Internet Privacy

Say no to internet censorship – Join the Fight


The Federal Government has said it will introduce a new law requiring Internet service providers to filter all Internet connections – including yours – early this year. The stated goal of the filter is to protect children, however the filter will only serve to give parents a false sense of security. It will not block the vast majority of sites unsuitable for children, nor mitigate the other, more serious risks facing children online such as cyber-bullying.The list of sites to be blocked will be secret, and not open to public review. It comes with no guarantees about how it might be expanded later by this or future… governments. Concerned? There’s still time to make your voice heard. Contact your federal representative nocleanfeed.com Sign EFAs Senate petition www.efa.org.au Spread the word join the blackout! www.internetblackout.com.au Black out your online profile picture now www.internetblackout.com.au Black out your website during …Blackout www.internetblackout.com.au Don’t let those who came before us down. Say no to internet censorship.

Keep your Identity and IP Address Secure

Why do you guess that people go to the trouble of utilizing software that hides your IP address? Whenever you investigate, you’ll find there’s lots of reasons but here are a few.

  1. There are plenty of countries where you risk your safety should you speak freely online
  2. Using the internet means you’ll be routinely monitored and have little privacy
  3. The web is full of information and identity thieves
  4. Some people just don’t like our every move online being logged

Obviously the internet has it’s fair share of criminals who wish to hide their IP address aswell. Just as they use other forms of communication like telephones, faxes and the mail! The irony is the evil doers always protect their connections so you inevitably end up with governments, agencies and hackers all spying on the innocent majority.

This is what so annoys me about the ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide’ argument, the majority who do are hidden. The rest of us are subject to surveillance, spying and intrusion by even the most democratic western governments. The European Directive instructs ISPS to log all the web sites, emails and electronic communications of it’s citizens for up to 2 years.

However it is also worth reminding people that using a simple piece of hide your ip software, or some super elite proxy you found listed on a web site is going to help your privacy. Most of this software doesn’t do much at all, remember HTTP is clear text protocol and that’s where most of your browsing happens through. These Hide your IP programs simply obscure your IP address from the website that you visit and that’s all. But every other details of your browsing is in the clear and traceable to your IP address, sitting in your ISP is a list of virtually everything you’ve ever done online over the last two years or so.

Beware most of all thought the software that simply routes your connection through free proxies found on the internet. They then route all your web browsing through the fastest, free proxy that they find available. It wouldn’t matter if the proxy was being run by a gang of identity thieves (which many of them are) purely to harvest user details, the software would still send you there. You would be much more secure using nothing than one of these, see one of the best and most secure programs here.

Simply staying secure online actually does take some work, too many people are misled by tales of free proxies and they actually put themselves at huge risk. You need to use secure private proxies, you should know who is responsible for them and ensure that the logs are deleted instantly. Any proper security product will also ensure that all your browsing is encrypted as otherwise your details and IP will be visible all along it’s route.

Surf securely and protect yourself online

The Role of the ISU and Saudi Censorship

You may not be surprised to learn that Saudi Arabia is amongst the leaders in filtering and censoring the internet. A rather strict political and religious regime combined with lots of cash to spend on filtering technology meant it was always on the cards.

The department who are in charge of ensuring that the citizens of Saudi Arabia don’t access anything their rulers don’t like is called the ISU ( Internet Services Unit). THeir official remit is quite benign – blocking anything that is against the Qu’ran and pornography. Unfortunately this scope seems now to have been extended to include lots of other topics – freedom of speech, womens rights, any non-muslim religions and loads of humanitarian websites. The other main category that keep the ISU busy is any web sites that says anything negative about the Saudi Royal.

The technology used by the ISU is based on quite an old technology called Smartfilter – recently bought by McAffee. It’s not actually that smart compared with some other products but it is quite effective against most users. The filter is just a large list of URLs from a central database, supplemented by all the urls added by the ISU including all the ‘free speech’ sites.

You can actually beat internet filtering like this fairly easily by using a VPN based function, or sometimes just a simple proxy will work. However remember Saudi Government take their spying quite seriously and have recently installed hidden cameras in many internet cafes. Alas the internet is not quite as free in some countries as others, who knows what will be accessible in Saudi in a few more years.

Learn all about the issues across the world about online privacy protection.

Internet Filtering Increases Across the World

There have been lots of surveys and research into the growing menace of internet filtering. I say menace because although there are obviously web sites that nobody should encourage or even allow – filtering does very little to tackle the real issues behind these web sites.

Casually blocking and pretending these sites don’t exist is not the way problems are solved, and the huge irony is that the people who do wish to access criminal sites will almost certainly be able to use the various work arounds that are available. In effect Internet filtering usually ends up filtering people who have no intention of visiting these sites in the first place – in essence an exercise of futility. Whilst the filtered site grow and flourish away from the eyes of governments and states who are best placed to make more direct action against them.

What has also somewhat lagged behind the increases of filtering our internet access is awareness of the practices. The internet is increasingly part of all our lives and the idea that what we are allowed to access is being decided on by our governments is not very popular.

At the very core of this change, is what is specifically monitored, our internet identity if you like – the IP address of our connection. This is linked specifically to our location, and is what is used to track, monitor and filter what we see, and who keeps a record. Obviously it’s not unique to an individual, but it is linked to the person who pays the ISP or cable bill – if you pay the bills then it’s linked to you. Which is why all across the world, people are being incorrectly sued, jailed or monitored because someone else is using their IP address either legitimately or via other means.

Your IP address is your identity online and if you value your privacy it’s essential that you take steps from it being recorded and logged by every site you visit and by which ever intelligence agency wants access to it – that’s most of them. Here’s one way to hide your IP address from all these people.

This can effectively change the way you use the internet. Not only will you stop an entire list of everything you do online being created at your ISP (yes everything!), but you will also be able to bypass the various commercial based filtering that blocks you from accessing sites based on your location. So you can then watch the BBC from outside the UK, Hulu from outside the US and lots of other fun sites that your location might stop you viewing.

Facebook Email – Anyone Else Worried ?

Now I’ve never been a big fan of all the free email accounts like hotmail and gmail, having all your email stored by one single central provider is just to much to trust someone with. But predictions are that these are going to be dwarfed by the new email accounts provided by Facebook. After all they have over 500 million members and so much information on each and every user that it is truly scary. We’ve already heard the stories of thieves and burglars using Facebook updates to pick their victims – what could be easier than selecting a user who is updating their status from a bar in Hawaii.

There are of course some huge benefits of using systems like Facebook to communicate if you ignore the security risks. For one a decent world wide spam filter would make email much easier to use. I don’t know about you but even my most prized accounts are starting to get more and more spam, which also entails tightening up filters – inevitably leading to genuine messages getting lost too. To the extent that email is becoming less of the reliable method of communication it once was, you’re never quite sure if an email has been delivered any more.

But the amount of data about each and everyone of us that Facebook will have is very worrying. The power of those Facebook ads you see on the side of your screen will soon overcome the Google adverts. Imagine advertisers being able to target ads so exactly in the case of peoples location, likes, dislikes, demographics and income levels to name just a few. I imagine if you looked at even all the publicly held data on an avid Facebook user you’d get an extremely accurate picture of that individual. Start cross referencing with all the private data like search phrases, fan pages and browsing history and you’ll know more about an individual than their partners.

I’m not saying that this is the intent of Facebook but the temptation in the face of profit potential will be huge. The threats to the privacy of our data grow by the month it seems, and there is little to stop the threat growing.

Catch the Criminals – Not the Innocent

One of the problems I have with all the monitoring, filtering and surveillance that goes on online it that it rarely works. For a start surveillance, 99.999% of the time all you are doing is monitoring the innocent. Anyone who has anything to hide can easily takes steps to bypass the monitoring. So in the end all the online big brother stuff does is invade our privacy – it rarely picks up anything from the guilty as they cover their tracks.

It’s the same with blocking and filtering access to sites that we decide are no appropriate. You may argue that it’s right to filter websites with dangerous and criminal content – I would argue back it’s also normally just a huge waste of time. Any site that contains for instance illegal pornography can be copied and rehosted on a thousand other sites with ease. They can be encrypted, sent on usb keys or DVDs or hosted on darknet sites. In effect it’s a great big fat waste of time, the URL filtering slows down our surfing and the only thing you achieve is this

A completely false feeling that you’ve dealt with the problem, when of course you haven’t.
You’ve Blocked access to websites to people who weren’t going to use them anyway
Driven the criminals responsible for this further underground.

Let’s get this straight blocking the website of a paedophile ring does little to help the victim, other than pretending they don’t exist. What we need to do is cooperate and catch the criminals involved.

This is a perfect example of what should be happening – http://www.cps.gov.uk/news/press_releases/140_10/
, a racist uploading videos onto Youtube, don’t put resources into monitoring access, or filtering the web site out. Simply catch the people responsible and bring them to justice.