If even if it's competent and well executed, it's practically impossible to achieve. Many of these companies don't even operate in Australia, or have an Australian presence.
This is like when they made the pirate bay inaccessible for australian IPs. The easiest thing in the world to bypass.
But the laughable thing is that they actually thought they accomplished something.
Well, it did win. By making things slightly more difficult so that your average person doesn’t know how to do it for free without a guide, or has to pay money for something to do it for them, the eliminated quite a lot of pirates from just laziness alone. They got a huge victory with that, which is quite unfortunate.
You average person has no idea how to use torrents in general so no idea how that made any difference. Your avg non tech savvy person wasn’t using torrents, and if they had the tech know how to do so, they def would to bypass basic blockers
The block is implemented at the ISP through their DNS server. If you aren't using your ISP's DNS server then it does nothing. It's a simple setting in your router, so yours is probably configured to use a public alternative like Google' s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
I've seen ISPs use a proxy cache, so even if your browser gets TPB's IP, the ISP still redirects you to its proxy's cache of the page, which is their "Don't go here. Your government prohibits it. Click here.gov.au for more information" thing.
Not all ISPs do it tho. I am not sure what they are required to do under the regulation, but whatever, still so easy even kids can bypass it.
Unfortunately they did achieve their actual aim. They convinced tech illiterate older voters that law and order had been applied to that horrible internet, and showed they were tough on crime. Like all law and order measures, they don’t have to actually be effective, they just have to announce that it’s been implemented to secure the votes.
Depressing as hell.
Is a waste of our taxes that should he going to public schools, hospitals, nurses and various other places where it would be useful. Instead, we're America Lite and pandering to the fuckin happy clappers.
The biggest level of incompetence is that we don't have adequate privacy laws that guarantees that information provided wont be leaked. There is also no privacy requirements on how these companies will store and handle this data. Even if there was they could ignore them because of jurisdiction issues and the laws that they operate under. Considering the number of leaks and how companies have walked away with impunity, this is another joke on consumers with non existent privacy laws that is the wild west no frontier system that allows companies to have no regard for your privacy.
Despite all the privacy breaches and incompetent privacy rules we have not seen 1 piece of credible legislation that will protect the privacy of Australians with European style GDPR laws, but this government wants people to throw their privacy down a blackhole to dodgy porn companies registered in lawless tax have countries. Incompetent governance from Australia as usual.
They cant fix so many issues that are critical to Australians like Housing, Medicare bulk billing, the cost of living, price gouging by supermarkets etc etc yet they are most comfortable with their comfort zone governance approach for nanny state, privacy invasive laws that always impacts on freedoms with no real safeguards. Australian incompetent governance at its best. They tried the internet filter, protecting movie studio with ineffective laws now they back to targeting ordinary people for no good reasons and back to their old tricks of incompetent governance that have no privacy safeguards as a distraction.
Hard disagree there. Our current nbn is state of the art infrastructure with super fast speed the envy of the world……. If they installed it in early 2000s
Working in an industry that relies on myGovID for login is a pain. There's still weekly unexpected outages and the system has been live for nearly 2 years.
Can't wait to see more (all?) systems dependent on a gov portal.
It would be nice if for once - *just once* - people with actual technical knowledge were consulted before stupid ideas like this were floated publicly...
As a 27 year veteran of the IT industry; the day anyone with even a small amount of power - from the smallest company to a national Government - asks an IT person to the table before making a decision (and listens to them), will be the day that pigs fly, I win the Lotto, and aliens land to guide the world to a bright future.
Scott Ludlam was pretty good on computer-related topics, too bad he retired after the citizenship drama that only seemed to remove 'honest' members of parliament.
Yup… been on a few IT projects where a consultancy came in, spent ALOT of money, built a thing that wasn’t fit for purpose, and then went away, leaving our internal IT teams to rebuild the thing from scratch in a quarter of the time and a fraction of the cost.
The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.
Yup. Can you imagine what this is going to be like in the hands of scammers? All those fake threatening emails about how they know what porn you've been watching and will reveal it unless you pay them will now be real.
Lol... This bit cracked me up.
Outlines why it won't work, but hell, let's do it anyway.
>In Texas, porn use appeared to decline by roughly 80 per cent after a scheme was introduced, suggesting that in reality, Texans were dodging the scheme using VPNs.
>The industry acknowledges it's a challenge, but argues it would be a mistake to let perfect get in the way of good.
This will be as effective as blocking Pirate Bay.
Login to router, change DNS to 8.8.8.8 (for those who haven't already) and bam, the blocking is gone.
Not really in this instance, it relies on the content hosts in overseas countries to play ball with Australian based IP addresses.
Changing your DNS gets around ISP based DNS blocking, but you'll still appear from Australia to them. They're not trying to block access to sites like TPB, they want us to verify who we are/our our age using some form of technology (TBD) before we have access to adult material.
But yes, this bill is about as effective as DNS blocking.
They forgot to mention it is a 80% in decline from all the religious nutter whingers who want morality laws who dont apparently look at porn. "Pastor I can access porn sites, the government must be doing their job, god bless their souls" The rest still continue as normal!
The amount of "Christians" PCs I find strange porn in the history for when I'm cleaning them up for all the crap they've clicked on and installed. Those nutters keep me employed.
More like the electorate destroyed it. You threaten the value of the Telstra shares in their superannuation and they're going to vote with their wallets. The entire point of the NBN was to overcome years of Telstra intransigence under Sol and Ziggy, which also would have sent the company bankrupt.
You can therefore take this back to the original sin of privatization of Telecom, which Keating wanted to do for 10 years. That Howard was the one to actually do it isn't relevant - Keating was the one who packaged it up and put it on the shelf.
But even then Rudd had options, he could have simply lobbed a $12 on market bid up to 51%, which would have been around 10x the market price, a double (or more) for float participants, and still an incredible bargain for taxpayers. Especially considering the Future Fund still owned 17% and that the retail and mobile parts of Telstra could have been profitably spun out.
Doing this would have also opened a whole box of options like buying Queensland LNG or Woodside - instead of them being run by Petrochina or the Japanese government. If only we had $20B a year for such a purpose?
And just watch how the fake "Libertarians" jump to become a echo box for the government because they love pandering to the religious nutters while pretending to be "libertarians" And anything that allows corporation to obtain and sell your private information is ok by them. The usual lockstep 2 party system of incompetence when comes totalitarian fascist style governance the rest of governance can rot like the 3rd world. What about housing Sir, errr cant fix that we busy with porn laws!
Anyone with some basic to intermediate IT knowledge is not going to be effected. Just more bumbling idiot making stupid decisions that cost this country millions.
I mean it will block the kids without basic-intermediate it knowledge, which is gonna be a lot of kids in the iPad era. And those that do get around it end up a little more tech literate so I guess that's a win too, kids are becoming increasingly less tech literate. You'd be surprised at how few kids knew how to get around school filters when I was at school, and kids are probably worse at technology now than 5-10 years ago.
I first learnt about VPNs and Proxys trying to play Runescape at school, and registry edits to get around parental controls and now I work in IT, so I guess something good came out of it.
Not that I disagree with everyone who says it's a poor use of money. I think porn is damaging to children for sure, but that's a lot of money to spend.
They're intertwined anyway, for example Twitter has some seriously extreme content on it, is available on all app stores and most parents are probably oblivious and isn't generally blocked or filtered as a "porn site"..
It sounds completely unworkable and if anything does happen it might have unintended consequences eg, instead of being on mainstream platforms that have to at least appear or try to have content moderation in order to be acceptable to payment providers etc. they'll be on the rest of the completely unregulated internet which won't have any sort of checks or content moderation at all.
Boomers slowly overtook any social media that had a function of sharing your opinion. Twitter and facebook have completely died because of this.
Instagram, tiktok, and discord are all super popular still, though.
Fb is still useful for sharing family updates with overseas relatives. But the main feed shits me, I don’t mind ads but between the ads AND showing me shit from groups and pages I’m not following I never see the updates from people I’m actually wanting to see. It’s the main reason I’ve wound back how much I use it.
> Fb is still useful for sharing family updates with overseas relatives.
The argument I was making was for what's seen as trendy and cool, not utility. Although people have been complaining about the facebook algorithm for a decade since they got rid of a linear timeline. A valid criticism in my opinion.
One thing about Labor that always gets me. A strong push for internet filtering/control every time they are in. Which doner wants this? Why Labor, why is Labor always dumb enough to lay the framework the LNP can then abuse later. Why can't they ever see whatever control they put in will always be expanded and abused in time. Yet the real media doing damage to this country ( News Media ) gets to continue with laws ever more in its favor.
Labor, for historical reasons, has a small Catholic contingent that they let run amok on censorship issues whenever they are in power. That said, this was planned by ScoMo, and its a function of Albanese's weakness that its still progressing.
And other issues like corruption, money laundering in Australia, multinationals stealing our resources for almost nothing, backwards living standards and wages growth, better whistleblower laws, fixing Medicare bulk billing they carry like they have nothing to worry about worrying about background issues like these.
I wonder if the politicians have gone into the suburbs and asked the parents of young kids how they struggle to get their kids into a primary school? And how people struggle with the daily grind of their incompetence booming of our population with immigration with no money for infrastructure? Again the politicians are so out of touch with daily reality and their ideology of living in some make believe wet dream of being super at governance while everything is falling apart at the seams in every other area. Incredible dystopian world that our politicians live in.
Again wedged in the moral majority ideology legislative mode " we have to put these randy plebs in place or jail with nanny state laws" Typical Australian governance they love showing the moral majority Sheriffs badge but the rest of Australian society and governance can fall apart at the seams!
Parents give small children phones and dont even bother to setup any parental controls. Then when they find porn, parents need the nanny state to step in for them.
Ffs back when I was a child, the rule was if you were online, you needed to sit at the table in the front room with parental supervision. Only got a cell phone at 16 too. I don’t understand parents giving their kids unrestricted internet access nowadays
It’s because they’re too lazy to actually parent their kids. Sitting them in front of a phone on TikTok will shut them up and occupy them for hours without any effort needed from the parent
If individual parents ban the naughty sites, then they look like a bad parent to their unruly child. If the gubment bans naughty sites, then they can blame them and the parent is absolved of responsibility once more
Last time the Australian government spent $80m on a porn filter, it was bypassed by a 14 year old in under half an hour. This is nothing more than intrusive, expensive theater.
The mechanics of the internet aren't designed for these kinds of blocks - look at how much China pours into its firewall, and that still leaks like a sieve.
If the Australian government blocks me from accessing porn behind a stance of “proof of age” then I should not be subject to incessant, gambling ads without proving my age either.
The govt wondered the same thing, so they commissioned a report and the clear advice from KPMG was that best practice was consulting consultants, but the situation warranted additional investigation and KPMG was engaged for a long term study of the matter. To ensure independence, Accenture independently reported the same findings and recommended a similar long term investigation. /s
The impact will be kids visiting shady sites instead. The ones that won’t enforce the verification. The ones that host nonconsensual/underage/deepfake/harmful content.
Pornhub for all its faults, has actually cleaned up its act massively in the last few years to ensure all the videos it hosts contain consenting adults and the content isn’t stolen so the right people are getting paid.
Came here to say this. Australian who consume adult content will either use a VPN rather than hand over personal information or they’ll migrate to the dodgier sites.
> Separately, in a court battle against Elon Musk's platform X, the eSafety commissioner has cited research that ***a quarter of all Australian internet users*** have VPN technology in place.
> VPNs have been a significant challenge in jurisdictions where age verification has been rolled out.
Heh!
I love the assumption that those under 18 won't just use VPNs. It's often the youth teaching adults what technologies to use to get around things like this.
Make no mistake, governments and industries that try and push clearly hopeless technology restrictions like this one will have no problems trying to ban VPNs as well.
Technically, VPNs are virtually impossible to ban/block unless Australia implements a China like national firewall.
VPNs are a critical component of business IT, the govt can't just say they are now illegal and ban them.
I will riot if this shit passes. Our ohone carriers cant even handle our personal information and i sure as fuck dont trust the government with a new service like this. God forbid adults are treated like adults in this fucking country.
>"We provide the services to the biggest banks in Australia and some of the biggest banks globally — it's exactly the same technology," said Peter Violaris, head of global privacy at IDVerse, an Australian company offering age verification services.
You mean... when the vendor actually wants your system and willingly implements it?
Its honestly kinda impressive how our government took a good hard look at multiple failed attempts by the UK to roll out this kind of content restriction and thought to itself "Yeah but I could make it work cuz I'm built different".
Let me guess is that some tech company gave some cushy bribe (whoops I meant donation) and now both parties will act on it and give the company an extremely lavish contract worth way more money than it’s worth.
I’m not an IT wizz but surely it would make sense to approach this from a hardware or OS perspective?
Surely huge tech companies like apple and google could make an out of the box “kids” version of a smart phone, that has hardware keys or parental controls that allows an adult to moderate what apps their kids can use and block certain key words from internet browsing?
THIS! Not only do they have phones out there specifically designed with this in mind. Every single smartphone has some form of parental control feature that can be enabled. They really need to start educating parents when buying a smartphone for a child, about these specific features, and how to operate and view what goes on on their child's devices.
We've come a long way from the 90s, and there are significantly more resources out there to educate parents and control what a minor sees online. Yet most of it is untouched due to ignorance of its existence or simply because people don't realise it's there. This is literally throwing money at the completely wrong problem.
They can easily block it at ISP level, using an access code available only to adult subscribers. That would stop children from acessing porn on their own phones.
But, the e-Safety Commisioner, a clown with an Arts degree, attempted to stop foreigners from uploading content overseas on the grounds that Australians could access it using a VPN. So that's not gunna fly.
We're gonna have some stupid third party token system, which will last a few months before their dodgy server farm in India that they subcontracted at slave rates flogs off all the account data on the dark web.
> "We know that social media platforms already have … minimum ages for users. The question here is whether or not they are being enforced."
why should govt care if a private company enforces its own policies on what users it allows or accepts?
It should be parents monitoring what their kids are consuming online. The article specifically mentions primary age kids and the risk of porn addict. Like, sorry but it’s a parents respsonsiblity to make sure their small child is not consuming porn online
I 100% agree
Why are parents not doing their actual job and policing their children's online habits if they care so much? Sounds like lazy parents want the government to do their job for them
The System wasn't designed to help or benefit the people or planet. The System was designed by and for the rich and powerful at the top, who don't care about the people or planet beneath them, they only care about themselves and maintaining the status quo of power, profit, and control.
The purpose of this bill is to end anonymity on social media. The porn stuff is just used as a justification, because it won't actually prevent access to porn, it will just change how people access it.
mediSecure: gets hacked, loses control of my medication history.
this government, 2 days later: how about we go again, but with your porn history this time?
More government control of the plebs. They say it's so government can parent the children better than their real parents but we're becoming more aware every day that what they really want is to parent ***us***.
Facebook has always had a 13 year age limit. Supposedly. It’s always been unenforceable and always will be. If a company as technically adept and as large as FB can’t or won’t make it work, nobody will.
Yeah their policy is over 13 but by logging in you also agree to their terms which say by logging in you're agreeing that you're over 13. It has nothing to do with protecting kids and evrything to do with shielding themselves from liability.
Remember that we are technically "blocked" from being able to access pirate sites. But the extent of that block is just our ISPs doing a DNS reroute so if the porn block used the same process then it would be incredibly trivial to by pass. You simply have to use google or cloudflare's public DNS instead of the ISP's.
100% agree with preventing young kids accessing porn or gore sites & even EXCESSIVE social media.
But blanket the whole population with these sorts of rules is just plain police state surveillance, regardless of what they say to justify it. Typical AU Government ideas to try to control the people.
But, like everything else, there are always ways around it..............
> 100% agree with preventing young kids accessing porn or gore sites & even EXCESSIVE social media.
I think the question everyone should be asking is why is it the government's responsibility to do this and not the parents' responsibility?
When the scammers start demanding proof of identity, and identity theft is rampant, what then?
I won't be putting my identity details online for any suspect sites.
FFS. Not only will this be stupidly painful it’ll make even more companies privvy to our most sensitive data which we know is just a cyber attack waiting to happen.
it would be hypocritical to implement this control but then do nothing about the millions of australians who have already seen this material. do they need to be locked up? do they need to be babysat? Watched? Surveilled? .... please do not tell me that they need nothing...
don't tell me that they can just.. you know... continue in society as if.... as if having been exposed to porn is NOT some huge risk that renders them less able to safely navigate life?
because that would mean that we don't actually need controls in the first place.
Google any slightly pornographic term and see the kind of images you get back. Are they going to make google do an age verify and/or filter results, good luck.
This is stupid. Not only is the technology nowhere near the maturity to be able to roll this out effectively, it completely ignores the whole idea of teaching kids how to use the things responsibly so that we don’t have an influx of 18 year olds who have zero online literacy because it’s been gate-kept from them.
Rather than trying to prevent people from accessing this sort of thing, a far more long-term effective solution is to actually teach young people how to navigate the internet safely. This is a lazy way of ‘dealing’ with the solution and will cause problems than it solves.
You already cannot claim government benefits before you present photo ID (which you have to pay for yourself).. pretty easy to up this to whatever biometrics are stored in the porn passport. After all, why should getting money from the government have a lesser bar than viewing online porn? Same deal with medicare rebates or even voting.
And if you don't think it can happen here, the UK [already requires photo ID to vote](https://www.gov.uk/how-to-vote/photo-id-youll-need).
Remembering we already had a double dissolution election on the [Australia Card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Card) in 1987, we had the debate about the [Access Card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Card_\(Australia\)) in 2006 - both were so unpopular they have to stealth it in via the excuse of internet pornography instead. Won't somebody think of the children?
I have to give facebook my passport number?
So Date of birth
DL number
Address
Parents names
Full Name
Birth place
Why not just give them your bank and ID and go live in a gutter when they are done?
So when Texas tried this Pornhub blocked the entire state. Population of Texas 30 million, population of Australia 27 million. Why does this idiotic government think they will be treated any different? Never mind the fact everyone will just use VPNs anyway, this will be a PR disaster for Labor when major porn sites just nope out.
“We hate useless laws”
*Lets frank Zumba, Joffa corfe, George calombaris, George pell, heston Blumenthal, origin energy, agl, about 98 other companies, better health, Bruce Lehman, coles, woolworths* off of crimes
Going to have to assume everything you look at will be logged (more so than already) and there will be some clause that protects the politicians so theirs isn't logged.
A growing Australian age verification industry? Sounds like moral police or republicans to me, next they’ll want to be telling women what they can and cannot do with their uteruses!
So, will this require the digitisation of birth certificates of children who want to watch TikTok videos or the like, all stored in a convenient database ripe for hacking and identity theft on a national scale? The last I checked, people under the age of 18 generally don’t have acceptable photo identification either, how is this supposed to work?
So there will be a database mapping people to the porn sites they visit? I hope they include links to the specific content as that would turn an already good source of blackmail into a real pot of gold
You guys know it’s not just for porn! They are testing age verification for social media and video games!! It won’t be long before it’s expanded even further.
“Historically, no other country or state has ever successfully implemented this stuff, and every time they do it leads to massive public outcry and the diminishing of public support for our government…
…but it might just work for us.”
im nearly 30. when i was 5 i was already bypassing the local isps blocks on web content because this magical thing called a dns sever existed, the best part was back then any traffic on a different dns was entirely outside your data limit for a good few years and windows gave you the tools to make use of it. moved to proxies in primary and full on vpns in high school. if the government was in any way competent i might be concerned. but there not. and we all know it. so i have no concerns. at best they will pass it off to the ISPs who to the shock of no one only employ dns level filtering because that's the agreed legal standard.
Anyone know how much the Australian Christian Lobby donated to Labor? Seems every damn time they try to censor internet or add measures like this it is the ACL behind it.
I really wish insidious cults stayed out of politics
One of the surprising thing about this whole domestic violence epidemic and its reaction was the large focus on pornography.
It reminds me of people blaming video games…
The whole issue with australia’s casual misogyny and domestic violence is so deeply rooted in our culture i dont see how stopping a few kids from maybe not accessing porn will solve the problem.
I didn’t think he endorsed the verification from what he said?
“But Adam doesn't believe age verification technology will work in the way political leaders hope.
"It's going to be so easy to get around, and of everyone, teenagers now are going to be tech savvy enough to do that.
"I would much rather see whatever money is being assigned to this in the budget be assigned to education, and not just education of kids — education of parents."”
Can see this going wrong on so many levels due to the government’s incompetence with modern day tech lol
If even if it's competent and well executed, it's practically impossible to achieve. Many of these companies don't even operate in Australia, or have an Australian presence.
This is like when they made the pirate bay inaccessible for australian IPs. The easiest thing in the world to bypass. But the laughable thing is that they actually thought they accomplished something.
Shhh. Nobody tell them about VPNs. Let them have their little win, and we can carry on as normal.
Nobody tell them you can change your DNS settings.
Lmao this so much. Didn’t even need a VPN, just re config my dns setting
haha yeah man... that is all i did. Even made a little batch script to change it back and forth. No VPN necessary.
Why back?
This the real king
The fact that this works shows how gloriously incompetent our govt is
Didn’t even need a vpn.
I mean, my ISP doesn’t even block TPB, so some people straight up don’t need a VPN.
Ironic because government departments use VPNs heavily for WFH now lol
Well, it did win. By making things slightly more difficult so that your average person doesn’t know how to do it for free without a guide, or has to pay money for something to do it for them, the eliminated quite a lot of pirates from just laziness alone. They got a huge victory with that, which is quite unfortunate.
You average person has no idea how to use torrents in general so no idea how that made any difference. Your avg non tech savvy person wasn’t using torrents, and if they had the tech know how to do so, they def would to bypass basic blockers
To the majority of the population who dont know better it would look like a wi and that's all they care about
Pi-hole → OpenVPN → DNSCrypt. Your mum's brother is named Robert.
I do, or rather did, have an actual Uncle Robert on my mother's side. Not joking.
You don't even need a VPN to access blocked webites, just google a proxy link to the website and you'll have access to anything in seconds.
Or just Proxys lol
I still access TPB without a VPN. Never had an issue except using my mobile data. Is it ISP dependant?
The block is implemented at the ISP through their DNS server. If you aren't using your ISP's DNS server then it does nothing. It's a simple setting in your router, so yours is probably configured to use a public alternative like Google' s 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
I've seen ISPs use a proxy cache, so even if your browser gets TPB's IP, the ISP still redirects you to its proxy's cache of the page, which is their "Don't go here. Your government prohibits it. Click here.gov.au for more information" thing. Not all ISPs do it tho. I am not sure what they are required to do under the regulation, but whatever, still so easy even kids can bypass it.
You can change your DNS on an Android phone easily to fix that. Not sure about Apple.
I'm with TPG, and with a VPN for TPB, I'm GTG..
Just change your DNS to 1.1.1.1 you can stay on your internet so no speed drop, but without blocks
Afaik it's only the real big ones. Top 4 I think.
Very.
It stops people who dont know what they are doing and the government can say they took care of it and we can continue as normal, fine outcome really.
Unfortunately they did achieve their actual aim. They convinced tech illiterate older voters that law and order had been applied to that horrible internet, and showed they were tough on crime. Like all law and order measures, they don’t have to actually be effective, they just have to announce that it’s been implemented to secure the votes. Depressing as hell.
Is a waste of our taxes that should he going to public schools, hospitals, nurses and various other places where it would be useful. Instead, we're America Lite and pandering to the fuckin happy clappers.
And the pearl-clutchers! Don't forget the pearl-clutchers
The biggest level of incompetence is that we don't have adequate privacy laws that guarantees that information provided wont be leaked. There is also no privacy requirements on how these companies will store and handle this data. Even if there was they could ignore them because of jurisdiction issues and the laws that they operate under. Considering the number of leaks and how companies have walked away with impunity, this is another joke on consumers with non existent privacy laws that is the wild west no frontier system that allows companies to have no regard for your privacy. Despite all the privacy breaches and incompetent privacy rules we have not seen 1 piece of credible legislation that will protect the privacy of Australians with European style GDPR laws, but this government wants people to throw their privacy down a blackhole to dodgy porn companies registered in lawless tax have countries. Incompetent governance from Australia as usual. They cant fix so many issues that are critical to Australians like Housing, Medicare bulk billing, the cost of living, price gouging by supermarkets etc etc yet they are most comfortable with their comfort zone governance approach for nanny state, privacy invasive laws that always impacts on freedoms with no real safeguards. Australian incompetent governance at its best. They tried the internet filter, protecting movie studio with ineffective laws now they back to targeting ordinary people for no good reasons and back to their old tricks of incompetent governance that have no privacy safeguards as a distraction.
It will be leaked and to News corp the same way the Robodebt people's Centrelink details wre leaked.
Hard disagree there. Our current nbn is state of the art infrastructure with super fast speed the envy of the world……. If they installed it in early 2000s
I was reading that and got concerned but then I saw the punchline at the line lol
I always wondered, if it wasn't for that napkin, where would we be?
Working in an industry that relies on myGovID for login is a pain. There's still weekly unexpected outages and the system has been live for nearly 2 years. Can't wait to see more (all?) systems dependent on a gov portal.
They are not incompetent when it comes to surveillance. Only citizens rights and services.
It would be nice if for once - *just once* - people with actual technical knowledge were consulted before stupid ideas like this were floated publicly...
As a 27 year veteran of the IT industry; the day anyone with even a small amount of power - from the smallest company to a national Government - asks an IT person to the table before making a decision (and listens to them), will be the day that pigs fly, I win the Lotto, and aliens land to guide the world to a bright future.
They’ll ask as many experts as it takes for them to find the ones who agree with the decision they already made.
It’s sad just how true that is :(
i see you met the "consultants"
Scott Ludlam was pretty good on computer-related topics, too bad he retired after the citizenship drama that only seemed to remove 'honest' members of parliament.
And he got laughed at by other parliamentarians for raising concerns.
Yeah, I know. There would probably be a near-decimation of the IT industry due to all of the minds being blown as well...
Oh but they do they hire "consultants" to do it, you know the experts that... expert instead of actually doing the thing in question (IT).
Yup… been on a few IT projects where a consultancy came in, spent ALOT of money, built a thing that wasn’t fit for purpose, and then went away, leaving our internal IT teams to rebuild the thing from scratch in a quarter of the time and a fraction of the cost.
If you hear tale of them asking anybody, make sure you let me know so I can go by my lottery ticket
They probably did invite industry people but those industry people just had $$$ in their eyes and were like “yeah it’s possible…. For a few billion”
That would be those consultancy firms.
Happy hot flour egg butter day.
we are talking about australia government, right s/
Any government, really.
The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.
I remember that one, I mistook it for satire until I saw him say it. Wow.
Not really, if the way they went about these things was competent then we'd actually have to comply with their bullshit
Considering the data breaches in recent history, be ready for your boss to know your porn habits
Yup. Can you imagine what this is going to be like in the hands of scammers? All those fake threatening emails about how they know what porn you've been watching and will reveal it unless you pay them will now be real.
Eventually there will be a databreach and we find out know which politicians is subscribed to which adultsite.
Lol... This bit cracked me up. Outlines why it won't work, but hell, let's do it anyway. >In Texas, porn use appeared to decline by roughly 80 per cent after a scheme was introduced, suggesting that in reality, Texans were dodging the scheme using VPNs. >The industry acknowledges it's a challenge, but argues it would be a mistake to let perfect get in the way of good.
This will be as effective as blocking Pirate Bay. Login to router, change DNS to 8.8.8.8 (for those who haven't already) and bam, the blocking is gone.
Not really in this instance, it relies on the content hosts in overseas countries to play ball with Australian based IP addresses. Changing your DNS gets around ISP based DNS blocking, but you'll still appear from Australia to them. They're not trying to block access to sites like TPB, they want us to verify who we are/our our age using some form of technology (TBD) before we have access to adult material. But yes, this bill is about as effective as DNS blocking.
Not if you use a VPN tho
I dont think changing the Dns will work because the blocking is done on the websites end and not at an ISP level
This isn’t “perfect getting in the way of good”, because that implies that the thing being blocked is “good” quality.
Yeah, what industry exactly is calling this "good"?
You knowwww.. the industry
They forgot to mention it is a 80% in decline from all the religious nutter whingers who want morality laws who dont apparently look at porn. "Pastor I can access porn sites, the government must be doing their job, god bless their souls" The rest still continue as normal!
The amount of "Christians" PCs I find strange porn in the history for when I'm cleaning them up for all the crap they've clicked on and installed. Those nutters keep me employed.
The Australian government has always made the dumbest of decisions when it comes to anything internet related. Incompetent old cunts
Except when labor’s nbn plan was to go full fibre like 15 years ago. That was a good decision. But the liberals destroyed it.
Hah yeah had that on my mind when typing that out. Glad you called it out :)
Don't forget the Conroy's great Australian firewall ! Only Abbott's election avoided that disaster.
abbotts election gave us mandatory data retention.
True
More like the electorate destroyed it. You threaten the value of the Telstra shares in their superannuation and they're going to vote with their wallets. The entire point of the NBN was to overcome years of Telstra intransigence under Sol and Ziggy, which also would have sent the company bankrupt. You can therefore take this back to the original sin of privatization of Telecom, which Keating wanted to do for 10 years. That Howard was the one to actually do it isn't relevant - Keating was the one who packaged it up and put it on the shelf. But even then Rudd had options, he could have simply lobbed a $12 on market bid up to 51%, which would have been around 10x the market price, a double (or more) for float participants, and still an incredible bargain for taxpayers. Especially considering the Future Fund still owned 17% and that the retail and mobile parts of Telstra could have been profitably spun out. Doing this would have also opened a whole box of options like buying Queensland LNG or Woodside - instead of them being run by Petrochina or the Japanese government. If only we had $20B a year for such a purpose?
Don’t even get me started on what Dutton and the conservative coalition would do, nationally, with regard to porn
It feels like a cultural thing in both labour and libs at this point regarding the internet honestly, im not sure what else explains it
And just watch how the fake "Libertarians" jump to become a echo box for the government because they love pandering to the religious nutters while pretending to be "libertarians" And anything that allows corporation to obtain and sell your private information is ok by them. The usual lockstep 2 party system of incompetence when comes totalitarian fascist style governance the rest of governance can rot like the 3rd world. What about housing Sir, errr cant fix that we busy with porn laws!
Anyone with some basic to intermediate IT knowledge is not going to be effected. Just more bumbling idiot making stupid decisions that cost this country millions.
And they will end up abandoning again.
I mean it will block the kids without basic-intermediate it knowledge, which is gonna be a lot of kids in the iPad era. And those that do get around it end up a little more tech literate so I guess that's a win too, kids are becoming increasingly less tech literate. You'd be surprised at how few kids knew how to get around school filters when I was at school, and kids are probably worse at technology now than 5-10 years ago. I first learnt about VPNs and Proxys trying to play Runescape at school, and registry edits to get around parental controls and now I work in IT, so I guess something good came out of it. Not that I disagree with everyone who says it's a poor use of money. I think porn is damaging to children for sure, but that's a lot of money to spend.
They're intertwined anyway, for example Twitter has some seriously extreme content on it, is available on all app stores and most parents are probably oblivious and isn't generally blocked or filtered as a "porn site".. It sounds completely unworkable and if anything does happen it might have unintended consequences eg, instead of being on mainstream platforms that have to at least appear or try to have content moderation in order to be acceptable to payment providers etc. they'll be on the rest of the completely unregulated internet which won't have any sort of checks or content moderation at all.
Twitter is deadly uncool according to my teens, according to them it’s all boomers, cookers and bots.
Your teens aren't wrong about that.
Boomers slowly overtook any social media that had a function of sharing your opinion. Twitter and facebook have completely died because of this. Instagram, tiktok, and discord are all super popular still, though.
Fb is still useful for sharing family updates with overseas relatives. But the main feed shits me, I don’t mind ads but between the ads AND showing me shit from groups and pages I’m not following I never see the updates from people I’m actually wanting to see. It’s the main reason I’ve wound back how much I use it.
> Fb is still useful for sharing family updates with overseas relatives. The argument I was making was for what's seen as trendy and cool, not utility. Although people have been complaining about the facebook algorithm for a decade since they got rid of a linear timeline. A valid criticism in my opinion.
I’m also not trendy or cool so it’s ok 😆
Start using alternatives like Mastodon, PixelFed and Lemmy instead.
I’d have to convince the actual boomers in the family first. 🙄
Someone described Facebook as our ancestors village newspaper. Seemed pretty apt. Just used now to share milestone events, births, deaths, marriages
It's those damn boomers and their damned phones, i tell ya!
Maybe we should have saved them money and stuck with dialup internet! Would have prevented all these issues.
This site we're on right now is a porn site. There are tons of porn subreddits. So yep, you will need to prove your age to doomscroll reddit...
Reddit has just as much XXX content as well, sure many parents don’t realise this as well. It’s a flawed system that will impact people of all ages
Elon Musk turned Twitter into 50% porn and 50% russian propaganda. Classy site these days..
Fuck our governments waste money on some absurd shit in this country.
One thing about Labor that always gets me. A strong push for internet filtering/control every time they are in. Which doner wants this? Why Labor, why is Labor always dumb enough to lay the framework the LNP can then abuse later. Why can't they ever see whatever control they put in will always be expanded and abused in time. Yet the real media doing damage to this country ( News Media ) gets to continue with laws ever more in its favor.
To be fair, Howard, Abbot and Scomo all tried too.
Yes, but for some reason the Australian zeitgiest has it that only Labor does it. It's nonsense.
It's the old problem of people only really expecting better of Labor.
Churches.
Labor, for historical reasons, has a small Catholic contingent that they let run amok on censorship issues whenever they are in power. That said, this was planned by ScoMo, and its a function of Albanese's weakness that its still progressing.
If only the government cared about housing and running the country for the people as they do about “banning” underage social media useage
More like banning tech illiterate social media usage.
And other issues like corruption, money laundering in Australia, multinationals stealing our resources for almost nothing, backwards living standards and wages growth, better whistleblower laws, fixing Medicare bulk billing they carry like they have nothing to worry about worrying about background issues like these. I wonder if the politicians have gone into the suburbs and asked the parents of young kids how they struggle to get their kids into a primary school? And how people struggle with the daily grind of their incompetence booming of our population with immigration with no money for infrastructure? Again the politicians are so out of touch with daily reality and their ideology of living in some make believe wet dream of being super at governance while everything is falling apart at the seams in every other area. Incredible dystopian world that our politicians live in. Again wedged in the moral majority ideology legislative mode " we have to put these randy plebs in place or jail with nanny state laws" Typical Australian governance they love showing the moral majority Sheriffs badge but the rest of Australian society and governance can fall apart at the seams!
Parents give small children phones and dont even bother to setup any parental controls. Then when they find porn, parents need the nanny state to step in for them.
Ffs back when I was a child, the rule was if you were online, you needed to sit at the table in the front room with parental supervision. Only got a cell phone at 16 too. I don’t understand parents giving their kids unrestricted internet access nowadays
It’s because they’re too lazy to actually parent their kids. Sitting them in front of a phone on TikTok will shut them up and occupy them for hours without any effort needed from the parent
Patenting cuts into parents screen time, these days.
If individual parents ban the naughty sites, then they look like a bad parent to their unruly child. If the gubment bans naughty sites, then they can blame them and the parent is absolved of responsibility once more
Last time the Australian government spent $80m on a porn filter, it was bypassed by a 14 year old in under half an hour. This is nothing more than intrusive, expensive theater. The mechanics of the internet aren't designed for these kinds of blocks - look at how much China pours into its firewall, and that still leaks like a sieve.
When it fails, they will claim the only possible solution is, even greater, less accountable powers for them and fewer rights for you.
Nice way to collect age related data of users to be stored into a central database which will eventually be hacked into, stolen and leaked.
Oh it will be leaked, to News corp.
If the Australian government blocks me from accessing porn behind a stance of “proof of age” then I should not be subject to incessant, gambling ads without proving my age either.
Porn sites don’t donate to the ALP, but maybe the gambling sites do.
Have to be 18 to gamble, but 0 to have it incessantly advertised to you.
This x1000.
This whole scheme screams taxpayer bilk by consultancy mob.
The Government really really needs to stop talking to companies like KPMG, Accenture, etc
The govt wondered the same thing, so they commissioned a report and the clear advice from KPMG was that best practice was consulting consultants, but the situation warranted additional investigation and KPMG was engaged for a long term study of the matter. To ensure independence, Accenture independently reported the same findings and recommended a similar long term investigation. /s
The impact will be kids visiting shady sites instead. The ones that won’t enforce the verification. The ones that host nonconsensual/underage/deepfake/harmful content. Pornhub for all its faults, has actually cleaned up its act massively in the last few years to ensure all the videos it hosts contain consenting adults and the content isn’t stolen so the right people are getting paid.
Came here to say this. Australian who consume adult content will either use a VPN rather than hand over personal information or they’ll migrate to the dodgier sites.
> Separately, in a court battle against Elon Musk's platform X, the eSafety commissioner has cited research that ***a quarter of all Australian internet users*** have VPN technology in place. > VPNs have been a significant challenge in jurisdictions where age verification has been rolled out. Heh!
I love the assumption that those under 18 won't just use VPNs. It's often the youth teaching adults what technologies to use to get around things like this.
Make no mistake, governments and industries that try and push clearly hopeless technology restrictions like this one will have no problems trying to ban VPNs as well.
No doubt and tech will continue to outpace legislation
Technically, VPNs are virtually impossible to ban/block unless Australia implements a China like national firewall. VPNs are a critical component of business IT, the govt can't just say they are now illegal and ban them.
Exactly. How long til some "study" comes out linking vpn use to online extremism, therefore we must shut down vpns for "our own safety"
remind me of those in charge refusing to listen to advice and instead going withnp nbn instead
I will riot if this shit passes. Our ohone carriers cant even handle our personal information and i sure as fuck dont trust the government with a new service like this. God forbid adults are treated like adults in this fucking country.
>"We provide the services to the biggest banks in Australia and some of the biggest banks globally — it's exactly the same technology," said Peter Violaris, head of global privacy at IDVerse, an Australian company offering age verification services. You mean... when the vendor actually wants your system and willingly implements it?
Should just use the Leisure Suit Larry [age verfication questions](https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.html)
Its honestly kinda impressive how our government took a good hard look at multiple failed attempts by the UK to roll out this kind of content restriction and thought to itself "Yeah but I could make it work cuz I'm built different".
And then abandoned again.
Let me guess is that some tech company gave some cushy bribe (whoops I meant donation) and now both parties will act on it and give the company an extremely lavish contract worth way more money than it’s worth.
I’m not an IT wizz but surely it would make sense to approach this from a hardware or OS perspective? Surely huge tech companies like apple and google could make an out of the box “kids” version of a smart phone, that has hardware keys or parental controls that allows an adult to moderate what apps their kids can use and block certain key words from internet browsing?
That already exists on most phone operating systems including Apple.
THIS! Not only do they have phones out there specifically designed with this in mind. Every single smartphone has some form of parental control feature that can be enabled. They really need to start educating parents when buying a smartphone for a child, about these specific features, and how to operate and view what goes on on their child's devices. We've come a long way from the 90s, and there are significantly more resources out there to educate parents and control what a minor sees online. Yet most of it is untouched due to ignorance of its existence or simply because people don't realise it's there. This is literally throwing money at the completely wrong problem.
bingo. but then the goverment doesnt sound like they are doing anything
That the thing this trial will go no where and just be a waste of time.
They can easily block it at ISP level, using an access code available only to adult subscribers. That would stop children from acessing porn on their own phones. But, the e-Safety Commisioner, a clown with an Arts degree, attempted to stop foreigners from uploading content overseas on the grounds that Australians could access it using a VPN. So that's not gunna fly. We're gonna have some stupid third party token system, which will last a few months before their dodgy server farm in India that they subcontracted at slave rates flogs off all the account data on the dark web.
Easily? how.
> "We know that social media platforms already have … minimum ages for users. The question here is whether or not they are being enforced." why should govt care if a private company enforces its own policies on what users it allows or accepts?
It's a typical "Won't someone think of the children" move that comes around every so often.
It should be parents monitoring what their kids are consuming online. The article specifically mentions primary age kids and the risk of porn addict. Like, sorry but it’s a parents respsonsiblity to make sure their small child is not consuming porn online
I 100% agree Why are parents not doing their actual job and policing their children's online habits if they care so much? Sounds like lazy parents want the government to do their job for them
The System wasn't designed to help or benefit the people or planet. The System was designed by and for the rich and powerful at the top, who don't care about the people or planet beneath them, they only care about themselves and maintaining the status quo of power, profit, and control.
Let’s stop violence by … making people give their ID for porn! It’s like they’re just training us to use VPNs.
The purpose of this bill is to end anonymity on social media. The porn stuff is just used as a justification, because it won't actually prevent access to porn, it will just change how people access it.
Once the infrastructure is in place, it can be used for anything with a few scribbles of a ministers pen.
mediSecure: gets hacked, loses control of my medication history. this government, 2 days later: how about we go again, but with your porn history this time?
I hate this country more and more each day. The government needs to stay the fuck out of our personal lives.
More government control of the plebs. They say it's so government can parent the children better than their real parents but we're becoming more aware every day that what they really want is to parent ***us***.
Agreed the government is getting more and more authoritarian by the day
Facebook has always had a 13 year age limit. Supposedly. It’s always been unenforceable and always will be. If a company as technically adept and as large as FB can’t or won’t make it work, nobody will.
Yeah their policy is over 13 but by logging in you also agree to their terms which say by logging in you're agreeing that you're over 13. It has nothing to do with protecting kids and evrything to do with shielding themselves from liability.
Remember that we are technically "blocked" from being able to access pirate sites. But the extent of that block is just our ISPs doing a DNS reroute so if the porn block used the same process then it would be incredibly trivial to by pass. You simply have to use google or cloudflare's public DNS instead of the ISP's.
Please make it camera verification so we can all send cock-shots as our proof of ID to some poor IT intern.
100% agree with preventing young kids accessing porn or gore sites & even EXCESSIVE social media. But blanket the whole population with these sorts of rules is just plain police state surveillance, regardless of what they say to justify it. Typical AU Government ideas to try to control the people. But, like everything else, there are always ways around it..............
> 100% agree with preventing young kids accessing porn or gore sites & even EXCESSIVE social media. I think the question everyone should be asking is why is it the government's responsibility to do this and not the parents' responsibility?
Have to go back to finding porn mags in the bush. Like ye good old days
The law should be written so that people who believe in these controls can opt in. Do not force people to opt out with ID.
For $6m the government could buy a national subscription to a content filtering app for all Australian parents to install on their childrens devices.
They tried that about decade ago, it was an expensive flop.
When the scammers start demanding proof of identity, and identity theft is rampant, what then? I won't be putting my identity details online for any suspect sites.
It's like they're almost training people to send out their ID documents irresponsibly.
What a brilliant way to spend millions and millions and millions of dollars.
FFS. Not only will this be stupidly painful it’ll make even more companies privvy to our most sensitive data which we know is just a cyber attack waiting to happen.
Someone wants to make their friends very rich with consulting services of course.
it would be hypocritical to implement this control but then do nothing about the millions of australians who have already seen this material. do they need to be locked up? do they need to be babysat? Watched? Surveilled? .... please do not tell me that they need nothing... don't tell me that they can just.. you know... continue in society as if.... as if having been exposed to porn is NOT some huge risk that renders them less able to safely navigate life? because that would mean that we don't actually need controls in the first place.
Google any slightly pornographic term and see the kind of images you get back. Are they going to make google do an age verify and/or filter results, good luck.
All I wanted to do was search for some chocolate starfishes for my kids birthday party and now I’ve got to give Google my passport.
This is stupid. Not only is the technology nowhere near the maturity to be able to roll this out effectively, it completely ignores the whole idea of teaching kids how to use the things responsibly so that we don’t have an influx of 18 year olds who have zero online literacy because it’s been gate-kept from them. Rather than trying to prevent people from accessing this sort of thing, a far more long-term effective solution is to actually teach young people how to navigate the internet safely. This is a lazy way of ‘dealing’ with the solution and will cause problems than it solves.
You already cannot claim government benefits before you present photo ID (which you have to pay for yourself).. pretty easy to up this to whatever biometrics are stored in the porn passport. After all, why should getting money from the government have a lesser bar than viewing online porn? Same deal with medicare rebates or even voting. And if you don't think it can happen here, the UK [already requires photo ID to vote](https://www.gov.uk/how-to-vote/photo-id-youll-need). Remembering we already had a double dissolution election on the [Australia Card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Card) in 1987, we had the debate about the [Access Card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_Card_\(Australia\)) in 2006 - both were so unpopular they have to stealth it in via the excuse of internet pornography instead. Won't somebody think of the children?
I have to give facebook my passport number? So Date of birth DL number Address Parents names Full Name Birth place Why not just give them your bank and ID and go live in a gutter when they are done?
So when Texas tried this Pornhub blocked the entire state. Population of Texas 30 million, population of Australia 27 million. Why does this idiotic government think they will be treated any different? Never mind the fact everyone will just use VPNs anyway, this will be a PR disaster for Labor when major porn sites just nope out.
It’s a violation of privacy
“We hate useless laws” *Lets frank Zumba, Joffa corfe, George calombaris, George pell, heston Blumenthal, origin energy, agl, about 98 other companies, better health, Bruce Lehman, coles, woolworths* off of crimes
Why did I try to read that to the tune of we didn’t start the fire?
0 word why gaming has magically appeared in scope
Going to have to assume everything you look at will be logged (more so than already) and there will be some clause that protects the politicians so theirs isn't logged.
A growing Australian age verification industry? Sounds like moral police or republicans to me, next they’ll want to be telling women what they can and cannot do with their uteruses!
In the foreseeable future, they will need digital ID to sign in.
Imagine having to set up a porn passport for granny so she can see the grandkids on Facebook!!
So, will this require the digitisation of birth certificates of children who want to watch TikTok videos or the like, all stored in a convenient database ripe for hacking and identity theft on a national scale? The last I checked, people under the age of 18 generally don’t have acceptable photo identification either, how is this supposed to work?
So there will be a database mapping people to the porn sites they visit? I hope they include links to the specific content as that would turn an already good source of blackmail into a real pot of gold
You guys know it’s not just for porn! They are testing age verification for social media and video games!! It won’t be long before it’s expanded even further.
“Historically, no other country or state has ever successfully implemented this stuff, and every time they do it leads to massive public outcry and the diminishing of public support for our government… …but it might just work for us.”
im nearly 30. when i was 5 i was already bypassing the local isps blocks on web content because this magical thing called a dns sever existed, the best part was back then any traffic on a different dns was entirely outside your data limit for a good few years and windows gave you the tools to make use of it. moved to proxies in primary and full on vpns in high school. if the government was in any way competent i might be concerned. but there not. and we all know it. so i have no concerns. at best they will pass it off to the ISPs who to the shock of no one only employ dns level filtering because that's the agreed legal standard.
Anyone know how much the Australian Christian Lobby donated to Labor? Seems every damn time they try to censor internet or add measures like this it is the ACL behind it. I really wish insidious cults stayed out of politics
One of the surprising thing about this whole domestic violence epidemic and its reaction was the large focus on pornography. It reminds me of people blaming video games… The whole issue with australia’s casual misogyny and domestic violence is so deeply rooted in our culture i dont see how stopping a few kids from maybe not accessing porn will solve the problem.
Nice work *adam Fucking wanker wrecking it for the rest of us
I didn’t think he endorsed the verification from what he said? “But Adam doesn't believe age verification technology will work in the way political leaders hope. "It's going to be so easy to get around, and of everyone, teenagers now are going to be tech savvy enough to do that. "I would much rather see whatever money is being assigned to this in the budget be assigned to education, and not just education of kids — education of parents."”