Australia Chooses Education Over Filtering

riprjak writes "The Australian federal government has rejected a call for Internet filtering to 'protect' Australians from child pornography and has opted instead to undertake an education and information campaign to teach parents about the perils of the Internet."

Comments

It's been cencored for a while ..

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet at schooles (or at least the ones I worked at) already had an internet filtration in place which was controlled at a state level. Bear in mind this was Queensland, I wouldn't know about other states.

Re:It's been cencored for a while ..

[dns_server]

In South Australia it is the same, there are the same types of filters in place. it is funny when your teacher uses the internet to look up legitamate topics such as sexual harrasment, but it is blocked because the site contains the key word 'sex'.

Re:State of Shock

[krumms]

It wasn't "filtered" so to speak - it was redirected to an intermediate page. You could still get to the gay porn if you really wanted to.

Re:State of Shock

[MEGAMAID]

ffs, were you asleep when that happened? They didn't totally block the site. They simply gave people a choice by putting up a page which meant that you needed one extra click to get to your gay porn.

Very responsible I thought.

Re:Excuse my ignorance but

[timmyf2371]

We don't.

British Telecom's ISP blocks certain underage porn sites which are found on an IWF black list, however this is not a legal requirement by any means and AFAIK they are the only British ISP currently to do such a thing.

Re:What about filtering in public venues?

[the_raptor]

There already is in 99% of those places.

From an Australian school student's perspective

[BlastM]

No no no.

Web filtering might sound good in theory, but in practice too many sites with educational benefit are blocked.

However, web filtering is not just an inconvenience.

There is an alterior motive at work. The state is censoring information that might allow impressionable youths to form opinions that might be critical of the government.

I am a Year 12 student of a high school in NSW. Sites that have been blocked by the proxy that I have noticed include: *.mozilla.org; *.sourceforge.*; *.sf.net; etc, etc. I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before SlashDot is blocked too. However, porn popups often appear thanks to the school using IE and infested Windows 98 machines (Microsoft donates licences to our school, the practice of which ominously reflects Hitler's Jungvolk).

Of course, there are easy ways to get around the blocks, as there is no way you can completely filter the web effectively. It's an inconvenience for me, but someone who isn't a geek will miss out on access to a lot of information.

The stated goal of web filtering is to 'protect' us from viewing "objectionable material" such as dangerous, dangerous porn, but more and more sites are being censored to 'protect' us from websites that aren't directly-related to the short sighted curriculum, e.g. mozilla or sourceforge, and soon we will be 'protected' from material that the state finds objectionable, such as critics of the government. The political blogs will go first because few will notice, then soon the news sites until only Packer's and Murdoch's news sites are endorsed for student viewing by the government.

Re:From an Australian school student's perspective

[sc0ob5]

Well I feel I am capable of replying to this.

I have worked for three years as a network administrator at a highschool, and to the people that say their is filtering already on a state or national scale is slightly wrong. It is true that there is filtering already in place but thats only if you have a contract with a company that provides filtering, which many schools have, at least public schools in South Australia. I can not say that this is what its like in other states but I would assume it is the same case. However, I found like many people have said that sites are blocked that should not be. I have disabled the filtering and decided to do local filtering through squid. I find that it is much better in terms of sites that get blocked that shouldn't be, of course there are always going to be sites that are blocked that shouldn't be but because its local students can come to me and tell me the site and I can un block it on the spot as opposed to the 24hour wait on centeral filters. It takes more effort on the part of the Administrator but after all isn't that what they are there for in the first place?

I can only imagine that sites such as mozilla and sourceforge are banned to stop students from downloading large programs and when schools are charged 13c a meg for downloads I can see the reasoning, particularly in under funded public schools. Also on the mozilla thing, I have blocked the mozilla site because of the fact that I choose to force proxy settings in IE.

Its easy to critise but much harder to understand the reasoning. I am glad that the government understands that education is the right way, personally I would hate to see a national filter for internet traffic.

Anyway I am glad I'm not working in that job anymore, underfunding in schools is whats going to impede on education and not internet filtering. I'm glad they made the right choice but I believe there are more important things to worry about such as upto date text books.

Re:From an Australian school student's perspective

[NeuralAbyss]

I'll give up my modpoints in this article, and post a network admin's view from Victoria.

I used to (well, still do on a part-time basis) work as a network admin for a secondary school in Victoria. Previously, until about 2 years ago, all government schools were mandated to use a state-government-selected ISP (Fuck you, Edunet!) which had a DEET-approved filtering system (N2H2). Given that they were working within the constraints of the VicOne WAN, they did an acceptable job, but outsourcing the filtering was one of the worse moves possible. Many educational and open-source-related sites were blocked, and it took upto 24 hours to get a site unblocked - the central filters were updated via a daily cronjob.

Things have improved slightly with regards to filtering - they have now allowed schools to filter by category, and turn off filtering for users (network admins/staff), but there's still the problem of inappropriate content being blocked.

I, personally, would like to see an instant unblocking option available for staff in schools, once they have reviewed the site in question. Yes, many within the system say that staff should check this when developing their lesson plans, but given the time constraints, the current filtering system is less than workable. I should say that, for the record, we have moved to the private (non-Telstra) incarnation of Edunet - Schoolsnet. Different name, same low SLA.