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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."
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.
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.
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.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
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.