Cafuego - australia

conroyfilter.module

cafuego — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:19:40 +0000

Seeing as the Australian governments proposed mandatory internet filter will filter all traffic on port 80, I thought it

would be helpful to provide a Drupal module that allows you to automagically provide an alternate link to each page on a site.

Your web server should be configured to serve content on a 2nd port, beside port 80, so as to not interfere with browsing requests from users outside of Australia.

Simply download and install the conroyfilter module, enable the block and set the alternate port number in the block configuration.

An example of the output is shown at the top right hand side of this page.

Update: The module is now hosted on github.

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Attachment	Size
conroyfilter.zip	1.66 KB

Asylum Scaremongering

cafuego — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:46:52 +0000

Ever since the explosion on the boat full of Afghani refugees, the news has been full of scaremongering again. They're faithfully reporting how we'll be overrun with asylum seekers because the new goverment has changed policies. I'm calling it scaremongering because they never report on the actual total number of asylum seekers Australia gets or, for that matter, the relative amount compared to other countries.

I've always known that Holland (half the size of Tasmania, about as many people as Australia) got far more requests for asylum than Australia, but I had no idea of actual numbers. During this evening's news I decided to have a bit of a google and find out.

UNHCR has conveniently provided a PDF with statistics from between 2004 and 2008 for pretty much all countries in the world. Unfortunately the stats for Holland are not reliable, so I've left them out of this graph.

So here it is; a graph that shows the number of requests for asylum as a percentage of the total population. You can see that compared to this relatively representative list of developed countries Australia actually gets a lot less than average.

Less than average even when you include the few hundred people who arrive by boat each year, who get intercepted and processed off-shore, as they are not included in the UNHCR numbers.

Yes, that's 0.022% for 2008. So my take on the news reporting about boat people? Cheap sensationalism, playing on xenophobia. Shame.

Sources:

Asylum request numbers - UNHCR
2007 Population Australia - ABS
2006 Population Canada - StatCan
2008 Population Finland - Stat.fi
2007 Population Germany - EU2007.de
2009 Population New Zealand - stats.govt.nz
2007 Population United Kingdom - statistics.gov.uk

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clean feed nonsense

cafuego — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:07:23 +0000

Dear Minister Conroy,

I'm an IT professional living in Melbourne and I have been following discussions about the proposal to filter all internet traffic coming into Australia. This proposal has me both worried and somewhat bemused.

The worry stems from a lack of any clear information on what "illegal content" is and no way of determining what sites would be blocked. Support group websites? Politically inconvenient sites? Overseas news papers? Proposing such broad censorship laws in the name of protecting children is wrong. The state is not a parent.

My bemusement stems from the fact any web content filtering put in place would only be partially effective and trivial to circumvent.

"[The filters] allowed access to between 2 per cent and 13 per cent of material that should have been blocked, and wrongly blocked between 1.3 percent and 7.8 per cent of websites that should have been allowed."1

With 181,277,835 web sites on the internet2, that means at best 2.4 million and at worst 14.1 million web sites would be incorrectly blocked, with no way of determining which sites these were. Once a site wrongfully disappears into this black hole, there appears to be no way of rectifying the problem.

It is relatively trivial to circumvent web filtering by using web proxies based overseas, and this is impossible to enforce without making the use of encryption technologies illegal as well. Doing that would probably result in a departure of high technology industry from Australia and loss of jobs.

I'm concerned this will be an expensive waste of tax payer time and resources.

1 http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/labors-net-gag-worse-than-iran/2008/10/23/1224351430987.html?page=2
2 http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2008/09/30/september_2008_web_server_survey.html

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