Photo: Kainet/Flickr (Creative Commons)
As debate continues over the decision by Optus and Telstra, the two largest ISPs, on implementing a filter that would block out sites containing child pornography, according to one source, a simple change to the DNS settings can defeat Optus’ filter.
ELECTION 2010: The Australian Christian Lobby has gone on the attack to defend the filter proposal after it was revealed by Joe Hockey that the Coalition will be going against the filter on ABC/Triple J’s news program Hack, and scrapping the proposal if it wins government.
ELECTION 2010: While Labor still is backing the controversial internet filter, the Liberals have finally confirmed that they will oppose the filter along with the Greens.
Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey, talking to ABC/Triple J’s Hack program, has stated that it will block the filter if Labor wins the upcoming election.
Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan has revealed that changes could be made to the proposed and controversial internet filter in a recent interview with the ABC/Triple J’s news program Hack.
“Well, it’s possible we could move in different directions,” Swan told the program, also telling listeners that the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has taken into consideration the concerns and is looking and responding to the concerns.
Hate when evangelicals push their religious views on you, or setting the damn agenda on an issue – looking at you, Australian Christian Lobby with your views on internet filtering? Well, get ready to have a God-free internet with a new filtering package called Godblock.
Opponents to the internet filter have been given a temporary win as Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy announced that he will delay the implementation of the controversial filter.
The delay comes as a review into the classification scheme, mainly focusing on what is Refused Classification, is done and what is deemed Refused Classification on the internet – one of the main focuses on Conroy’s filtering plan.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is still not backing down, telling the Sun-Herald over the weekend that the policy was still going ahead. However, what he said might have caused some caveat with one of the ISPs involved. Can you guess?
Chinese users behind the “Great Firewall of China” have reported that Google Hong Kong has been blocked, according to several sources. While initially admitting it was a fault on their end, Google has now said that it is China blocking the site.
Senator Stephen Conroy has gone onto the attack as news that the US State Department has said that it has an issue with its internet censorship plan, with the target placed on Google – who recently pulled its localised search engine after failing to get approval to stop censoring search engines – by highlighting its policies on content, privacy and censorship.
After publicly announcing that it may rethink its China strategy after an attempted breach of its servers and stopping censoring content from its search results, Google has given all of its employees based in China a holiday as the company steps up its security of its networks.
The year 2009 has been an interesting year for Australians. Not only we remember the political scandals like Utegate and the Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O’s controversial lie detector stunt on radio; but we also remember how Australians got together and showed solidarity amongst one another via charity work after the Bushfires caused havoc to many Australians living in the countryside in Victoria.
On behalf of the writers at TECHGEEK.com.au, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; and thank you for reading our blog. Who would have thought that in three years and more than two thousand posts later, we would be at this stage where we would be tackling discussing censorship and internet filtering… but then again, the decade was all about technology.
Google has today written a scathing blog post on the Australian Government’s plan on bringing mandatory ISP level filtering to millions of internet users in Australia, citing a report by three professors that found a wide scope of content that could be blocked under “Refused Classification”.
Below is the Government’s results of its filtering trial, released today. We have uploaded it to Scribd, so you don’t have to download it. Enjoy!
The Federal Government has today announced that it will give the green light to the compulsory internet filtering plan, after a controversial trial to filter the internet was conducted earlier in the year, with the legislation being introduced in Parliament next year.