Another busy day of filtering news with the Greens calling on the Government to abandon their live ISP trial as ‘as it’s flawed and doomed to failure‘. Senator Ludlam said:

“This trial is simply all show. It won’t give any meaningful indication of how mandatory internet filtering would work in practice. One of the few Internet Service Providers participating is only doing so to prove to the Government that it won’t work. We won’t even get a sense of the impact of the filter on internet performance, because the trial is not even going to be using real customers. “

Asher Moses and SMH call it with the headline ‘Labor plan to censor internet in shreds‘. “Shreds,” alright.

Back at ALP HQ the boys at the DBCDE and Lindsay Tanner have teamed up to blog about the digital economy. One issue they want to explore is ‘how do we maintain the same ‘civil society’ we enjoy offline in an online world?’ So far a good section of the comments are related to filtering, but they are moderated. Commenter Ben Gray writes:

“Senator Conroy refuses to listen to anyone with any technical knowledge of how the internet works, so why would we think that this blog represents anything more than an over-stuffed, never emptied “suggestions” box, which constitutes more of an insult to peoples’ intelligence than it does represent “an open dialogue”?”

Tanner and Conroy — It sounds like an unsexy ’80s cop show. A case of Good Cop, Bad Cop Jon Seymour writes.

Speaking of that scene, the The Australian Information Security Association says the primary objectives of the government’s plan to block unwanted content will not work effectively, potentially wasting millions of dollars of tax-payer money.

Individuals who are motivated to seek unwanted content, will, with a 100% certainty in AISA’s opinion, continue be able to do so by bypassing the filtering in a number of trivial and not so trivial ways.

Sometimes those trying to protect us, like Bernadette McMenamin, simply become blinded. She says the Telstra’s decision not to take part in the live trials was ‘a black day for Australia’ and that ‘this indicates that Telstra is not committed to banning child pornography and we should question its values.’

Other news and blog coverage:

– ZDNet: List of ISPs who put in an EOI

– Crikey: Why Internet Filtering Won’t Work, is Wrong and Dangerous

– Public Polity: Political background could explain underlying motive for ISP filtering

– Servant of Chaos: With the Internet Filter It’s Not 2009, It’s 1984

– Danu Poyner: Net Censorship: What we can learn from The Howard Years