Australian Government Ignoring Problems With Proposed Filters

halll7 writes with an update to the proposed Australian national firewall we discussed recently. According to the BBC, "The official watchdog, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), has been conducting laboratory tests of six filtering products, and the government plans a live trial soon. ... After its recent trials, ACMA reported significant improvements on earlier studies. The network degradation on one product was less than 2%, although two products were in excess of 75%." Now, Ars Technica reports that "an Australian newspaper has uncovered documents showing that the government minister responsible for the program has ignored performance and accuracy problems with the filters, then tried to suppress criticism of the plan by private citizens." The EFA has a great deal to say in opposition of these plans.

Comments

Re:They're not actually ignoring the problems...

[LVSlushdat]

In the early 70s I made several trips to Australia for work, and was blown away by the size of the country, and the wonderful people. For a while, I seriously considered emigrating there... It pains me to see how authoritarian it has become.. And of course, my native USA is right on its heels.. I'm terrified about what's gonna happen to America if (oh hell, its when) Comrade Obama and his neo-communist (was US Democrat party) get in power.. And as the parent poster said, the "shopping list" of alternate countries is getting ever shorter.... I suspect the last 20 or so years of my life (am 58 now) will be in an ever increasing copy of what the old Soviet Union was like..... I cry..

Re:What is going on?

[electrictroy]

Worthless. Really? Let's consider then: How would you watch Heroes HD without broadcast television? Could you watch it via NBC.com? No, not really. 30 million people watch that show on Monday night, and it streams at 15 megabit/second over the airwaves. That's approximately 500,000 gigabit of bandwidth in total. No way could NBC.com or any other website handle that load.

BROADcasting is still the most-efficient ways to distribute (versus single-casting). Using broadcasting, NBC can send-out just 200 copies of Heroes via 200 stations distributed over the continent, and reaching 99% of the U.S. population. That's far more efficient than sending out 30,000,000 copies of the show via internet.

One final thought:

Whitespace Devices won't just block over-the-air television. They will also block your Cable television, or at least severely degrade the image, as the WSD signals leak into the exposed jacks hanging off your walls or set-top boxes.