F.A.Q.
Q. Why are you doing this? Are you some sort of paedophile-lover?
The main reason for doing this is to demonstrate how so 20th century the Australian government’s approach to Internet regulation is. A bit like the GST – a tax that was twenty years behind its time, but served its creator politically.
The policy makers are clearly more interested in the politics than the technicalities. Stephen Conroy‘s filter will not save one child, will not protect anyone, will not prevent anyone from doing anything… and will only cost you money and time.
We do this simply to demonstrate that it can be done.
Q. When will this service be available?
We’re working hard to get this up and running the day that Conroy deploys his “filter”. Check the Connect page for details of the availability of testing servers.
Q. Why would I want to use your service anyway?
Maybe you’re paranoid. Maybe you you’re American and want to watch crap online television that you would normally watch at home anyway. Maybe just because you can. We don’t know why you would want to use this service, don’t want to know, and frankly we don’t care.
It’s your business.
Q. Why doesn’t Hulu work?
It’s something to do with HTTP headers, we’re working on it. Remote desktoping with a decent protocol will get around this anyway. Tested and proven.
Q. Why are you so special?
We’re not. Our AMI is open source and listed on AWS, and you’re more than welcome to fire up your own instance under your own account. We’re just trying to make it easy for you.
Q. What happens when I’m finished?
After 15 minutes of inactivity, the machine kills itself and all charges cease. It deletes all logs and traces. Of course, we can’t guarantee that intermediaries haven’t kept their own logs of your network traffic – read the Patriot Act. That’s why encryption and tunneling are good – e.g. the Tor/VPN models that we intend to offer.
Q. Where are my logs stored while my session is active?
/dev/null
In other words, they’re not.
Q. Do you provide support?
No. If you can’t figure out how to use it from our online tools and documentation, please do not attempt to give us your money. We’re not interested. We are not a consumer-orientated business. You will not suffer or be charged any further.
Q. Can I share my session?
Yes. Ultimately.
But our basic model will lock itself to your current IP address to prevent third parties from exploiting your service.
Q. How much will it cost?
About 20 cents an hour, slightly more if you’re caning traffic.
Q. Do you keep logs?
Yes. We keep logs of who fires up instances via our services and during which times. We do not keep logs of what you do with it. We are simply a brokerage service. However, if we’re presented with a court order requesting a copy of our logs, we will happily comply. That would tie your usage, over a certain period of time, to an IP address that your ISP would also have to reveal under court order, but would ultimately identify you (or rather, it would identify your internet connection).
Because that’s the law and how it should work.
It didn’t take legislation to figure that out – the courts did it for us. Lazy policing is no excuse for new legislation.
Q. Why are you being so hard on Stephen Conroy?
Because he’s either lying to us or he’s stupid. We tend to get Stephen Conroy and Steve Fielding (who can’t even filter his own web site) confused anyway.
They look the same to us… let’s Photoshop that tie to sell the message. Edit that out.
Q. What do you hope to achieve by being such a scurrelous blight on our perfect society?
Nothing, really. It’s a loaded question anyway.
Q. Get a life.
O.K.
What’s the name of your AMI on EC2?
Good question. I’ve had some trouble building the AMI. The FAQ was a little preemptive but you have renewed my motivation.