Slashdot Mirror
Dismal Failure of Internet Filters In Australia
An anonymous reader writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), the department responsible for implementing the insane Internet regulatory framework put in place by the current government, is about to drop a number of Internet Filtering packages due to their ineffectiveness. The full article is available here. There is also news that the Minister for Communications, Senator Richard Alston (whom The Register has labeled the Worlds Biggest Luddite :) ) is awaiting a review of the law with possible changes to follow. Be afraid Australia, be very afraid!"
At the ISP I used to work for in Perth, Australia we decided the best solution was to provide a page or two on our website explaining how software filtering works, then provide all the alternatives and let the clients decide, so I wrote:
. ht ml
http://www.iinet.net.au/support/softwarefilters
it fulfilled the requirements of the legislation and explained the limitations of each type of flitering quite clearly - without affecting our customers or business.
From the article:"ISPs don't want people using very effective filters," he said. "They want people to be downloading as much information as possible - that's how they make their money."
....which is why they cap the bandwidth avalable to their customers
"We feel the decision is best left in the hands of parents." He said the opt-out clause "could work" but feared routine filtering could seriously slow down the internet.
They should go with an opt-in policy instead. Those willing to stick their heads in the sand and let others make decisions about what they can and can not read should stand up and ask for it by name instead of forcing the everyone else to bail out of such a scheme.
--
Freeper Logic
For months people got around the filters by changing the way they entered the web addresses (use IP addresses instead of domain names until that ceased to work; use the integer encoding of the IP address until THAT ceased to work, etc.) They fixed that. Then they went through well-known proxies like anonymizer.com and made proxies out of well-known services like babelfish.altavista.com. They fixed that. Eventually proxy access on well-known ports will probably be blocked at the border to stave off the unknown proxy usage, but that doesn't do anything about the ports that are unknown. Then they can start filtering things that look like web traffic on non-standard ports, but SSL gateways and VPN software can always get past that until they decide to block encryption.
My point: there will always be ways around filters on the Internet, because at any point there aren't, we've no longer got an Internet. There are sufficient business interests in maintaining the Internet as a useful tool to keep the book-burning impulses of even the most ardent censorship advocates in check.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Thankfully those of us lucky enough to live in Australia don't need the Internet, 'cause Telstra and other broadband carriers certainly won't let us have it!
Filtering the Internet is unnecessary. All we need are a few more users, and the tiny bandwidth available to the entire nation will be spread so thinly that it'll be like the good old days of 9600 baud modems. Sure, pornography will get through, but by the time a download has finished, even young teens will then be old enough to vote.
The World's Biggest Luddite is barely worthy of being called a moron (well, only if you were comparing him to a particularly stupid moron), so no doubt he'll implement another completely unworkable solution which will win him votes with people who think "Something must be done!" and the rest of us will long for the next election so that we can vote this peanut out.
Still, we only have to give him some sort of bribe, like the digital television he accepted for research purposes (as did the PM). It's so much easier when the top pollies are on the take. All we have to do is work out the right size bribe...
"ISPs don't want people using very effective filters," he said. "They want people to be downloading as much information as possible - that's how they make their money."
Weird, I always thought internet providers made money from people who pay their monthly fees but don't download a lot, and they actually loose money on those who download gigabytes a month..
Anyone care to explain how an ISP makes money because their users download a lot ??
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
What some people don't realize, and it is probably due to their lack of understanding of technology is that in the case of internet filtering you can only limit access to certain sites but not prevent _all access to everything that is deemed inappropriate on a moral scale. Just like crime, you can prevent some but not all.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Filtering is a good idea, but mandatory filtering is not. Let people filter what they want to filter; any other route is doomed to failure.
As a parent myself, I think any parent who gives their child unfettered, unsupervised access to the internet is a fool; you might end up raising a kid who's a combination of Benny Hill and Ted Bundy. Kids too young to understand the difference between good/bad, normal/abnormal, etc don't need to be downloading hard-core pr0n, and faces-of-death pics.
HOWEVER... there's nothing to stop a parent from being that kind of fool, and I'm not entirely certain that you can legislate that anyway. If somebody wants their kid to think sex with goats is OK, and attend his high-school graduation in a Gimp suit, have at it... (but I'll tell you what, their kid will only date one of my kids over my slowly-cooling, twitching corpse).
Leave the filtering to the parents, if they so choose. As long as it's in the privacy of their own home, and as long as it's not kiddie pr0n, I'd say let adults download what they want.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Nor am I.
FWIW, I mostly agree with you, but that doesn't mean the gov handled it well. They lie (child overboard) to confuse the issue. They keep refugees for years in lousy conditions, including the fair dinkum ones. They also appear to have committed us to a non-UN sanctioned invasion
And lets not forget the Telstra HDTVs that both John Howard and Richard Alston have for evaluation, funny how things go Telstra's way.
lets face it, they are bunch of self serving drongos whose main skills lie in getting themselves voted into office. But I guess thats not exclusive to Australia.