Web filter a runaway success: Exetel

If this is a "success" they should release their results

If this is such a "success" they should be happy to release their results in full.

I'd like to find out where those 20,000 censored searches were actually going.

And, what have they done about those 20,000 accusations of paedophilia, have they reported them to the police? Did they send the users emails urging them to get help? Offer them a subscription to an encrypted tunneling service?

And, what is that $6 per user cost based on, is it 100% user take up due to government censorship, or is it based on an extrapolation of the user figures for the previous government's free home filters which I believe was less than 1%

Filtering Technology

Just a minor correction to the article. The filter server is not a proxy but a packet inspection device. This avoids proxy-based issues such as the recent Wikipedia incident in the UK.

Problem with the trial

There is a problem that was acknowledged by Peter Mancer in relation to this system and what the government proposes.

When asked if this filter would cope if you had a youtube URL on the blacklist (effectively causing the all of the ISP's youtube traffic to be routed through the filter) he said it was a theoretical problem because list managers wouldn't do that. Youtube have a policy for removing illegal material and that should be used rather than blacklisting.

That's where the problem lies for the government. They already have a youtube URL on the blacklist. The government has backed away from using the ACMA list and it's now "almost exclusively refused classification". But.... the youtube on the current blacklist is Refused Classification. Not illegal material though and Youtube won't be taking it down.

There are 4 other clips that I'm aware of that are RC according to the classification board. There are likely hundreds or even thousands more.

Peter Mancer's solution if a youtube url made it onto the list to keep the filter running smoothly? He'd whitelist youtube. So you effectively have a vendor overriding the government on what gets blocked.

Runaway success indeed. Internet censorship continues to be a monumental farce.

yes, opponents of mandatory internet censorship are insignificant, effeminate fools who will immediately comply with your demand to be silent.

*tee hee*

Nice twisting

I love how this article has twisted the words from Lintons blog to serve it's own agenda - ie: 20,000 hits from 1%. This article is obviously pro-filter, I've read a very similar article which is quite obviously anti-filter with the same quote.

"it is hard to see how even a low end server would not be able to meet the demands of a very large ISP," - Until someone blacklists a youtube address.

Exetel's trial still doesn't address one of the key consernes of the anti-filter/censorship mob - Scope creep.

(Sorry about the double post - the comment box couldn't handle the quotes used on the page)

Why should it cost the user??

The government decides to censor the resources on the internet, and we pay $6 a year for it?
Why should this not be incurred by the government if that is their wish to filter internet content??
I certainly did not ask for my internet to be filtered. I don't understand why I should pay extra $6 for my internet services.
It's really not that much, but it is a cost I would not otherwise have to incur.

To all those people who support "the right to view child porn".

Why don't you all head off to the USA where hopefully you will get shot by one of the people who support "the right to bear arms".

To me, the lame arguments put forth by the anti-filtering lobby is no different to the gun lobby.

Think of the children?

Seeing that anyone technically minded can circumvent any proposed filter, and the government's cry is to protect the children, why don't they forget the whole mandatory part, and just subsidise parents who want to buy filtering software from one of the countless number of software producers.

Any "complaint" based filter is doomed to failure anyway. Parents will stop supervising their children expecting the filter to protect them. In reality it requires a complaint to the filter authority to have content blocked. So someone has to see it and report it before any filtering takes place. This leaves (how many million?) pages still available to the unsupervised children. Dynamically changing URLs by the millisecond.

The filter is hardly going to help the police profile paedophiles either. I'd imagine they'd have private networks set up that don't make use of http.

The whole proposal is flawed.

re: Think of the childeren

The government already has a free web-filter scheme for parents. But the filter had very little uptake. Even most ISP's offer filtering for low rates or free of charge.

So it's not about "protecting our childeren", because for that, they would go and educate parents, heavily advertise the free filtering software and actively persue thoes that distribute child pornography and shut them down, not just tell us to look the other way.

re: Why should it cost the user??

Why should it cost the taxpayer? If the people who pay for internet access dont cover the cost, it just comes out of the taxpayer. Besides... its $6 a year... 50c a month. Really? is that worth arguing about?

It's not scope creep, it's scope avalanche

The problem is that while the government talks about child porn, it clearly means to use The Filter to secretly censor much more than that.

It's a technique (using constant references to the need to protect children) that notoriously was developed in Germany in the 20s and 30s.

Our government has never limited the stated ambit coverage of The Filter to child porn, although that has been the public justification they have promoted. They have admitted that censorship will apply to any "inappropriate" material, at the secret discretion of the minister or his appointees.

Surely even the "think of the children" brigade can see the dangers in that, given that The Filter also won't do what they think/hope it will.

Tax vs Fees

Considering most taxpayers have internet, and most internet customers pay tax, whether you pay 50c per month via your ISP, or 50c per month of your taxes are spent on this instead of (insert govt discretionary expenditure item here) doesn't really matter. You still pay for it!

Mind you, I don't support the filter. Nor does Exetel.

At least they admitted publicly that they are testing something (how many ISPs have tested something and NOT admitted it).

"Here comes the lame excuses" - spoken like someone who has never had a critical thought in their lives.

"Where are the facts that they are actually going to filter out something like "politcally conflicting views". This is just utter rubbish." - I never mentioned that the government would, 100% do this, but the public has a genuine concern it could happen, and with a secret list it is more likely to happen without public knowledge.

"The two topics have very much similar veins to them. The gun lobby argued that gun control would be useless and that if people wanted a gun they could bypass the controls put in place." - and thank <deity of choice>, every single gun in Australia is registered and owned by honest, law abiding citizens... oh, wait...

Here comes the lame responses

"Where are the facts that they are actually going to filter out something like politcally conflicting views?" The real question is "What STOPPING them from filtering whatever they want?" And the answer is a fact confirmed by Conroy himself - NOTHING!

The gun lobby argued that gun control would be useless and that if people wanted a gun they could bypass the controls put in place. And you know what? They were right! Armed robbery and other gun-related crime is still happening out there - so much for the "gun filter."

The fact is that the internet filter will be far easier to bypass than the gun filter, far less effective, and will have many more far-reaching civil and financial consequences than the virtual criminalisation of gun ownership.

As we found out with the lame excuses the gun lobby put out, since we now have gun control, which country has less gun related deaths per capita, Australia or the USA.

All the excuses in the world to stop filtering cannot escape one fact - Child porn will be less accessible with filtering just as with gun control - guns are harder to get.

So what type of country do you want, Safer or not. Because that's what it boils down to.

Of course it wont eliminate access to child porn, that's just naive. Just as gun control has not eliminated gun related deaths. BUT IT HAS REDUCED IT, and as a result we are a safer country.

poorly written article, 90% of the comments on here are apposed to the filter does that tell you something. Its not wanted and all the fake good publicity in the world isnt going to change that.

Test on IP-Ranges

Have these clowns heard of shared hosting? Its not uncommon for low-volume hosting providers to hang hundreds of domains off a single IP.

And then the lame justification that ignores the facts.....

You claim that "Child porn will be less accessible with filtering just as with gun control - guns are harder to get."

Just as guns are still NOT hard to get and that armed robbery has had no significant decline, this filter will not effect the supply and demand for child pornography... simply because the supply of both guns and CP have been "underground" for years and only law-abiding citizens are affected by the laws.

Exetel and even Conroy himself has admitted that that filter circumvention is both trivially simple and legal. Even if this was not the case, the filter is not directed at the sources of CP (private networks and peer-to-peer) but instead filters normal webpages where very little child pornography can be found even if you search for it.

The real fact of the matter is that the filter will have ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT on the supply and demand for child pornography, and even the Federal Police have confirmed this. We can only assume that the Government is chasing after other unstated goals.

We need to watch Conroy now

The furore about secret government censorship using The Filter has died down a bit, so Conroy and Rudd will hope they can get away with suddenly announcing that the trial has been an outstanding success and The Filter will start immediately.

We need to get the truth about this f---wit idea out into the general media, not just on tech sites like this where everyone understands the con job that the govt is trying to pull.

Parents, and members of the religious lobbies, need to be told that The Filter won't remotely do what is claimed, and that the govt seems to be running a hidden agenda to secretly ban whatever it deems "inappropriate". Like any opposition to govt policies, for instance.