[clug] OT: Protesting the proposed clean feed?

[Chris Tuckwell]

Hi Guys

Been lurking here for a while, but wanted to share some thoughts.

The proposed legislation will take away common carrier status from the 
ISPs.  Which will then open up the legal channels for the ISPs to be 
sued for their innability to filter the content 100% correctly.

I gather that the mechinism for filtering the 'bad' content is to have a 
list of md5 hashes supplied by the police to ISPs.  But any one can 
generate a file to hash to a target md5 if they dont care about it being 
openable.  So this could the possibly be abused to send a bunch of junk 
files which appear on the 'bad' list to someones email address where you 
wish to have them investigated by the police.

Also if I wish to send a file that is on the 'bad' list, I can make 
subtle changes to the content (change a couple of pixels in an image, 
and some noise at the end of audio) and the file has a new md5 hash.

I think this will just provoke more people to use applications that 
encrypt communications to circumvent the filtering.

Cheers
Chris

David Tulloh wrote:
> Ian Bardsley wrote:
>> Perhaps all that needs to happen is for Minister Conroy to be sent a 
>> copy of all the dialog that this post has generated in a few hours 
>> with a note that this is a relatively small group and it would not be 
>> unreasonable to multiply the negative reaction by a factor of 250k to 
>> get some idea of how close to a snow balls chance in hell of getting 
>> to first base with this he has.
>>
> Unfortunately most people don't realise what's wrong with the idea.
> Once it's implemented there will be some initial pain, some protest 
> and bad press, a bunch of people will opt-out and we will just learn 
> to live with the occasional mandatory blocked site.
>
> As much as I hate it I suspect we will still have it in five years time.
>
> We have had filtering of websites hosted in Australia and Australian 
> based news servers for at least the last seven years.
>
>
> David