[MrDan]

Australia has been known to have high levels of censorship. It should come as no surprise to those in the land down under that the government is planning to filter P2P and Bit Torrent traffic in live pilot tests.

Senator Conroy went on the record saying "technology that filters peer-to-peer and Bit Torrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial".

It is a drastic step to filter out all P2P and Bit Torrent traffic as it assumes that those channels are only used for piracy. One example of legitimate use is the popular online game World of Warcraft. This game uses a Bit Torrent system of distrubution for its updates. Like any technology it can be used for both good and evil and choosing to block all on the account that it is only used for piracy is taking censorship to new levels.

Unsurprisingly the idea has fueled a serious debate in Australia; "I'm aware that this proposal has attracted significant debate and criticism ? on this blog and at other places in the blogosphere," Senator Conroy said. Many of the complaints stem around the idea that Senator Conroy is acting as a big brother.

If the Senator has his way and the filter is kept in place how far will the government be allowed to intervene? Simply blocking a technology for the potential illegal use is a preposterous idea as nearly all software can be used for malicious activities; it's the user who makes the decision.


Source : http://www.neowin.ne...torrent-traffic

[Xevious Sylar]

Thats Bad...


But still i suppose it is to stop piracy...

although i do download my fair share of music...

:(

[bolzano_1989]

Australia has been an awful place for newbie-pirates a long time ago . Many people had been caught for downloading copyright material from p2p .

[Xevious Sylar]

Thats not actualy very truithful...

i have not herd of anyone in australia being done for p2p... only for ilegalay selling pirated material...


so...

[Archer1978]

In my opinion Piracy makes the world go round! :)

[RedX]

Archer1978, on Dec 23 2008, 09:47 AM, said:

In my opinion Piracy makes the world go round! :)

I couldn't agree more, if Bill want every household to have a PC then he better start giving away softwares to the less fortunates. Because it will be a very long time for that to happen by the rate of which things are going it the world these days.

This post has been edited by RedX: 23 December 2008 - 02:16 PM

[2xtreme]

RedX, on Dec 23 2008, 02:15 PM, said:

I couldn't agree more, if Bill want every household to have a PC then he better start giving away softwares to the less fortunates. Because it will be a very long time for that to happen by the rate of which things are going it the world these days.

Why do you think that every OS that Microsoft releases is always so easy to crack/activate? If they really wanted they could make the task of cracking their OS very difficult but they don't want that. In their mind it's better someone run a cracked Win XP for example then a free open source alternative like Ubuntu or Debian.

[White Shark]

The filtering trial has been extended to at least mid-January 2009. News can be found at http://www.itnews.com.au/News/91640,conroy...nt-filters.aspx

[Papa Smurf]

I hope it doesn't start here? I could see we would lose the opportunity to download so much. :(

I belong to OPTUS (ISP) and when I fist started the download limit was effectively NONE but has since been filtered down to 60GB a month for me. The speeds aren't as good as many people in the USA and Britain and ASIA get so, if they start this censorship then we will REALLY be lost :(

Hopefully it won't happen?