Tag Archives: filter

How to bypass the Great Firewall of Australia

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Dear Internet users, I have decided to provide a list of ways to bypass the Great Firewall of Australia to look at all the child porn you want to protect your privacy, security and freedom for the truth. All of these techniques are legit and legal, and surprisingly the education department has helped in teaching students how to use and setup these tricks. If these stop working, then the government has broken the fundamentals of the internet.

These are the following techniques that are typically used, from easiest to hardest.

  • Web App Proxy
  • Http Proxy
  • SSH Tunneling
  • VPN

Techniques

Web App Proxy

This is dead easy to setup and use. Step one is to find a working proxy, which is as simple as googling. Just jump on google and search for “web proxy” . These are popular with students at schools with restrictive internet. Here are some that might work for you.

  • http://hidemyass.com/
  • http://proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml
  • http://www.kproxy.com/
  • http://www.daveproxy.co.uk/
  • http://www.phproxy.org/

HTTP Proxy

This is a little bit harder but works with more websites. The first step is to find a proxy, which you can use a site like this to find a proxy address, or just google. Once you have an address you can update your proxy settings in you browser. This site provides a detail guide on setting proxy settings in different browsers.

SSH Tunneling

This works best if you have access to SSH on a remote server outside of Australia. Here is a good tutorial on how to do it.

VPN

Your final option is VPN tunneling. This get’s fairly complex quickly, but basically you create a virtual network and route all your traffic through a remote end point outside of Australia. You could setup your own with software like OpenVPN, or leave the hard work to someone else like this site.

Final Note

So basically if a grade 8 student can break through a filter in place for education Queensland that is more restrictive with a smaller user base, then I’m sure a pedophile could work it out quickly. This filter is not being put in place to protect your children from inappropriate content to start with. Mr Conroy has even stated that high speed sites will not be filter such as YouTube, as the filter can’t work that fast. The filtering works faster than a blink of an eye stat is for a low bandwidth (not video content)  site.  YouTube is exempt from this filtering scheme. Blocking a whole 1000 sites for a mere 125.8 million doesn’t quite seem worth it. 125 could go a long way to setup a new school or hospital. Instead we waste it on this shit.

Also worth noting is that without compromising every single secure site (Banks, PayPal, eBay, Company Documents, ect) the filters will not be able to filter secured traffic, making it easy for these porn sites to evade the filter.

Filtering, why not?

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I know this has been written to death about, but surely another opinion won’t hurt. It seems a lot of IT blogs and tossing around false / misleading figures, making it easy to disprove that the filtering technique will slow the internet. Sure, a filter list of 1000 entries won’t be too bad on performance. A setup similar to the UK’s IWF where by there is a suspected IP list, followed by a URL list. This is fine, while I don’t like this setup for privacy and freedom, the method is technically viable (as seen with most UK ISPs). Of course URL checking fails with SSL.

I have two simple reasons why the ISP level filter should be abandoned before being forced upon Australia. My first reason is privacy and freedom. The list will be a secret, and is not published or checked by a third party. How does Australia know it’s not being lied to. I really don’t want something like the Great Firewall of China, where even Chinese citizens know that their Internet is different to ours. Not only the fact that we will have any control over the filter lists, data around Australia will enter several choke points. If these points ever become hacked, your data could be exposed. Passwords, cookies, e-mails, all of it.

Why bother blocking ten thousand RC sites, there is more than ten thousand RC sites on the internet. Not only that the proxy can be bypassed using several ready available proxy services (which are being used at schools around Australia every day). From what I’ve read so far, suggests that there will be no attempt to block anything but RC content, which means that the proxy systems will not be block proxy servers. These tools are well known by students, and people who view/download child porn using HTTP, will quickly learn how to access these tools, making the purpose of the filter useless.

In the end, the proxy will not make children safer at all. So Stephen Conroy, please stop using this as your slogan. I’d be very surprised that any child would actually end up at one of the 10,000 you can block, out of the billions of sites that they visit a day, when they search for My Little Pony and Ben 10. Save your/our money, and stop trying to force a useless filter down our throats, when the money could be better spent on health care, or what not. $100 million can go along towards a new hospital or research. Cut your losses (I won’t comment about the thousands of dollars already spent on this waste of money if you ditch the filter now).

Just my 2 cents for the blog-o-sphere.

The "Naked Cowboy"

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Good news, it seems like no more porn filter, but ISP level filtering will go ahead with child porn url dectection. :(

Email from the dbcbe

ISP FILTERING

Thank you for your correspondence and your interest in internet service provider (ISP) filtering.

Attached is information from the Minister on this matter. In addition, the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has prepared material on a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding ISP filtering. This list is available on the Department’s website at www.dbcde.gov.au/cybersafetyplan

These FAQs will be updated regularly to provide you with the most up to date information on ISP filtering issues.

We hope this information is of assistance.

The Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy

PDF attached