Report on New Zealand net filtering trial
October 4, 2009 – 8:33 pm
New Zealand blogger Thomas Beagle has obtained a copy of the NZ Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) report (PDF) on their trial of an Internet filtering system (in this case the Netclean Whitebox).
Beagle writes:
The second half of it [the report] is more interesting as it has some results from the DIA’s testing. This was apparently split into three phases:
- Single ISP with 5,000 users ((already had their own filtering system so it was probably Watchdog).
- Two ISPs with 25,000 users.
- Four ISPs with 600,000 users (at a guess this was when Ihug and TelstraClear joined).
There’s no way to measure the effectiveness of the filter at stopping people from finding child pornography – we can’t tell how many people worked around it or downloaded material using peer to peer filesharing or other methods.
According to the report, the system was operating at 80% capacity in the third phase. Apparently this was a bit much for it as: “the system did experience some stability issues processing this amount of requests and required maintenance on two occasions to replace hardware.”
There is no further detail about whether the “80% capacity” referred to the performance of the filtering system or the Internet connection they were using.
