[LINK] ACS new? submission on ISP filtering

[Jan Whitaker]

At 09:25 AM 18/03/2010, Kim Holburn wrote:

>http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/339394/filter_trial_vendor_sceptical_over_internet_clean-feed/?fp=4194304&fpid=1
>Filter trial vendor sceptical over Internet clean-feed
>
> > Internet filtering won't prevent people deliberately looking for
> > inappropriate material from accessing blocked content, according to
> > security vendor, M86 Security

There is a comment to that article by a Doug Wilson that says:
"If you come across a website that includes these things you can 
already report it to the ACMA and if they determine that it is 
illegal in Australia the ACMA will block Australians from getting to 
it through a Blacklist that Every ISP runs. "

Then someone said no they can't. Then another said:
"Wow, you've never heard of "trans proxies" (Transparent Proxies) have you?
Your ISP is probably already running all of their users, including 
you, through a trans proxy: any outbound traffic on tcp/80 (i.e.: web 
traffic) gets intercepted at the ISP's border routers and flicked 
back to a Squid (or other) proxy server to service the requests. This 
saves the ISP big dollars on traffic bills to their upstream peers as 
all the regularly hit traffic (like stylesheets, images, videos, etc. 
on Facebook, GooTube, etc.) will be in the Squid cache and can be 
served up locally instead of downloaded across the internet again.
Once you've got that kind of infrastructure in place it's literally 
"trivial" to add a blacklist-style content filter. Of course, it's 
also trivial to bypass such a system, too. "

That isn't true, is it? I mean, if every ISP is running a blacklist, 
that would mean that we already *have* ISP level filtering. Is this 
guy just making things up? Or is there already blocking going on?

Then this, which I think is the crux of the matter:
"My only concern is Abbott taking over when the filter is already 
implemented. God know what he will be filtering... "

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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