Government mandatory porn filter to slow down the internet

[Andy]

lol hahahaha. Eriny you should go to China if you dislike the Internet being monitored and filtered. From what one of my friends over there told me, the government blocked google once because they thought it was giving them a bad image.

[beezy4eva]

If theyre going to ban internet porn then y not ban all forms of porn? My younger sister and I always stumble accross my parents magazine stash and im sure we're not the only kids who have. The problem isnt the internet its the parental supervision of the children that use it. A better option would be to educate parents on what sites/search engines they should let their children use and which they should block.

[AppleXY]

Wouldn't it be embarassing to call up your ISP and tell them you want to be able to watch porn?

clearly not...

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=i8Q8IyPE2aY

ROFLMFAO. hahahaha that was an excellent one :p

If theyre going to ban internet porn then y not ban all forms of porn? My younger sister and I always stumble accross my parents magazine stash and im sure we're not the only kids who have. The problem isnt the internet its the parental supervision of the children that use it. A better option would be to educate parents on what sites/search engines they should let their children use and which they should block.

Exactly. The parents should handle this problem, its a domestic one.

[Collin Li]

Facebook group that is exploding in size pretty quickly (has grown 200 members overnight - should be exponential for a while):
http://unimelbedu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7968823265

"No Australian Internet Censorship"

Fight for your freedom from a paternalistic government.

[excal]

I disagree with Rudd on two counts - social and technical. I think the social aspects have been argued to some point, and will continue to be, so I will put my thoughts on this topic on paper from a technical point of view.

It is simply too expensive, impractical, unsustainable if not impossible to implement a blanket filter across all ISPs. Besides, any person who really wants to bypass the filter can easily do so without having to opt-out (the government, fortunately, cannot filter encrypted SSH traffic through which you can tunnel web traffic aka porn if so desired - and filtering SSH traffic would be a big hurt for the ICT industry which means it won't happen).

I once read that every week (or day perhaps) there are 600 porn sites going up. How the operators of such a filter plan to keep up still puzzles me. If they decide to use a heuristic algorithm to determine whether a site is porn or not, how will they ensure that legitimate pages (e.g., the human body) are not filtered? Will Australian students have to ask their parents to ask the government to opt-out of a porn filter for study? Won't this factor in itself render the filter moot, as it could become a trend to say that one needs no filter for study...or 'study'?

How does the government plan to implement an opt-out scheme? Is this filter going to be centralised so that people can be mobile - resulting in a bottleneck in terms of internet traffic? Or will it be at ISP level, incurring cost on private business who would have to maintain these filters on behalf of the government?

I cite the case of Tom Wood, a 16 year old Melbourne student, who broke the recent million-dollar NetAlert filter in a matter of minutes. Every system is bypassable by a determined individual.

[brendan]

As reported in the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122575091772994663.html

[excal]

Really, i'm going to laugh at the ridiculous "isp filtering policy" IF its in act. That filter that government released was unstoppable of blocking explicit sites except it could be easily turned off by going to Add/Remove Programs and unistalling it LOOOL (just like any other program). Males will[/u] find pr0n0 if they want to. Really, all you need is a proxy server or the the company which hosts the noodz changes the domain. It's joke, How could you possibly block every single explicit site out of the 29,700,000,000+ webpages out there ROFLDOFL. SUXOR.

Sounds very draconian and a sign of control-freak Rudd's meddling in all aspects of Australian's lives. No one wants to see the already illegal child porn and abuse, but how does filtering ALL of Australia's Internet traffic practically and effectively improve this situation? Communist China does the same thing, and their Internet access is known globally as a joke. Slow, unreliable and flaky because of all the filtering being undertaken on the great volume of perfectly OK traffic. Didn't Rudd promise us all faster Internet? Sounds like he is finally being taken to account on his pre-election spin.

Agreed. Let the internet be, Rudd.

It will be done at an ISP level - so you can't simply uninstall it. However, there is a very simple solution to this - SSH tunneling / proxies. These are very hard to filter out without disrupting a LOT of IT infrastructure in Australia.

I think porn is a bit... ick, but the idea of the sites being blocked is stupid. It goes against human rights, from a sliding scale sort of view. I honestly disagree with any interference with the internet because it's pointless. Any info -however "dangerous"- you could access on the internet you could still access in real life anyway, and even if you couldn't, how does censorship make anything better? It merely hides the "problems" of society in a place where they can't be freely discussed.  And I smell hypocracy also, remembering that Rudd has been to a strip club at least once.

On the bright side, just like the Liberal government filter, I doubt it'll be very effective.

It won't. From what I've heard, anyone with some experience in computing can break it in seconds with the appropriate tools.

Wouldn't it be embarassing to call up your ISP and tell them you want to be able to watch porn?

So many people would be doing it, it'd be 'just another call'.