Who would have thought that here, in the dying stages of 2008, we'd be looking back fondly at the Howard government's failed $84 million porn filter? Remember how hard we laughed when it was cracked within minutes by 16-year-old Tom Wood? And how badly it failed because the very nature of the Internet means that censorship just doesn't work? You'd think that no government would be stupid enough to make the same mistake again, wouldn't you? Well, it just goes to show that the government's penchant for stupidity continues to grow unabated, now that K-Rudd and his geeky sidekick Conroy are planning on forcing mandatory ISP-level filtering of all illegal content, as well as an opt-out filter for "adult" content.

Yes, no matter how ridiculous it seems to any Internet user with even the tiniest morsel of common sense, the Government believes that the Howard porn filter didn't work because it wasn't mandatory for all Australians. And so now we as Australians are faced with possibly the single biggest affront to our online freedoms, while the Government decides it needs to follow up on a headline-grabbing election promise that is impossible to enforce.

While 99.9 percent of Gizmodians understand that mandatory internet filtering just can't work, for that 0.1 percent, here's why the filter is doomed to fail, and why you should lend your voice to the online activism movement taking the government to task over their foolhardy attempts to censor the net.

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It's no secret that the Chinese government censors web content, but what's it like to actually be a citizen trapped inside the Great Firewall of China? A new FireFox plugin called China Channel can show you. It reroutes your IP through China, allowing you to look like any other digital Chinese citizen from anywhere in the world. Click on a banned site and BAM! You lose your browsing privileges for 15 minutes. But luckily, in this version, you can just reopen the browser with a newly assigned IP. To see an example clip that walks you through installation and browsing, read on.

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All internet cafes in the main 14 city districts of Beijing have been mandated to install cameras to take pics of people as they enter the store, which are they uploaded to a city-wide database under watch of the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce. Shop owners have apparently said that their customers don't care, but apparently an online version of the People's Daily showed 72% respondents opposing it because it violated their rights.

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Looks like China won't be the only place with a Great Firewall in place--The Australian government is introducing its own censorship regime that will determine what is or isn't illegal for you to view on the web. The move is said to help stop teenagers from accessing online pornography, but even if you opt-out of the pr0n filter, you'll get put on a different blacklist for "illegal" content.

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Network access at conferences sucks, pretty much without exception. That is, unless it's built by the badge-wearing network ops volunteers of the Defcon hacker convention, who are affectionately referred to as the "Goons" (read: IT badasses). Wired's Threat Level got a chance to look behind the scenes and snap some great photos of the network gear (and chain link fences, and padlocks, and German Shepherds) that make the Defcon network the fortress that it needs to be to keep a network full of hackers from tearing each other apart.

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