I know this has been written to death about, but surely another opinion won’t hurt. It seems a lot of IT blogs and tossing around false / misleading figures, making it easy to disprove that the filtering technique will slow the internet. Sure, a filter list of 1000 entries won’t be too bad on performance. A setup similar to the UK’s IWF where by there is a suspected IP list, followed by a URL list. This is fine, while I don’t like this setup for privacy and freedom, the method is technically viable (as seen with most UK ISPs). Of course URL checking fails with SSL.
I have two simple reasons why the ISP level filter should be abandoned before being forced upon Australia. My first reason is privacy and freedom. The list will be a secret, and is not published or checked by a third party. How does Australia know it’s not being lied to. I really don’t want something like the Great Firewall of China, where even Chinese citizens know that their Internet is different to ours. Not only the fact that we will have any control over the filter lists, data around Australia will enter several choke points. If these points ever become hacked, your data could be exposed. Passwords, cookies, e-mails, all of it.
Why bother blocking ten thousand RC sites, there is more than ten thousand RC sites on the internet. Not only that the proxy can be bypassed using several ready available proxy services (which are being used at schools around Australia every day). From what I’ve read so far, suggests that there will be no attempt to block anything but RC content, which means that the proxy systems will not be block proxy servers. These tools are well known by students, and people who view/download child porn using HTTP, will quickly learn how to access these tools, making the purpose of the filter useless.
In the end, the proxy will not make children safer at all. So Stephen Conroy, please stop using this as your slogan. I’d be very surprised that any child would actually end up at one of the 10,000 you can block, out of the billions of sites that they visit a day, when they search for My Little Pony and Ben 10. Save your/our money, and stop trying to force a useless filter down our throats, when the money could be better spent on health care, or what not. $100 million can go along towards a new hospital or research. Cut your losses (I won’t comment about the thousands of dollars already spent on this waste of money if you ditch the filter now).
Just my 2 cents for the blog-o-sphere.