Mandatory data retention laws passed the senate this week. The premise is to fight against Islamic terrorist attacks by retention of ISP customer data. But this will not work out right from the start. ISP`s are confused by the 400 page document that outlines what they must retain, and they are not ready to capture customer data and implement the infrastructure required. Malcom Turnbull has outlined changes in laws. But this is easily circumvented by the use of a Virtual Private Network or VPN. This allows an encrypted connection over port 1701 and hides the data transferred from the ISP. They will just see data over HTTPS. If you configure the VPN to use port 443, this will appear as HTTPS web data and will look rather innocuous. That is how I would configure such a VPN. If you are in an educational institution such as TAFE or school, the detportal proxy will block the standard VPN ports and using port 443 will be required. But this does work very well if you are studying Information Technology and accessing websites such as openvpn.net that is blocked by a proxy. If your home PC is on the same VPN as a machine at your site, you can configure the VPN to allow you to ping the other PC. That is the meaning of a Virtual Private Network. https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/digital-freedom-and-privacy/go-dark-against-data-retention/go-dark-against-data-retention.
Go to https://www.vpngate.net/to get a free VPN that will allow an Internet user to escape the clutches of data retention laws. These laws are only going to punish the law abiding citizens and will not really stop anyone from doing anything illegal on the Internet, the terrorist could just use other means of contacting others such as TOR, which also uses an encrypted connection tunneling through the Internet. TOR is not as fast as a VPN, even using a VPN to Japan from Australia, is faster than TOR, but good for users in an oppressive regime to still communicate safely with the outside world. Anonymous browsing is under attack by the media, but this is due to the encrypted nature of the communications. The government fears this. Setting up TOR is very easy and the TOR bundle allows easy access to the network. Then the real fun begins once you have an anonymized IP address. The only caveat is that you must disable flash and Javascript to allow greater security when using the network. Adobe flash can allow hackers to capture data as it connects directly, not using the TOR network. That is the only real thing you have to remember. There is a TOR library, that contains many useful books and documents and a whole host of other information on this network, all you need to do is look.