Bingo. Well said.

I hope you lot are proud of yourselves for setting the fight against child porn back 20 years.

I agree with that. Their campaign is just one huge self-indulgent PR posefest that will not reduce real child abuse. Put the money into actual police and child protection services instead.

We’re all aware of 8e6 and the argument moved on a long time ago. It’s useless for two reasons:

1) Tit is only as effective as advertised against a blacklist, which is only a part of what the Government plans to filter
2) A blacklist can’t keep up with illicit content, so all you’re doing is using the world’s most efficient BB gun against an elephant.

No ISP filter vendor has made ANY arguments as to why their filter is better than increased police resources. Neither has the government for that matter.

The opportunity cost of ISP filtering is the protection of children. I hope you lot are proud of yourselves for setting the fight against child porn back 20 years.

Suppose the Australian Government is successful and 8e6 and NetClean filters are installed everywhere and only block against a blacklist. Suppose they block against that blacklist 100% accurately, measured with respect to the list they are configured with.

What stops the Government using a Bill of Parliament to replace the manually compiled ACMA blacklist with a “more effective” “dynamically compiled blacklist”, refreshed say, once a day? This will be justified, at the time it is done, because it is “more effective” at “protecting the children”.

Peter Mancer has previously stated that Net Clean can only be used to block strictly illegal material (enforced by vendor licensing terms), yet NetClean suggests on its own website that NetClean is suitable for implementing filtering against the ACMA blacklist (which includes otherwise legal X18+-rated material). This is a contradiction that has not been resolved to my satisfaction.

Will NetClean refuse to supply technology to the Australian ISP vendors if the ACMA-blacklist stays as broad as it is. And anyway, what precedence will a Swedish vendor’s licensing terms have over an Australian act of Parliament in the High Court of Australia?

It is not clear to me that we can rely on vendor licensing terms to prevent politcal abuse of a technology. It is not clear to me that a mandatory censorwall initially configured with a manually configured blacklist will always be so configured.

We need to resist technology such 8e6 and NetClean now, because we don’t want a single act of parliament to be between us and political tyranny. NetClean and 8e6 may be fine pieces of technology but, despite what NetClean’s founders say, they merely enable political tyranny. Any claim to the contrary needs to be judged against the vested interests of those making it.

When Michael said:

“None of the filters being trialled can automatically filter out Internet pornography effectively”

Two key words he used were: “automatically” and “effectively”.

Name a blacklist filter that will automatically block ALL pornography on the Internet!

No such thing exists.

Even if such magical thing did indeed exist it would require human interaction to:

1. Search for “prohibited content”.
2. Block it.

Now imagine the infinite work involved in doing so…

Effective? No.

You think the Australian Government has the budget for that?

Secondly, is there going to be a classification panel, and if so are they going to be working 24/7 reviewing and blocking prohibited content from ALL over the web?

Surely they will miss content.

Blacklists are full of fail, and you know it.

Any filter is full of fail.

Regards,
Ben Grubb

Just for once, I’d like someone to confirm, unequivocally, what the specific aims of this filtering project are. At the moment it just appears to be “pfaff around with some activity or other so it looks like we’re doing something until the public’s attention turns elsewhere.

My question was in relation to filtering pornographic material automatically, as was the statement in my post. With respect to the 2003 survey being touted, I believe ‘automatic’ refers to on the fly or dynamic filtering. Not a blacklist where material is manually added.

A blacklist is rarely 100% accurate as it requires human processes to add items to the list. Especially a blacklist of pornographic or ‘inappropriate’ websites.

There are a number of filtering technologies that will filter URLS on a blacklist with 100% accuracy and no false positives or negatives. The best example of this is the hybrid BGP and URL filtering system as used by NetClean in their Whitebox Internet filter. This type of technology was first used in BT’s Cleanfeed system but their use of proxy servers can cause issues related to the changing of IP address requests as happened in the recent Wikipedia problem in the UK.

@Big Pete

No, I’m not a NetSweeper booster. I think that their technology has limitations that other technologies have addressed.

I sometimes think it’s just the one person, different name.