Michael Wheeler

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.

TheSkorm – First Geocache

My uncle has kind enough to give me his old GPS unit to me, so Chris and I decided to try out geocaching. We had 5 unsuccessful attempts, followed by a success. It was really fun looking at all of the items and logbook entries. We signed the book and put the cache back and had two more unsuccessful attempts.

ps. This blog post is smallish due to me still learning the DVORAK keyboard layout.

Fibre connectors – Craig Rodway

When configured correctly in a network QOS can be a wonderful thing. The ability to prioritize network traffic by it’s importance is crucial in most places that use VoIP systems to ensure that normal network traffic doesn’t kill off telephone calls. QOS can be both difficult to configure and simple depending on what systems you use and is being used in industry around the world.

With VoIP moving to home users now problems occur with keeping calls going when other home users are download or the like. Newer modems support QOS but still suffer from a simple flaw which impacts the usefulness of it. These modems can only control QOS for outgoing packets (uploads) and not incoming, becuase the QOS needs to be done on the ISP switches/routers. This flaw means that if someone packet floods your connection, QOS won’t be able to help your VoIP system.

There isn’t really a simple fix to this, however it would be nice if ISPs had a configuration page or the like to allow you to make simple QOS rules. Some people will want QOS on VoIP IPs/ports and others will want it on other services.

Who’s The Dick Writing Comments On My Blog – Laughing Squid

I thought I’d give wordpress a go now since I have a much more stable server to run it on. So far I’m liking the new interface (I know alot of people that previously used wordpress didn’t like it, however I like it compared to the old).

With a bit of tinkering it was pretty simple. A few plugins didn’t play nice, and mod rewrite was a little harder to do on lighttpd than apache, but with the help of another blog I was on my way to a happy start to wordpress.

I’ve used the wordpress blogger import and it has done a wonderful job so far :> Lets see how this goes (I’m still keeping a copy of my blogs in blogger just for history sake)

Wireless/Mindless Internet Point – NaOH

So I decided to get ADSL 2+, at a discounted price of 50% (<3 parents), and I'm loving. Despite the fact that I had to ring up, and had all sorts of problems in their tech support center, People Telecom ADSL 2+ has been awesome so far. The setup was very quick, however they decided to send us the login details via email, after we had lost our internet. Kinda stupid right?

Since I don't really trust my modem with being able to handle all that many connections, I decided to turn it into a bridge and let my server do all the work. It's pretty awesome, once I got the kernel compiled right, and iptables done, everything works nice a fast now. I am planing on getting a block of 8 IPs from People Telecom, so having setup like this will be good.

Also with the help of Hamzah I got e-mail setup on my server, which is quite a bitch to do usually. After changing from Optus, I can now use port 25 and 80. As another addition I’ve decided to use Lighttd over apache, just for shits and giggles, and it’s pretty damn good.

Now, I really wanted to test out my new Linux router and ADSL 2+, what better way to do it than games. Jack was able to lend me some PayPal monies, and I bought the Valve complete pack, which was 99 USD. It contained all the games I wanted to play, and a few others. (It also contained a few games I pirated and wanted to pay for, since they are awesome, esp. Portal). I would have bought the orange box, but it was missing a few games I wanted.

Other than that, I’m starting the last week of school, so I’m basically just been having a rest from work and school, and just doing things I either enjoy or would like to get done.