4 July 2011

CyberOne turn on Internet Filtering

| kevin22
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ZDNet report that filtering of the Interpol blacklist has begun in Canberra:

Canberra-based internet service provider (ISP) CyberOne is believed to be the first in Australia to implement voluntary internet filtering against Interpol’s “worst-of-the-worst” blacklist of child exploitation material.

Filtering was turned on this morning for the ISP’s customers connected via the TransACT hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) cable network. CyberOne’s DSL and wireless customers are not yet filtered.

“We are very happy that we can do something to disrupt the activities of child pornographers,” said CyberOne founder Maciej Mikrut in a media release. Implementing the Interpol blacklist was “a great step forward”, he said.

According to Mikrut, it took “about 10 minutes” to install the filtering using the ContentKeeper Web (CK-Web) appliance from ContentKeeper Technologies, Australia’s largest provider of content-filtering technologies.

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ThrowawayAccount said :

Spectra said :

Second, this is not a “public list”, and that’s the whole point of concern for a lot of people (myself included). It means that if, god forbid, someone makes a mistake (like, say, putting a Queensland dentist’s site on the list…just to pick a random example) then poor Dr Tooth can’t even know he’s on the list, never mind having some avenue of appeal to be taken off it.

It’s not a public list for a very good reason. It contains the ‘worst of the worst’ sites on the Internet. This is not a list of sites I want to see, and I’m not sure why anyone else would want a list of these sites. Unless of course they were better trained than the experts at Interpol who have assessed the content of the sites contained on the list……
Now if this were a government sponsored blacklist of sites, it would be a different matter. Government sponsorship brings with it a whole range of issues, including scope creep, individual political agendas, religious beliefs, etc. These are things that shouldn’t come into play with this list as it’s supplied directly from Interpol, who are only interested in stopping crime (in theory).
Having said that, mistakes can happen, and if you do happen to stumble onto a site that you believe is incorrectly classified, the block page you receive will have contact information that you can use (after you have finished panicking that you have got an Interpol block page….) to have the site re-assessed.

Oh and congrats to Content Keeper Technologies. A local company making it big with some innovative products..

And how do you know it’s the “worst of the worst”, every time such lists are leaked threy prove to be mostly innocuous.

shadow boxer9:20 am 05 Jul 11

ThrowawayAccount said :

Spectra said :

Second, this is not a “public list”, and that’s the whole point of concern for a lot of people (myself included). It means that if, god forbid, someone makes a mistake (like, say, putting a Queensland dentist’s site on the list…just to pick a random example) then poor Dr Tooth can’t even know he’s on the list, never mind having some avenue of appeal to be taken off it.

It’s not a public list for a very good reason. It contains the ‘worst of the worst’ sites on the Internet. This is not a list of sites I want to see, and I’m not sure why anyone else would want a list of these sites. Unless of course they were better trained than the experts at Interpol who have assessed the content of the sites contained on the list……
Now if this were a government sponsored blacklist of sites, it would be a different matter. Government sponsorship brings with it a whole range of issues, including scope creep, individual political agendas, religious beliefs, etc. These are things that shouldn’t come into play with this list as it’s supplied directly from Interpol, who are only interested in stopping crime (in theory).
Having said that, mistakes can happen, and if you do happen to stumble onto a site that you believe is incorrectly classified, the block page you receive will have contact information that you can use (after you have finished panicking that you have got an Interpol block page….) to have the site re-assessed.

Oh and congrats to Content Keeper Technologies. A local company making it big with some innovative products..

But there has to be oversight, who is watching the watchers, if a torrent site is illegal in say sweden does it make the list ? who is making these decisions ?

At least with R and X rated stuff we have a classification board that is made up of community representatives and it publishes it’s decisions.

Grail said :

ThrowawayAccount said :

Oh and congrats to Content Keeper Technologies. A local company making it big with some innovative products..

And grats to Content Keeper Technologies for coming up with the really imaginative name of “ThrowawayAccount” to post their astroturfing on RiotACT 😛

+1. I was going to launch a spirited counter-argument of my own, but you seems to have covered it nicely 🙂

Saying these sites are the “worst of the worst” is just propaganda, not to mention blindly parroting the government’s line on the matter without apparent irony. But I’m sure Mr/Mrs ThrowawayAccount is totally unaffiliated with any local commercial entity that stands to gain from widespread adoption of a filter 🙂

Think of the children! This list will only ever contain the ‘worst of the worst’! It’s for your own good! Trust us. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

ThrowawayAccount said :

Oh and congrats to Content Keeper Technologies. A local company making it big with some innovative products..

And grats to Content Keeper Technologies for coming up with the really imaginative name of “ThrowawayAccount” to post their astroturfing on RiotACT 😛

ThrowawayAccount said :

It’s not a public list for a very good reason. It contains the ‘worst of the worst’ sites on the Internet. This is not a list of sites I want to see, and I’m not sure why anyone else would want a list of these sites. Unless of course they were better trained than the experts at Interpol who have assessed the content of the sites contained on the list…

Interpol are the same folk who issued an arrest warrant for Julian Assange for “sex crimes”.

Secret blacklists are bad, mostly because they’re secret. Being secret there is no way to vet them, no way to challenge the listing of a site, and no way to police the addition of sites to the blacklist.

ThrowawayAccount said :

Now if this were a government sponsored blacklist of sites, it would be a different matter. Government sponsorship brings with it a whole range of issues, including scope creep, individual political agendas, religious beliefs, etc. These are things that shouldn’t come into play with this list as it’s supplied directly from Interpol, who are only interested in stopping crime (in theory).

Why do you have to qualify your own pro-Interpol propaganda with “in theory”? Interpol is an international legal & political entity. It isn’t even answerable to a body of voters. The issue of scope creep, political agendas and religious beliefs is just as pertinent for Interpol – even more so because they’re not accountable to anybody except themselves.

ThrowawayAccount said :

Having said that, mistakes can happen, and if you do happen to stumble onto a site that you believe is incorrectly classified, the block page you receive will have contact information that you can use (after you have finished panicking that you have got an Interpol block page….) to have the site re-assessed.

I’m sure that it makes sense to someone that you would somehow believe that a site was incorrectly classified when you can’t see the content of the site.

Mistakes will happen, and many of the mistakes will be the blacklisting authority stretching its envelope to see just how far the scope can creep before people notice something amiss.

ThrowawayAccount8:59 pm 04 Jul 11

Spectra said :

Second, this is not a “public list”, and that’s the whole point of concern for a lot of people (myself included). It means that if, god forbid, someone makes a mistake (like, say, putting a Queensland dentist’s site on the list…just to pick a random example) then poor Dr Tooth can’t even know he’s on the list, never mind having some avenue of appeal to be taken off it.

It’s not a public list for a very good reason. It contains the ‘worst of the worst’ sites on the Internet. This is not a list of sites I want to see, and I’m not sure why anyone else would want a list of these sites. Unless of course they were better trained than the experts at Interpol who have assessed the content of the sites contained on the list……
Now if this were a government sponsored blacklist of sites, it would be a different matter. Government sponsorship brings with it a whole range of issues, including scope creep, individual political agendas, religious beliefs, etc. These are things that shouldn’t come into play with this list as it’s supplied directly from Interpol, who are only interested in stopping crime (in theory).
Having said that, mistakes can happen, and if you do happen to stumble onto a site that you believe is incorrectly classified, the block page you receive will have contact information that you can use (after you have finished panicking that you have got an Interpol block page….) to have the site re-assessed.

Oh and congrats to Content Keeper Technologies. A local company making it big with some innovative products..

Classified said :

VPN to offshore proxy.

Theyve been doing that for years anyway

VPN to offshore proxy.

Bigpond will be following soon. I just hope it doesn’t slow down the response time any further. It takes about 6 or 7 seconds for the latest incarnation of RA to come up after I’ve clicked the bookmark icon on the toolbar and the same amount of time when I click on a story. Any longer and it will be like going back to dialup.

eyeLikeCarrots4:25 pm 04 Jul 11

This is bullsh*t, I’m a CyberOne customer and I can’t get to my child phonography sites anymore….

Furious!!!!

dvaey said :

Im assuming this blacklist contains host/domain names, since thats how 99% of people get to sites.. DNS is an amazing thing, where there are only a few major root servers which propogate domain information. If you remove DNS for the host/domain, then the site might not be shut down, but its no longer accessible to the masses.

I wasn’t really referring to the difficulty of physically removing access, more the legal/jurisdictional aspects that Spectra alludes to above.

Erg0 said :

I think you may be underestimating the difficulty of “shutting down” a website.

Im assuming this blacklist contains host/domain names, since thats how 99% of people get to sites.. DNS is an amazing thing, where there are only a few major root servers which propogate domain information. If you remove DNS for the host/domain, then the site might not be shut down, but its no longer accessible to the masses.

dvaey said :

OP: Canberra-based internet service provider (ISP) CyberOne is believed to be the first in Australia to implement voluntary internet filtering against Interpol’s “worst-of-the-worst” blacklist of child exploitation material.

Coming up next, I wonder if Interpol will bring out a blacklist of terrorists addresses or drug dealers addresses? If these sites have been identified, why group them all together in one public list, instead of shutting them down? Or are the rules of suspicion to end up on the blacklist less strict than whats required to actually be illegal or shut a site down?

I think you may be underestimating the difficulty of “shutting down” a website.

dvaey said :

Coming up next, I wonder if Interpol will bring out a blacklist of terrorists addresses or drug dealers addresses? If these sites have been identified, why group them all together in one public list, instead of shutting them down? Or are the rules of suspicion to end up on the blacklist less strict than whats required to actually be illegal or shut a site down?

You’re obviously new to the internet, so let me help you out: Most (all) of these sites aren’t in Australia, so the AFP can’t do anything directly. Interpol doesn’t have much in the way of actual direct jurisdiction anywhere, so the best they can usually do is notify and work with the local authorities. And if the local authorities don’t/can’t do anything then the site stays up.

Second, this is not a “public list”, and that’s the whole point of concern for a lot of people (myself included). It means that if, god forbid, someone makes a mistake (like, say, putting a Queensland dentist’s site on the list…just to pick a random example) then poor Dr Tooth can’t even know he’s on the list, never mind having some avenue of appeal to be taken off it.

OP: Canberra-based internet service provider (ISP) CyberOne is believed to be the first in Australia to implement voluntary internet filtering against Interpol’s “worst-of-the-worst” blacklist of child exploitation material.

Coming up next, I wonder if Interpol will bring out a blacklist of terrorists addresses or drug dealers addresses? If these sites have been identified, why group them all together in one public list, instead of shutting them down? Or are the rules of suspicion to end up on the blacklist less strict than whats required to actually be illegal or shut a site down?

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