Australia’s inane internet censorship plan

Clean Feed the system is called, and it is intended to save kiddies from porn and kiddie fiddlers. Clean Feed is the product of a bunch of politicians who wouldn’t know a piece of code from a hole the their backs!

For months now I’ve been trying to find out why I have been denied access to a site on which I was a contributor ragebot. As Kvatch points out –

“The Frogette and I have discovered that our IP (Ragebot and 10 other sites) is being blocked by at least 3 Australian ISPs. We've only got one confirmed as allowing access to Ragebot.”

I thought this was a new form of political censorship, but it turns out to be an old form of political stupidity:

Optus joins filter trial to censor the internet

THE nation's second-largest internet service provider, Optus, has joined a broadband filtering trial as part of the federal Government's plans to censor the world wide web. The company has started a six-week evaluation that will conclude in early July.
Optus is the eighth internet service provider to participate in the scheme, joining Primus, Highway 1, Nelson Bay Online, Netforce, OMNIconnect, TECH 2U and Webshield.

Optus, owned and operated by the totalitarian Singapore Government, had no problems signing up with this draconian and stupefyingly useless internet censorship program. As Kvatch pointed out, one major ISP didn’t join the gang, and that was Telstra, headed by Mr Potato Head (Sol Trujillo). Sol had his own issues with Australian’s, and generally told the government to ‘get a dog up you!’

Anyway, I was dealing with the nice folk from Singapore – where they still hang people – and eventually received this reply before they refused further discussion:

From Optus ‘Support’ (16-04-2009)

I have examined the previous reports you mentioned, the trace routs included in the reports clearly show the fault beyond the optus network. Once a connection leaves our boundary point there is very little that can be done.
It was requested that you contact the administrator of the domaine (sic) trying to be contacted.

That was about the same response I had to my complaint of paying for broadband and receiving dial-up – between drop outs. Sol is still not forgiven for screwing the system, but obviously others are being added to the list – ‘come the revolution…’

Also note, the article in The Australian was dated May and I had been fighting this since February . So here is a bit about 'Clean Feed', the culprit it appears, according to those already doing battle (emphasis mine):

The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan called, Clean Feed, to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.

Although the final details of the filtering plans have been kept under wraps, the Minister is on record as being firmly committed to a mandatory clean-feed internet to Australian homes, schools and public computers.

Even the most accurate software the Government has tested would incorrectly block 10,000 sites in every million.

In short, as the best experts in the country unanimously agree, Conroy's plan does not make sense technically.

I intend to reveal more about this moronic situation, and about the equally dumb steps leading up to it. I should have been on guard earlier but actually allowed for some intelligent thinking in the process. For now I leave you with an info link - Download censorship filtering Fact Sheets (PDF, 2MB) or visit -