Wait continues for content filtering report
- 05 November, 2009 06:03
- Comments 13
The Australian public will have to continue to wait on the release of the Federal Government’s report on ISP-level filtering, with a spokesperson for the Communications Minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, confirming no date has been set for the report’s release.
“...No date has been set. The trial report is under consideration and will be published in due course,” the spokesperson said in an email response to Computerworld’s enquiries.
The news is likely to frustrate many consumers and those in the industry, not least of all the managing director of the company that carried out the testing on the internet filter trial Enex Testlabs.
In mid-October, Enex Testlab managing director Matt Tett called for the government to release the report on the trial to the public so people could see the methodology used in evaluating whether ISP filtering worked.
"I think at this stage I would definitely [want it made public], it is such a public thing it should be released. I think the minister or the minister's offices made undertakings in the past that it will be but we honestly don't know," he said in October. "As far as the testing goes people will see the transparency we have and it is better if it is out there." The move is also likely to frustrate the Opposition communications minister Nick Minchin, who in October told Computerworld sister publication ARN, that the Opposition did not support Government having mandatory ISP-based filtering.
“We’ve said we’ll give Senator Conroy the benefit of the doubt in relation to his trials and our attitude will be influenced by the outcome of his trials.” Minchin said in October. “But we’re happy, given that he’s spending millions of dollars of taxpayers money on trials, to see what these trials indicate before making a final judgement.”
That judgement, too, is likely to take a while.
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Comments
Ben
The report is only delayed because Rudd and Conroy know that it is a pile of garbage.
Anonymous of /b/
thats because this report will show us just what a fool conroy and co really are.
Aaron M
Obviously the report must be censored and Australians made unable to view it online, otherwise children could be hurt. If you want to view the report then you must be a supporter of child pornography…
Isn't that the logic of our wonderful Minister for Broadband?
Anonymous
I wonder if Conroy is censoring the findings in order to help promote his communist plan thus saving his arse from being sacked
Anonymous
Intended Release Date: 31 December 2009
TJ
Of course the report is garbage. Mandatory filtering probably slowed net speeds by half, blocked out many legit web pages because of 1 swear word or one reference to sex and blocked every social networking site as they all have children under 18 on there (hopefully not naked)...
Duncan Maitland
Seriously, you'll have to wait until you read the report before you call it a pile of garbage.
There exist ways to implement a blacklist filter that would not affect download speeds. The way most of the blacklist filters work is with route redirection - the ISP poisons their route tables so that the specific IP addresses of dodgy sites are routed to a separate filtering box. Any other traffic would be routed as normal. The extra routes aren't really a problem unless the number of filtered sites grows significantly, except possibly for some smaller ISPs with older routers that can't hold the entire routing table. 10K or 20K sites might be manageable, beyond that it would be a huge challenge for network engineers. Still, there are costs involved (upgrading routers, the filtering boxes themselves etc.) that will have to be passed on to the user.
Dynamic content filters (ie. not using a blacklist) are a whole different kettle of worms. I have no idea how it could possibly be done without affecting the user experience in a not insignificant way.
But the thing that gets me about all of this is that I possess the knowledge and means necessary to bypass a filter (as I imagine most of the people active in the debate are) and I can easily teach anyone how to do it in about 5 minutes. So I object to the whole thing on the basis that it's a really expensive feel-good exercise.
Ben
Duncan, true, but the scope has to be incredibly small and include sites which practically nobody visits. That is not the intention of our government. They plan to block YouTube and Wikipedia pages. That is markedly different from examples in the UK (after they learned their lesson).
The leaked Whitebox paper on Wikileaks shows that just one error in the blacklist can cause meltdown.
Anonymous
Of course it's not reasonable of us to ask for the details of this secret government plan for secret political censorship. It's all a secret.
Anyway, it's said to protect the children, so how dare we question the secrecy and the idiocy of the concept. Asking questions indicates doubt and that is verboten.
Anonymous
"As far as the testing goes people will see the transparency we have and it is better if it is out there."
This might be true if Enex were to release the report, but of course it will be edited to hell and back by Conroy and his henchmen. So we will have no idea what the original report actually contained... Another unfalsifiable position yet again in this internet filter debacle.
When everyone is in a position to falsify the proponents of this censorship regime - through the leaking of the ACMA blacklist. All the claims about "the worst of the worst" and "almost exclusively child pornography" seem to be very misleading indeed. If not a willful lie.
Actualize
If the government doesn't release the original report - then perhaps someone at Enex should accidentally leak it?
John
Obviously, the filter is targeted directly at any form of online dissent, whether that be films, art, lectures, or whatever. Conroy is worried that the internet is becoming the new academia, but worse, anyone can access this information unlike university.
Given the economic meltdown and higher energy prices, the government is worried about the internet being used as a tool to bypass the mainstream government controlled media and find out 'what's really going on' via youtube and many other sources which expose content which we could never see on mainstream television.
Thus, the web filter is a counter revolutionary exercise and they will find anything to justify ramming it through such as child porn, animal cruelty, violence and terrorism (terrorism meaning any form of critique that is against government policies).
Scary times.
Anonymous
Two years ago I would have said it was unthinkable that any Australian government would try to impose secret censorship of whatever content they considered "inappropriate", or that the public would let them get away with it if they did.
I still have faith in the common sense of the people, but the detail that has been given and leaked about the operation of the secret Net filter means that the real intent is only too clear.
Once the official censorship apparatus is in place, any future government will be able to ban whatever they deem to be inappropriate content. We'll never know what that is, because that's a secret with heavy penalties for disclosure.
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