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Schoolboy downs Australia’s $84m porn filter with ease
By Stevie Smith Aug 27, 2007, 13:25 GMT
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Older Talkback
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Seems it may be cheaper (and less embarrassing) for the Australian gov't to silence this child or ban him from computer use than to spend more money on new but still ineffective software.
84 Million, eh? Maybe the kid can show them how to do it properly for 1 million.
84 million dollars! that could've been put toward a much more worthy cause! according to this kid they could've spent 1 million on a filter that works, that leaves $83 million to help with Drought in outback communities, or go toward the Noosa floods! or even be put away for the next natural disaster! stupid government.
I'm a IT professional and know that any tech savvy kid could get past internet filters in several minutes. There's no golden bullet for this one - the government is living in a dream world and puring money down the drain in the hopes of making it one.
The moral of the story is use a real babysitter, not a virtual one.
Since most of these solutions have a workaround, it's inevitable that a bright kid can get through them if need be, credit to this one that he's let people know, rather than have parents believing the govt that surfing is now 'safe'.
To the idiot who says ban him from a computer, maybe you should move over to a country which filters things effectively, perhaps China? Chance of the death penalty there if you visit sites you're not supposed to, that would be a more fitting punishment? lol, do yourself a favour and stay away from the keyboard until you get rid of your narrow mindedness.
Perhaps this kid will have ideas of his own on how filtering *could* work, if you know the workarounds, it leaves you clearer to think about the things that couldn't be worked around.
I agree that something needs to be done on the internet to make it safer, but parents need to regularly check on the computer, TEST the filters/security, basic parenting skills, looking after your children! What I don't agree with is censorship, how to put this into working pracice would not be easy. Also verification of age of the subject is a difficult one, how do you know that the person typing this now isn't a 10 year old kid? (okay so the one about banning the kid probaby WAS a 10 year old kid, lol).
Cyberpolicing is the only way to attempt to crack this problem, but putting that into place across many different territories is virtually impossible at the moment. Perhaps a good start would be to be stiffer penalties for the spammers who send the kids emails about 'hot girls, viagra, xxx' etc, get them stuck in a jail for 15 years, and I mean a jail where they do NOT have the luxuries afforded them at present.
Apologies that I didn't read through all the posts here, I saw the one about banning that kid and that prompted this post, so many stupid people out there, and your kids could be talking to em right now. Which brings me onto MSN, a haven for weirdos.
My advice, being in the business, is keep a check on your kids, if they're young, have the computer in a room where they know you could always turn around and watch them, have a password on the computers BIOS so they can't use it when you're not home, and check up on them (or is this against their privacy rights now???). Kids are kids, they're curious, they want to know about life, they have a natural instinct to learn (or most do). Get away from the front of that TV screen and be a part of their lives.
Oh, and keep an eye on what your government is doing with your hard earned money too, too many people sit back and let them, believe what they say, and trust what they say, YOU have the internet, do your research.
Steve!
www.timerider.co.uk
Very good boy. Instead of throwing away the 84 millions this government could invest it in the environment protection or health care.
That's what happens when the Gov't tries to censor. Porn is a fact of life, deal with it. When I was a kid our porn was the bra section of the J.C. Penny's catalog. Nobody outlawed that!
The simple way to stop kids from accessing pornography or other inappropriate content is to SUPERVISE them on the internet and not allow them unrestricted/unmonitored access.
The internet is not the problem per se, merely the fact that parents allow their kids free reign of it. Which is the cyber-equivalent of letting kids travel the world on their own.
Negligent to say the least.
'The Government has not listened to common sense and it leaves kids exposed.' Fielding also offered that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) need to implement compulsory content filters in order to help markedly increase the level of online safety for children while surfing.
??????i don't get it??
are my children normal??
i don't feel the need to censor or filter
o..hang on..they know how to use the SHUT DOWN option.
'which cleverly involved leaving the software’s default on-screen toolbar intact so as to indicate to parents that the filter was still functioning properly.'
I don't know about you but I don't know anyone who would want to look at porn when there parents are in the house awake............
and seriously this software is EASILY worked around by a live CD distro of an OS like linux which the software is incompatible with... or if the pc's powerful enough, a virtual OS with linux... or even just disable the software from the task manager, (possibly go through the registry and weed it out) and set up another program EG mIRC to hide to tray.. and I know in mIRC you can change the tray icon to ANYTHING you want... I can distribute that workaround in a small batch file and 3 step instructions on how to set up mIRC to immitate the software... I still think the live cd is a much more effective way to workaround because it runs completely independant to windows... but works LIKE windows so it's easy to use and the softwate filter won't even be loaded!
it's as easy as download an '.iso' file, burn it, put it in the cd/dvd drive and restart your computer...
for kids under 13-14 i agree they shouldn't be on the internet unsupervised... but after that they start to become sexually active and more mature... hell i'm a 15 Year old young man.. and for the most part... there's not much (except some... questionable things) that I, and my boyfriend, haven't done in real life so I can't really understand how seeing it would affect me mentally in any way... I feel that the 18 and older is a harsh limit as it is...
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To the guy (Mitchells00) who says its as easy as inserting a live cd and booting to that. What if you change the boot sequence to not boot off anything but the HDD and then put a password on the bios so that you can't change the boot sequence.
What do you have to say to that?
Also if you disable it from the taskbar, (which you can't, this must be done through the services window, but I think he is talking about ending the process) Integard will just restart, I tried this. Didn't work! I even tried going into the services tab and stopping and disabling the service. This ceased all network activity. I even tried resetting the winsock catalog with no luck. In fact after doing the above things I received emails notifying me that Integard had been tampered with. So I know if my children do try any of these things I will find out.
As for the mIRC idea. What happens when the parent comes along and tries to login to see a report or to change some settings? Integard will not be there?
If the boot sequence is changed to not include anything but the HDD and the bios has a password I think your little plan to circumvent Integard using a live unix cd becomes void.
With a little bit of knowledge parents are able to secure their computers. You may also be perverted enough to have seen all these graphic and disgusting things at an age of 15 but there are people out there that haven't. You may think you are a man at 15 but I can assure you that you are still just a little boy. One day you will grow up and it will be clear to you that you were.
The filter is also targetted at younger children to prevent them from accidentally going somewhere they shouldn't. I personally use Integard on my 2 computers at home and have found it to be quite effective in not only filtering for my children but also as a reporting sytstem to let me know what they use the internet for.
I also did some research on this scheme and have subsequently found out that the $84 million or whatever was spent was not all given to these so called filter developers but was also used in the advertising campaign to raise the awareness of the dangers of the Internet to parents. I for one think it is a good idea as the Internet is becoming a major tool in most peoples lives, including our children, and there are a lot of parents that are not aware of the true dangers.
Well i believe integard is easy to bypass. I myself bypassed it easily, but that may be due to the fact I recieved admin access due to a loophole in the windows xp system. Therefore through using system restore integard was easily removed. I was surprised that it was an $85 million internet filter. Talk about waste of money.
Just my two cents
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