Internet filtering

[rmp]

I have been following the debate about Internet filtering with some interest.

In brief; as we know, the Internet contains offensive material, such as child porn. The Government wishes to create a "clean feed" by filtering offensive material, thereby relieving everyone of the burden of doing it themselves, or accidentally stumbling across the same. The argument goes that nobody should be accessing such material, thus, why object to its blocking? We have censors for magazines and movies, why not the Internet? What's wrong with a nice clean feed devoid of the nastier porn and suchlike?

There is a counter argument based on two principles. Firstly, what's offensive and not offensive? And secondly it's a moot point because filtering doesn't work anyway. Unfortunately for those making the second point, that relies upon understanding of some technical details of the Internet. Without quite detailed explanation this comes off as something of a lassiez-faire libertine answer.

So to tackle the first point. What, exactly, is offensive material? Let's just look at porn (no, not literally, close that browser window). On one hand we have child porn. On the other, a model clad in a swimsuit. Somewhere between the two is where most people will draw the line. Nobody is going to agree where, so why should the Government decide it knows best? If you want filtering, you can set it up on your own system. Remember the Henson saga? Whether you thought his photo was porn or not, do you want that choice made for you? It wouldn't be so bad if the blacklist was open, or at least there were some descriptions around banned and non-banned content. But there aren't, and if something will be censored I'd like to know what rules are used to censor or non-censor.

Then what about non-porn? Let's take politics. On one extreme we have the Ku Klux Klan who are actively plotting murder of non-whites. On the other we have the Green party. Does the Government plan to censor political content? We don't know, the blacklist is secret. Even if it did nothing in the history of humankind suggests it would be successful, or stop communications.

What other content other than some porn, some political views might be censored? Bomb-making instructions. Which may, or may not have legitimate uses.

The second point -- that filters just don't work -- makes it all moot. Child porn doesn't exist on the web. It exists in peer-to-peer networks which filters cannot touch. The filters also won't touch email, NNTP, torrents or any of the other myriad protocols the Internet is made up of. Remember, the Internet is far, far more than websites.

Secondly, it is incredibly easy to circumvent filters for the web (or anything else), and if the Govt decided to implement one I give it ten minutes before it's common knowledge about how to step around it. This happens all the time in China, for example. A little example; does your workplace block access to websites? Simply use an anonymous proxy (Google it) and you're in. That's just one way to do it, and use of proxies is an easy way around some filters. Banning things, especially on something as nebulous as the Internet, just doesn't work.

Then you have filter design. Hands up if you've got a spam filter and never lost an important email to it, or had a false positive. Right, now tell me a web filter won't suffer the same problem, but magnified.

Volume is also a concern. Humans view movies and rate them. They also view magazines before sale, and both can be tied back to other humans who produce them for money.

Not so the web. Trying to trace who is behind a website can be very difficult, and the authorities don't have the resources to keep up. You wouldn't want to pay the taxes to have them do it. And all filters will be automated -- believe me the technology does not exist which can replicate a human's ability to comprehend a web page and rate it. As a little example, you've seen those Captchas -- little images that ask you to type in words -- those are to fool automated machines, and they do a pretty good job. A machine simply cannot reliably distinguish between a "good" or "bad" image whatever the criteria may be, so it has to rely on the website's address. And that's trivially easy to change every few minutes, quicker than blacklists can be updated.

So whilst I'd love to cleanse the Internet of child porn, that won't happen till the world is so cleansed. If you are concerned about the nasty stuff on the Net, educate yourself, your children, monitor them openly, install your own filter if you want, and to be honest if you don't go looking for it, you're unlikely to find it; nobody is forcing you into an X-rated shop, and if other people have different tastes to you, live and let live. There's an Internet question, but goverment-controlled filters aren't the answer.

[V8Ian]

I couldn't have put it better myself. Fully agree.

[Slunnie]

So there is no point to the filters if illegal media is still able to pass through the internet.

The other interesting aspect, is if the government becomes liable if illegal material does pass through the internet onto for example a school computer.

[rmp]

So there is no point to the filters if illegal media is still able to pass through the internet.

The other interesting aspect, is if the government becomes liable if illegal material does pass through the internet onto for example a school computer.

An interesting point. Quite possibly yes, if two lesbians can sue for the emotional distress of having twins instead of a single child, why the hell not.

I forgot to mention the filter could also be tampered with.

[V8Ian]

This "problem" has to be tackled in a logical sequence. Before we get too concerned with how, we need to determine what. That alone will put a cat amongst the pigeons.

[whitakerb]

I agree. Why are they trying to stop me from looking at pages that I simply wouldn't. I mean, lets face it. Your not going to look for a site about The cricket scores and find bomb making, and the same deal goes for anything else. If your not looking for it you wont find it. Do governments think that these sites are advertised to catch unsuspecting people?

I think the plan would be far more complex than this. Remember all the information that is passed inside aust will travel through the filter, whether it being from your computer or to it. If this idea went ahead, then I reckon the filter will simply log the addresses of people that visit such unauthorised site, whether it is a legit site or not, and then send the fuzz down the St to put him/her in to the back of the paddy wagon.

Yes the filter would stop some people, and some sites. but at what sacrifice, everyone's privacy? Hey for the hell of it, why don't we all get micro chipped at birth, so someone can scan us and find out who we are.

I'm pretty sure we still have our civil rights for the time being. Only time will tell

[p38arover]

The banned list will eventually be leaked as were the Danish and Thai lists.

See List of banned websites in Thailand and Denmark leaked online | News | News.com.au (http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,28348,24840506-5014239,00.html)

I found it ironical that Denmark has a list when it was the source of so much porn in the 70s, e.g., from Color Climax - some of which featured bestiality and child pornography.

Does the publication of such a list make it easier for people to acquire stuff?

I wonder if the govt. would ban sites like wikileaks http://www.wikileaks.org/

especially http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Australia

[V8Ian]

The tangible media is far easier to censor than the intenet, yet illegal publications are still available. Laws have to be enforcable, or they become a farce.

[hook]

And all filters will be automated -- believe me the technology does not exist which can replicate a human's ability to comprehend a web page and rate it.

YES it dose, ask any bank or Govt. dept., when they stuff up your *****(stuf), it's not our fault the computer did it.
lol
the PC only dose what you put into it.:twisted:

[ivery819]

Benjamin Franklin summed the internet filtering situation up when he said;
Quote:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

More about Benjamin Franklin here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin)

[Pedro_The_Swift]

interesting----
from "The Register"


Great Australian Firewall dead in the water?

Posted in Government (http://www.theregister.co.uk/public_sector/government/), 2nd March 2009 09:13 GMT
The final nail in the coffin of the great Australian Firewall was hammered home last week when independent Senator Nick Xenophon (http://www.aph.gov.au/SEnate/senators/homepages/senators.asp?id=8iv) withdrew support for the measure. This takes the voting arithmetic in the Australian Upper House beyond the point of no-return, as there are now 43 votes stacked up against the proposal with just 33 in favour.
Under the Australian constitution, tied votes are decided in the negative: so the Labour Government now needs an about-turn of Damascene proportions, both by the Green Party and by Senator Xenophon, to reverse its now inevitable defeat on this issue.
The bad news for the firewall’s sponsor, Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy began with a statement by the Opposition's communications spokesman, Nick Minchin, that his party has taken independent legal advice and now believes the government cannot implement a mandatory filtering regime without passing new laws. He said: "legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required".
At the same time, Senator Nick Xenophon, who had previously suggested he might support a filter that blocked online gambling websites has now come out firmly against it. A spokesman for the Senator told the Reg that he will not be voting for it in any form. The Senator is concerned that the proposed measures will slow the internet and are likely to lead to over-blocking.
Instead of putting in place a blanket censorship regime the Government should instead put the money towards educating parents on how to supervise their kids online and tackling "pedophiles through cracking open those peer-to-peer groups".
In a statement to the Brisbane Times (http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/technology/web-censorship-plan-heads-towards-a-dead-end/2009/02/26/1235237821636.html?page=2), the Senator added: "I'm very skeptical that the Government is going down the best path on this".
"I commend their intentions but I think the implementation of this could almost be counter-productive and I think the money could be better spent”.
The only hope for the scheme now is if the Government is able to find an opposing legal viewpoint that rules it does not need to pass new laws to implement its ban.
However, recent polls commissioned by online activist group GetUp (http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet/442), show just 5 percent and 4 percent respectively believe that internet filtering should be in the hands of ISPs or Government.
Meanwhile, the other joker in the pack – the Australian Sex Party (http://www.sexparty.org.au/) – seems set for a serious grudge match up in Queensland. Although too late to register candidates under the Sex Party banner, it looks as though they will be putting forward their own candidates to run as independents.
This has brought down the wrath of the Australian Christian Lobby (http://www.acl.org.au/) (ACL), whose Managing Director, Jim Wallace has said (http://www.acl.org.au/pdfs/load_pdf_public.pdf?pdf_id=1266&from=national) (pdf): "The Australian Sex Party exists to represent the interests of businesses who make money from the exploitation and degradation of women".
"If Labor, the LNP and the Greens believe women should be respected and are concerned about the enormous damage caused by pornography and prostitution then they should be demonstrating this by having nothing to do with the Sex Party or its affiliated candidates". This is likely to be an interesting election as despite the ever-present snigger factor when discussing the role of the Sex Party, Queensland is recognised as far more reactionary in matters of sex than the rest of Australia. The Sex Party will therefore be focusing (http://www.sexparty.org.au/index.php/press-releases/117-sex-party-to-launch-queensland-branch) on a range of broadly civil liberty related issues such as censorship, sex education, legal abortion and gay marriage.
Sex Party Convenor, Fiona Patten, said: "Queensland’s censorship laws are far stricter than any other state in Australia and are the same as laws on erotica in totalitarian states like China and Iran. The directors of large public companies like PBL and Adultshop.com go to jail in Queensland for selling products they can freely distribute in other states and to the rest of the world".
Referring to reports that some religious schools in Queensland are teaching the virgin birth as a biological event, creationism and even that "God kills a kitten every time someone masturbates", she added that Queensland was in urgent need of a standardised sex education curriculum.
"Labor, the Conservative parties and even the Greens in Queensland are ignoring these travesties because they don’t want to offend the churches". Queensland has the second highest rate of teenage pregnancies in the country, after Tasmania.
Queensland was the only state in Australia to discriminate against gay and lesbian people around the age of consent making it two years older than the age for heterosexuals (16 years).
The Sex Party was born, in large measure, out of a reaction to what it saw as the Labour Party’s anti-sex agenda: it would be hugely ironic if Labour cannot now pass its laws on censoring the internet, at the same time as seeing a pro-sex party gaining its first seats in the Federal legislature. ®

[JDNSW]

It seems that the Senate numbers are against it, but I would not count on that stopping the government - they are likely to do a deal on some other front to get enough votes, the same as has been done in the past by both major parties; this is how the minor parties and independents gain so much influence.

The above posts cover pretty much all the problems, but I will point out another couple of points - the government is proposing to use blacklists from overseas to add to its own, including the UK one that cut off a lot of people in the UK from Wikiepedia recently. It is worth noting that the image that got Wikipedia on the black list would have probably been rated 'G' in Australia (the image was not very different to some of Henson's rated thus), and raises the point that these overseas black lists are almost certain to use different criteria to those here (whatever those are - they are secret). This event further points out the problem of a single page being banned placing a whole site out of reach.

Another point not mentioned - with a requirement to opt out rather than in, how long before the people who do opt out will find the fact that they have done so is used against them in job applications, child custody cases etc? And as Ron points out, expecting the list to remain confidential is rather naive.

John

[rmp]

Good points JD.

Is there anyone here pro-filter, and if so, why? I'm not looking to shout people down, just interested in differing opinions.

Note that being anti-kiddie porn and hate material is NOT the same as being pro-filter, and despite what others say being against a filter DOES NOT mean you support that sort of filth.

[JDNSW]

As I (and many others) predicted last October - the "blacklist" was leaked to wikileaks.org today (see whirlpool.net.au). As expected only a relatively small part of the list is reported to contain illegal material, much of it is distasteful but certainly not illegal, and some are neither - including a boarding kennels, a dentist, and other similar innocuous sites.

Note that wikileaks itself is already on the blacklist because they also published the Danish blacklist.

John

[loanrangie]

If the government throws some water at the murray Xenophon will vote for it ! I dont agree with with them telling me what i can and cant look at but then again there is a lot of shyte out there that shouldnt be seen by anyone, it is quite easy to find outragous material by accident- more often than not when i search for info on something, i fine 100's or 1000's of pages of sh$t i didnt want.

[abaddonxi]

If the government throws some water at the murray Xenophon will vote for it ! I dont agree with with them telling me what i can and cant look at but then again there is a lot of shyte out there that shouldnt be seen by anyone, it is quite easy to find outragous material by accident- more often than not when i search for info on something, i fine 100's or 1000's of pages of sh$t i didnt want.

Don't think that's going to change.

:D:D

Simon

[JDNSW]

Following the leak of the blacklist to Wikileaks, Conroy claimed it was not the actual ACMA list, and also said he would get the AFP to track down and prosecute the whistleblower. (Being a bit contradictory?)

In response, Wikileaks now claims to have received yesterday an updated list, and have also threatened to prosecute Conroy under Swedish law for attempting to track down a confidential media source, and say they will seek his extradition. (Australia will not extradite someone charged with something that is not an offence in Australian law, but not all countries would take this view, and it could cramp his overseas travel plans if he is put on Interpol's wanted list!)

Also it emerged yesterday that the ACMA decisions on what to put on the list are apparently made by a single person with no discussion, solely on the basis of a complaint from the public. There is no appeal, the website owner will not be advised they are on the list, and since the list is secret there is no way of knowing whether your site is on the list. If the site is hosted in Australia, the hosting company (not the website owner) will be issued with a take down notice, which if not acted on will incur a fine of $11,000 a day. But many Australian businesses have their websites hosted overseas.

Again, see whirlpool (or almost any IT industry news site!) for the latest.

John

[rmp]

Good update JD.

How anyone thinks this filter is even a remotely good idea is beyond me.

I wonder what Fake Stephen Conroy will say next ;-)

[tracker]

congrats to the OP.If this topic was debated in parliament with the same clear dialogue we may understand things a little better.
I just tried to access wikileaks.org and it times out.
Did find this < Australian Government adds Wikileaks to banned website list | News | TechRadar UK (http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/australia-issues-wikileaks-linking-fine-warning-585894) > interesting.
Also < WikiLeaks Exposes Australian Web Blacklist | Threat Level from Wired.com (http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/wikileaks-expos.html) >.
It's amazing how things get so stuffed up when govs try to force their views on a mixed population like aus.
Google is fun,typed "ford wreckers" in once and found more replies for porn then wreckers.Not hard to sort,just look at address b4 clicking.
cheers.

[ivery819]

Critical Blogs to be tracked.

"The Federal Government will begin trawling blog sites as part of a new media monitoring strategy, with official documents singling out a website critical of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy"

READ MORE HERE (http://tinyurl.com/d8p4kx)
This is a sign of things to come !

[feral]

Contact details | Senator Stephen Conroy | Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/contact)


This is the Stephen Conroy website.

Go your hardest :eek:

[JohnF]

Remember this Internet filtering proposal is from the Goverment who outlawed protests during the Popes visit as they did not want media attention on sexual abuse by the clergy. When people did protest they backed off, as to aresst them would have drawn much media attention to the issue. Rudd and the then NSW premier Eimma [not sure of spelling now] were both staunch Catholics who did not want media attention focused on their Church's Clergy sex abuse.

[JDNSW]

Critical Blogs to be tracked.

"The Federal Government will begin trawling blog sites as part of a new media monitoring strategy, with official documents singling out a website critical of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy"

READ MORE HERE (http://tinyurl.com/d8p4kx)
This is a sign of things to come !

This is not necessarily a problem - it is just conceivable that they want to start listening to what people are saying! But I would have thought that Conroy would be certain to have someone whose job it was to read Whirlpool anyway - even if he does not know what it is, surely some of his staff do.

John

John

[JDNSW]

Whirlpool discussion on the subject makes an interesting (if very lengthy) read. It seems the leak was not exactly a leak. The list is incorporated into several types of filtering software that are generally available. Someone found a security problem in one of these that enabled the list to be recovered from the software update.

Apparently this was not very difficult - there is cryptanalysis software available that make recovery of this sort of list quite easy if you have a good idea of what is in it, which would be the case here.

John

[JDNSW]

Contact details | Senator Stephen Conroy | Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/contact)


This is the Stephen Conroy website.

Go your hardest :eek:

Copy everything to your own federal MP, and write him a letter as well.

John

[feral]

iiNet has removed itself from the trials.....

iiNet pulls out of internet filter trials | Australian IT (http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25228031-15306,00.html)


The nonsence continues.

[Bigbjorn]

The greypages reverse telephone directory no longer is accessible because of this.

[feral]

This is a farce......

Conroy admits blacklist error, blames 'Russian mob' - Technology - theage.com.au (http://www.theage.com.au/news/home/technology/conroy-admits-to-henson-blacklist-error/2009/03/27/1237657120642.html)


This is a classic example of a would be politican showing the world that he is doing something to control an innate object that itself is uncontrollable.

FAIL :p

[JDNSW]

Last night on TV Conroy admitted that one of the web pages included in the leaked blacklist was one that had actually been already classified as 'PG' and should not have been there. He attributed it to 'human error'. But of course, this begs the question as to how many "human errors" will occur in the future, and what mechanism is proposed to uncover them, without the list being leaked - which, of course, it will be.

The audience (ABC's Q&A programme) laughed at many of the minister's responses.

Perhaps the best comment is the following quote :-

"When he wasn't blaming the Russian Mob, the Minister was still invoking hateful, extreme content and protesting that they don't intend to censor 'political' content," said Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia.

"But this doesn't address questions of how the secret list is administered, how the Government hopes to classify millions or billions of web pages without making any mistakes, or why an expensive national filter has to be applied at the ISP level in the first place."

Senator Conroy also admitted last night that proposed internet filters would not be effective on peer-to-peer networks, which experts say is where the vast majority of child pornography is traded.

This contradicts his comments when announcing live trials of his censorship scheme in December last year, when he said the Government would test technology that could filter peer-to-peer networks.

The saga is expected to be ongoing.

John

[JDNSW]

Unless tonight's blackout in Sydney derailed it, Conroy is expected to appear tomorrow night Tuesday 31st March on SBS Insight (http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/)at 7.30. He will be part of a panel that includes both the Australian Christian Lobby, Electronic Frontiers Australia, a former police office, the teenager who cracked the previous government's filter in a few minutes, and an eight year old computer expert.

John

[Dmmos]

Unless tonight's blackout in Sydney derailed it, Conroy is expected to appear tomorrow night Tuesday 31st March on SBS Insight (http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/)at 7.30. He will be part of a panel that includes both the Australian Christian Lobby, Electronic Frontiers Australia, a former police office, the teenager who cracked the previous government's filter in a few minutes, and an eight year old computer expert.

John

He's the one advising Conroy isn't he? :angel:

[JDNSW]

Program went ahead last night. Part of it was blacked out apparently by an SBS glitch, but was quite interesting. Much comment about it online, especially on whirlpool, although the news article about Conroy being sacked on there is apparently an April Fool's joke.

If you missed the program, I believe it will be available online from SBS. There was a chat session on SBS online after it, and a transcript of that is also available.

According to some, the high point was when Mark Newton (from Iinet), responding to Conroy's question "would it work", said that if implemented, he would go to Conroy's office if asked and show him how to bypass it in thirty seconds, comparing it to the thirty minutes it took a teenager to bypass the previous government's PC filter. Same teenager, now seventeen, asked what he would do if the new censorship regime was implemented, simply said he would bypass it.

One point that did come out of the show was that the existing censorship and classification scheme is a real mess. What you can see depends not only on what state you are in (for printed material and films), but also what form the material is in - different standards apply to printed material, movies, games and internet. On the internet, under the present rules, items that are MA+ or higher can be banned. And the procedure is different for the internet. Whereas books, films and games are submitted to the OFLC for classification before publication, this is clearly impossible for the internet.

What happens is that if a complaint is made about a website, a public servant in ACMA makes a judgement as to "whether the site would be classified by OFLC as MA+ or higher". If the answer is yes, and the site hosted is in Australia, the host of the site is issued with a takedown notice ($11,000/day for failure to comply). If the site is overseas, it is added to the ACMA's secret blacklist. To date this is used by the filtering software supplied to concerned parents (which is where the leak of the list came from), but the current plan is to use this list for mandatory filtering at the ISP level. Since the list is supposed to be secret, there is no appeal and no review. The list has been shown to include a substantial number of websites that should not be there - most notably one that is Australian (should have had a takedown notice - which would have been disputed as it was a dog grooming service) and one with pictures already classified as PG by the OFLC.

But since the list has only affected people who have a commercial filter or the one ISP that supplies a filtered service, most people have been unaware of it. The proposal to make it mandatory as well as secret is the real problem, with obvious opportunities for political censorship. As far as its effectiveness is concerned, consider that the list contains about 2,000 web pages, probably only a few hundred if you remove the ones that should not have been there in the first place and the ones that no longer exist. Compare this to the over a trillion web pages indexed by Google, and you have to conclude that either the MA+ material on the web is vanishingly small, or the system is not even scratching the surface. Of course, added to this is the fact that the web only represents around 20% of internet traffic.....

You have to ask if mandatory filtering of web traffic, that is either addressing a non-problem or ineffective, is worth doing when it is introducing a major tool for government control of what you can know.

John

[feral]

Shifting goal posts.....


Conroy backtracks on internet censorship policy - Technology - theage.com.au (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2009/04/01/1238261622790.html)

[Sprint]

typical government sensationalist bull****

[Dmmos]

:Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling: :Rolling:

[Ace]

I can safely say, and Slunnie will have had similar experience, that the filters are nothing but a pain in the rear.

We have them at school, now initially we had the power to go to the schools server, enter in the sites web address and block it manually, this was effective because teachers could take not of what kids were looking at in class, and the computer coordinator could sit at the server and watch what sites the kids were accessing.

Now, in order to access the net all people within the NSW DET have to log into the net via a server or whatever controlled by the department, schools no longer have control over the internet within their school. As a result we now use a universal filtering system that filters the net that all schools view. This system is nothing short of crap, the amount of completely save websites (or false positives as RMP put it) that this filter picks up is phenominal. I could be getting the kids to do an assignment on the reproductive system, so they research for it and any site that mentions "penis" or "vagina" is often blocked, it could be a medical site with no innapropriate material what so ever.

In short, its not possible. Im with RMP on this one.

[JDNSW]

Just bringing this subject back into discussion again. No, it hasn't gone away. Conroy keeps changing what he is planning to block, ignoring the fact that to change criteria for the contents of the ACMA blacklist (which includes even MA15+ under the legislation) will require legislation which is most unlikely to get through the Senate.

The planned trials are under way, as with much of the whole scheme under a veil of secrecy. Despite this a FOI application has revealed that no documents exist that specify the criteria for success or failure of the tests, suggesting these criteria will be decided after the results are available!

Looking at some numbers is instructive. The planned blacklist will have, according to Conroy, no more than 10,000 web pages. About a year ago, Google announced that it had indexed a trillion pages, and the number was increasing at around a billion a day. It seems to me that anyone who thinks that this will "keep children safe online" is in fantasyland. A couple of other numbers to compare to the planned 10,000 to be banned - a Google search on "sex" gets close to a billion hits, a search on "xxx" or "porn" get around a quarter of a billion hits.

The only possible use for it that I can see is to hide a small number of things the government doesn't want us to see. The secrecy and lack of review or supervision of the system makes it inevitable that even if it is not intended for this purpose, that it will be used for it, and probably sooner rather than later. The link deletion mechanism is already being used for this purpose regarding euthanasia and anti-abortion web pages, but at least we can still talk about it (so far).

Of course, it is trivial to bypass the planned filter - systems for doing so are promoted by the US government as an aid to oppressed peoples in places like China and Iran. (Do we want to be on that list?)

A further point that has come up is that the adoption of IPv6 to replace IPv4, which will be necessary as early as the end of next year (because it has a larger address space and we are running out of IP addresses) will, since it appears to mandate end to end encryption, appear to make the whole scheme simply unworkable.

John