My internet speed is too slow for vids. All but the most parsimonious bit streams stop and leave me hanging at all the interesting bits. I have to let them run in the background and then run them again from the local buffer to see the vids as nature intended :).

When Kev said "You know what, I'm going to give every home optical fibre broad band". I said "All RIGHT, 3d vids". Now as Kev's post election world morphs from a word painting of sweetness and light to a smoking ruin of post apocalyptic reality likewise my world view has slowly morphed from one of hope, trust and naive optimism to one of sham drudgery and broken dreams.

Conroy's messianic mission to protect us from the evils of the internet (Why isn't there a conspiracy thread about this?) promises to claim a stream of my precious bandwidth for his dubious mission. The brightest possible outcome that I can see is fast broadband hamstrung by filtering. My post election cynicism, otherwise known as my new found grasp of reality, tells me we will get the filtering but not the broadband. If Kev is re-elected, a big "if", he wont be able to afford it. Tony Abbot has already said he will can it but you know damn well he wont can Conroy's folly. He loves a moralistic cause almost as much as he hates paedophiles. If he had his way he would probably swap them for boat people. Now there's an idea.

Nevertheless it is still a beautiful world and this is just another chapter in the rich pagentry of life. I must be cheerful and strive to be happy.

strive
#8194;
–verb (used without object),strove or strived, striv·en #8194;/#712;str#618;v#601;n/ Show Spelled[striv-uhn] Show IPA or strived, striv·ing.
1.
to exert oneself vigorously; try hard: He strove to make himself understood.

I'm going for a sail.

This is a job for INTERNATIONAL LAWMAN.

Censorship is always somewhat troubling. It's troubling that there seems to be no independent authority qualifying the listed sites and its further troubling that they struggle to keep the list secret.

One is tempted to mention Nazis but the first one to do that loses :)

The filter can be bypassed by using foreign proxy sites but if the proxy sites are blocked what do you do short of direct connection to an offshore isp? Can you have a pirate proxy that cant be blocked? Is there some other way around it? Is the filter applied at the offshore feeds or through the local isps?

My understanding of his proposal was that it would only block DNS requests...

This is the part where your computer goes "Hey, what IP address is seabreeze.com.au?" and the DNS server replies either "Yo dude it's 174.133.239.138, have fun" or, in the case of filtering, "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that".

This way it doesn't slow down actual downloads, but still allows the government to control what people see.


The problem with this is that it is trivial to circumvent. Like, really really easy. Just manually type in a foreign DNS server (4.2.2.2 is a good one) into your system preferences and bang you can browse whatever you like.

You only have to look at China, and the way that people there can still circumvent the filters if they really want to, to get an understanding of how difficult it would be for the government to really filter the internet. China has thrown lots and lots of money (like, LOTS of money) at the problem and it's still not 100% perfect.

In my opinion, Mr Conroy has no idea about what the heck he's talking about. You only have to look at his misguided comments about Google sniffing network traffic to realise that he is just... completely... useless. Maybe if he did spend a bit of time on the internet he'd be in a position to properly make decisions on our internet future. I can guarantee that he doesn't. He lives in politician land, where a soundbyte is far more important than actually understanding what he's talking about.

*sigh* This topic really gets me riled up.

If I ever see him on the street, then he is in very real danger of getting a cream pie to the face [}:)]

nebbian said...

<snip>
If I ever see him on the street, then he is in very real danger of getting a cream pie to the face [}:)]

Doesn't that mean something very different in internet land

Cheers Nebs. I posted that last one without seeing your post. What's to stop them blocking all foreign DNSs?

It sounds like it wont slow things down much but the censorship is still an issue particularly if its secretive.