of the day. Comments (13)
I on't know - but it is really relevant as any list used should it become law would be the responsibility of the government of the day.
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You've made a quite complex debat very simplistic here. If it were just about child porn then you are correct, there is little argument. But the blacklist is known to contain a large variety of websites well beyond the scope of child pornography, including normal adult content, and subjects found distastful to the government such as euthanasia and abortion, the worst part of which being that the list is secret, and there is no means to A - find out if your site is wrongly on the list and B - have your site removed.
Compulsary content filtering in Australia will place us on a sippery slope towards joining the likes of China, Saudi Arabia and others, who closely monitor and regulate what their citizens can and cannot do, say or see. Certainly not a road we want to go down in Australia where we value our freedom above just about anything else. Comment (1)
Actually, I've done nothing of the sort.
The debate is very simple - it's about banning access to child pornography according to the election promise. You/a whole lot of other silly people are hung up on the Governmet trials using the ACMA black list which, by now, every idiot who has made a comment knows is a badly flawed and inappropriate list to use in banning child pornography and will never be the list used should legislation be enacted. It is a non-issue and completely irrelevant. There are only two ponts at issue: 1) Can a list (of whatever) be used without slowing the internet - the answer is almost certainly yes. 2) Who decides what goes on that list - no-one has made that decision. ...and by the way....you must be awfully immature to make comments about "Australians valuing their freedom above everything else". Where did you get that crap? From a Year 10 civics text book? My 40+ years of, relatively, acute observation of Australians is that, with a small percentage of exceptions, Australians value their personal convenience and comfort above the convenience and comfort of all others as their most treasured aspiration. "Freedom" is a word whose meaning they barely comprehend....along with most other people who live in the more enlightened countries on the planet. Comments (13)
To quote: "Who Could Possibly Object To Black Listing Child Pornography Sites?.........apart from those relatively few people who suffer from paedophlia? .......it would be hard to find anyone I would have thought."
To answer the initial question on which you base your argument, how about Peter Mancer himself? Mr Mancer recommends not adding certain known Child Abuse - sites to the blacklist on the grounds of service degradation. Comment (1)
You say that only "mildly technically competent internet users" will be able to bypass the blacklist? I wouldn't be surprised if more than 80% of internet users fell into that group, if that group contains anyone who is able to use a webproxy. I could do that (and did, to bypass school filters) when I was 12.
In addition, it is debatable how well a blacklist can deal with the dynamic nature of the internet. From memory, an AFP spokesperson said that these websites rarely stay up for more than a week. Given this fact, how can a static blacklist ever help if by the time a site is on the blacklist, it's already been taken down? Comment (1)
Clearly your knowledge of the filter trial is a little off.
There where 20,000 hits to the filter, 20,000 referrals to the white box. NOT 20,000 hits on actual CP URLS. That was significantly less. Comment (1)
"Who Could Possibly Object To Black Listing Child Pornography Sites?.........
That's not the common objection because we don't know that they are Cp sites at all. Every other list leaked so far has proven to be a great deal more than that as well as perfectly legal sites. John, you are arguing in favour of something you haven't verified for yourself. And until a large ISP puts all of it's users though a filter that includes high traffic sites, nothing has been proven to work. Comments (2)
Sigh....why not read read what is written rather than inventing things that were not stated:
1) The point of the election promise was to ban child pornography - the use of an ACMA list to trial a technical concept is irrelevant and pointless to raise - that issue, should it ever arise, will be dealt with in the Senate. 2) Exetel has verified what it set out to verify - you stating we didn't is pointless. 3) I have already referred to a million user ISP that uses the technology which was why we were happy to test the SAME solution. I suggest you comment on what is actually said - in the event you believe you should waste your time scan reading the stuff I write in the first place. Comments (13)
John, Labor's election promise was to "require ISPs to offer a ‘clean feed’" and to "prevent Australian children from accessing any content that has been identified as prohibited by ACMA". Child Porn was already banned in Australia. There was no mention of child porn in thier "Labor’s Plan for Cyber-safety" document released before the election.
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Hrmm that's true. Kinda got you there, the original promise has shifted so often since then, but the original did actually have nothing to do with implementing a mandatory black list of anything let alone CP sites for all.
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I did read what was said and I'll say it again. We don't know that there was CP on those sites and high traffic sites are excluded. So how is the internet being filtered, and how does it work?
When you have followed this from the original election policy and seen every single thing put forward so far by the pro filter people and the minister responsible turn out to be bogus, some are bound to be sceptical. As for you feeling depressed about your users accessing Cp. What if many were in fact sites that have Cp there somewhere that most visitors were unaware of? Also definitions of Cp vary from place to place. It can also include a girl over 18 dressed to look younger, so if in many cases it was teenage boys viewing that, many would consider it far less disturbing than a middle aged man viewing real Cp. There are so many ways what has happened with your trail can be interpreted that you could write a book about it. Comments (2)
It's completely irrelevant what you think.
Exetel conduceted a trial of a process of limiting access to a range of sites nominated by a third party. We would never do this in 'reality' unless we were required by the government of the day to do so who have the 'authority to define such a list. Whining about the things you state in your post is both childish and stupid.If your mind is so sick you require images of children (or people impersonating children) to get a hard on then buy a fire arm and deal with yourself as a parent of a child would wish you to be dealt with. Get a f***ing life - if the government of the day pass a law then Exetel is required to obey it. What is your problem in grasping that elementary basis of living in a democratic society? Comments (13)
John, do you honestly believe that the blacklist in the filter's software that you tested was 100% real child porn sites? Do you really believe that you have 100+ paedophiles as customers of your ISP? If we look at the numerous blacklists that have been leaking over the last 8 months so, practically none of them have had any child porn sites on them and even less of them have had child porn sites which were still in operation. I think was the Danish list which had the highest rate of about 5 or 7 child porn sites out of the list which totalled over 1,500. And of course the rest were normal legal porn sites or odd additions such a trucking company's site. Guess how many child porn sites ACMA's list has on it? None, as far as I'm aware.
Now are you seriously going to tell me that the blacklist you used, from a private commercial company, is completely 100% child porn? You believe what Watchdog told you then? Isn't amazing that commercial company can find all of these live child porn sites (using the same method as ACMA; complaints and tip-offs from the public), yet according to the leaked blacklists governments and police agencies can’t seem to find them? Do you think you've been lied to by the vendor John? Comments (2)
You are equally childish with a zero comprehension of the world and Australia:
1) There are CP sites that no law enforcement agency can touch because of their location - if you doubt this you are a moron. 2) IWF's capabilities are listed on their web site...and 80+ UK ISPs are happy enough with their services. 3) The "lists" you refer to (and I assume you mean the main list relevant to Australia - ACMA) has nothing to do with CP or anything I have written. 4) You and people like you you with zero knowledge, apparently, of how dmocracy operates and with no facts, simply your opinions, need to keep your mouth firmly shut until you actually know something having checked it several times with verifiable sources. 5) I have little doubt that there could be 100+ paedophiles who use Exetel broadband as that would be in line with the percentage of Australian broadband users Exetel has compared to the lower estimates of the number of paedopiles there are in Australia. Stop wasting your time reading what I write and go and get on with your life more productively. Comments (13)
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