Plans came to light recently that described a nationwide Internet censorship initiative in Australia to protect the children from the Internet. One could say that parents should take care of that but the Australian government does not seem to have much faith in Australian parents and decided that a far better way to protect the children would be to ban selected websites completely in Australia meaning if you are of legal age to view a website you might not be able to by normal means because of the censorship to protect the children.

One common denominator is always the vagueness of those plans. Questions like who will select the websites that should be banned, how will they be banned, who will decided what is appropriate, who will maintain the blacklist, what can be done about false positives or who will have access to it are not addressed at all.

Current plans favor the use of two blacklists, one for material unsuitable for children and one for illegal material. It is possible to opt-out of the first but not the second. No definition of illegal was given and it is likely that the blacklist will contain websites that might not be illegal but considered illegal.

Nationwide Internet censorship puts Australia right in the midst of elusive countries like China and Iran who censor the Internet for different reasons. Australians who want to fight this plan can head over to the No Clean Feed site for more information and calls to action.

Related posts

• Use Picidae to access blocked and censored websites (5)
• Should Search Engines censor certain keywords ? (5)
• More Proof That Apple’s Next Target Is The Print Media/Industry (5)
• Internet Filtering Checks and Maps (0)
• Internet Censorship 101 – DNS Server Filtering (4)

Restrictions on the other hand are usually implemented by an Internet service to prevent access to the service from users that do not live in the target area. Some prominent examples are the Internet Radio Pandora and the streaming video services Hulu and ABC.

Gpass is a free software that provides an encrypted connection to bypass Internet censorship and restrictions. It makes use of encrypted socks tunnels to launch applications and can use Skype and Tor as backup tunnels.

Every application that connects to the Internet can be used with Gpass. Most run out of the box without having to enter details into the application. Some require that the proxy server (localhost:8000) is set in the application itself.

Gpass provides links to a few applications like Firefox, Internet Explorer and the default email client in it’s program interface. The user can drag and drop additional applications in the interface so that they can be launched to bypass restrictions as well.

Gpass works with Hulu, ABC and Pandora but the connection is rather slow and the viewing experience therefor limited. The main use of Gpass is therefor to access information on the Internet without difficulties and reprisals.

Users can check if Gpass is running properly by looking in the title frame of the application that they started. It should state [via Gpass] which is the indicator that the service is working. The IPs of the service are located in the United States.

Related posts

• YubNub a social internet command line (2)
• Wolfram Alpha Gets Its First Core Update After Launch (3)
• Wireless Network Scanner inSSIDer (3)
• Why you should not run an Open Wi-Fi (7)
• Why it might be a good idea to use Open DNS (2)