Thread: Internet filtering

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

Shifting goal posts.....


Conroy backtracks on internet censorship policy - Technology - theage.com.au

typical government sensationalist bull****

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.