ICANN says Web filters will "embarrass" Aussie govt
- 01 July, 2009 09:31
- Comments 17
Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy.
An Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) chief has said the Australian government will “embarrass itself” if it pushes ahead with plans to install a national Internet content filter.
The group is a non-profit corporation that oversees management of domain names and IP addresses, Internet Protocol address space allocation and generic Top Level Domains.
ICANN board chair Peter Dengate Thrush said national Internet content filters are ineffective at law enforcement. The plan was introduced by federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy ostensibly as a mechanism to control distribution and access to child pornography.
“The government has set itself up for embarrassment,” Thrush said.
“I have no problems with the principle behind it [but] censoring material outside the country is difficult and the tools to do it cost a lot.”
Web filtering at the Internet Service Provider-level will be compulsory under the plans, and all online illegal and Restricted Content will be blocked.
In a previous development, Conroy refuted claims that political material could be added to the government-controlled blacklists, but acknowledged the public has raised legitmate concerns about functional-creep.
"It goes against the tenets of the Labor Party to block political [material]," Conroy said on a previous ABC Q&A television program.
The federal government is conducting trials with nine ISPs to evaluate the effectiveness of the filters and will make a decision pending the results.
Netforce, Tech2U, OMNIConnect, Webshield and Nelson Bay Online are using a Marshal836 filtering and reporting product for the trial. Primus Telecommunications, Highway 1, Optus and Unwired are also participating in the government pilot.
Critics have raised concerns that a national Web filter program will impose heavy costs on ISPs and argue the technology will be unable to fulfill the government's objective of blocking illegal content.
The filter could potentially be bypassed by technologies such as anonymous proxies such tor and Virtual Private Servers.
A recent independent trial by ISP Exetel found Web filtering could cost users about $6 a year and cause no network disruption.
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Comments
william_nguyen@idg.com.au
web filters = spam mail filters
they just dont work
Mostly Anonymous
Exetel trial was a sham
Exetel deliberately left out URLs that they knew would cause performance degradation. I don't know what exactly they were trying to prove, but real world performance of a serious block list was not it.
Oh, and of course, URLs that would cause serious degradation are part of the existing ACMA naughty list, so any test of performance would need to include them, so I can only conclude that Exetel's test was deliberately designed to deceive.
Darrenpauli
Darren Pauli
I've heard similar things from other Exetel customers, though I was told by Exetel it used the URL list from the Internet Watch Foundation which they said was similar in content and count to ACMA's.
Thanks for the comment!
Darren
CW
Government department advises how to bypass internet filter!
The Privacy Commissioner website provides information on how to bypass the proposed internet filter.
Talk about stupid, the government internet filtering policy will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and will be trivial to bypass.
http://www.privacy.gov.au/internet/tools/index.html#6
CW
Exetel trial sham
The Exetel trial used the IWF list of sites (allegedly), the filter vendor stipulates that high traffic sites can not be placed on the blocklist.
Peter Mancer, has said as much himself here: https://www.howtobeasystemsengineer.com/blog/?p=70#comment-34
<cite>You are correct in that if a URL within Youtube or Amazon was added to the filtering blacklist then the amount of traffic through the filter would increase dramatically which would need to be considered in the filtering implementation. This is certainly not recommended for any blacklist system, as can be seen by the recent problem with the Wikipedia page in the UK.</cite>
Consider that "instruction in crime" is grounds for Refused Classification (RC) and RC videos are on Youtube, some of the RC videos relate to graffiti.
Senator Conroy has made it clear that RC material will be part of the mandatory filter regime and YouTube is an extremely high traffic website.
The above pretty much invalidates anything learned from the Exetel "trial", it was just a PR stunt from the filter vendor.
It doesn't cost much or have any measurable impact on the web experience if we filter a list of URLs that wont be used in Australia using a filtering platform that can't meet the government's requirements.
Anonymous
> Exetel's test was deliberately designed to deceive.
Exetel are brown nosing Labor.
Ruairi
Important note
Just so we're all clear, listen up Conroy. Child porn is NOT, i repeat NOT distributed on the web. There may be a few exceptions here and there, but it's mainly distributed over VPN's and torrents - a different technology that this filter does not cover.
This is NOT about protecting children, this is about forcing their dogma on you. The Christian group 'family first' is behind this.
Anonymous
Ho hum
This is not nearly the first time an Australian Government has spent lots of taxpayer money on something that could never have worked, and it certainly wont be the last. Even though this is just an act of blaten political expediency, we should just let them get on with it, have them suffer the backlash, have it discontinued, and move on, before the Government party changes and we get locked up in the inevitable "it was their fault" echos.
Bourkie
Tor and VPNs
"The filter could potentially be bypassed by technologies such as anonymous proxies such tor and Virtual Private Servers."
Should read:
'The filter could potentially be bypassed by technologies such as anonymous proxies such as Tor and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).'
gfrend
Resign, Conroy
There's been much talk lately about whether some politicians have lied. There is no question that Conroy lied to the Australian people when he claimed that his filter was to control pedophiles, when his real agenda was to win some Senate votes and preferences from the ACL.
Conroy gave the game away when he was forced to admit that the filter will in fact be used to secretly censor "inappropriate" content. Now what would the government consider inappropriate - anything said by the opposition?
Conroy has repeatedly lied to us about his filter, and he should resign.
Anonymous
Ctrl+Alt+Del
It's not a digital economy it's a digital society and it requires leadership with vision -not Stephen Conroy.
Anonymous
Web Filters
When will governments learn that imposition of unreasonable controls will never work. I can say for sure that the government is not smarter than the people they're trying to stop by using web filters.
Prohibition is the finest example of ineffective and ill fated legislation. It never managed to curb the consumption of alcohol, in fact I think it may have actually increased it.
Just behind the web filters will be increased taxes on the use of the Internet too. Just look at your phone bills if you're interested in what the government wants from you.
Anonymous
Embarrassing
1. The filter is put in place.
2. It is demonstrated to the public that a teenager can bypass it in under 5 minutes.
3. The thousands of technologically competent people who've been screaming "it won't work!" for the past months/years will laugh and say "I told you so".
4. Conroy and his government will have to explain why they wasted all those millions of taxpayer dollars on a filtering scheme that doesn't do what it's supposed to do.
- Yeah, I could see how that might be embarrassing.
Tim B
Exetel test
Exetel used a method that does not impact performance, and proved it... That said, the solution chosen will NOT scale to the sort of lists Conroy is talking about. The vendor of the software said this themselves.
Small lists might be fine. Easy to handle complaints about, easy to filter. But the list is going to bloat out very quickly once the fuddy-duddies start complaining about every 2nd website they see.
IT Geek
Secure sessions won't be
One other point is that secure sessions (e.g. online shopping, Internet banking, etc.) will be intercepted by the servers running the filter, then these servers will re-authenticate to the end user's PC - which means all secure sessions will be authenticated by the Australian government. This removes the ability for the end user to see the security certificate of whomever they're connecting to.
Internet fraud, anyone?
gfrend
An embarrassing joke
Of course the government won't embarrass itself with the filter. Apart from the fact that it is too clueless about the effects of its policy to be embarrassed, the reality is that it is already an international laughing stock.
Pity we all have to be an unwitting and unwilling part of the joke.
Anonymous
The Two Myths
For almost a decade now there has been alarmist and polarised rhetoric distorting important new findings about the risks and benefits of children's use of the Internet. The debate has been polarised around two conflicting myths - The Myth of the Columbine Generation and the Myth of the Digital Generation. One is generated by fear and the other hope and both distort the reality. Parents, educators and policymakers can get whiplash trying to respond to the competing pull of these two myths.
Fortunately, there has been millions of dollars spent on rational academic research done by appropriately qualified psychologists and sociologists that disproves both myths.
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/e-society/projects/1/UKCGOsurveyreport.pdf
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/
http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/bestof.html
But of course the authorities dwell on past isssues and drive ICT further back into the dark ages. ICT in Australia is a laggard (almost last) in terms of comparison with other OECD nations.
An Observation: Everytime the police do their job and bust child porn rings, check the profiles of the offenders - politicians, teachers, police etc etc.
It is shameful!
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