As any of you who
actually visit my blog may've noticed, i've added a new widget! An online petition against Labor's proposed internet filter. I first saw the widget on
Hugh's Blog, and decided to drop it on mine also.
As for the filter, i first saw
it many, many months (probably verging on years) ago, when there was a bit of a flurry with news articles, online petitions, and even public debates. But then it disappeared for a while,
until now. ABC's Q&A, SBS's Insight, and countless other publications of every sort have gotten back on poor Conroy's ass.
But ignoring the media circus, i want to deal with the actual proposal. Created under the ideals of cracking down on pedophilia, euthanasia, and anorexia sites, Labor's Senator Stephen Conroy has failed miserably.
Lets look at a couple of unmissable truths:
1. It's pointless. It will not slow down the spread of internet child porn. Think about what it covers. It covers pages on the Web, period. No coverage of peer-to-peer networks, no coverage of FTP, newsgroups, torrents, nothing else. There is no doubting that there is child porn on the internet, the problem is that it is also in so many other areas. And any system that is complaint-based (that is, it is only blacklisted once someone actually complains to ACMA that it should be) will never get any large proportion of inappropriate sites.
2. It's going to backfire. It is technologically impossible to filter out all the nasty websites, but no good ones. You either end up barricading a glass of water with 6-inch concrete, or you hold back a dam with a paper-mache balloon. My bet is on it doing a bit of both. There have already been reports of people's business websites being blocked by the ACMA list without even knowing! Chances are my site could be blocked because now it has the words 'child porn' in it.
3. It's impractical beyond belief. How on earth are you going to place a server-side filter on the ISP feeds and not slow down the internet, or raise costs, or any number of other problems. And you will never be able to effectively stop any and all internet traffic. My estimate is on around 30 seconds for someone like myself, 5-6 seconds for a trained pro, maybe 10 minutes for someone with out any tech experience, and they will have bypassed the filters. Two main reasons for this. One, other filtered countries like China, Korea, Iran etc have already got a nice semi-black market running in unblocking sites.
Second problem, is the legitimate stuff like, secure data connections used for remote access to business servers etc. Given a little time, this could be easily adapted to the task, and thanks to the heavy encryption, and secure transmission methods, there is no way the Govt could know if it's child porn, financial figures, or a Google Image Search.
4. How? Linked to above is the rather large issue of how to do it.
Technologically, there are two options: Regular URL filtering, or content analysis.
First one never works at actually limiting child porn since there are gazillions (yes, gazillions) of pages on the Net, and URL filtering is also fairly easily bypassed.
Content analysis works by checking every page as it loads. Similarly useless for a couple of reasons, such as the speed. If you have to check every page, it's going to get mighty slow. Also, it doesn't know context. It could block the medical sites because they have a bit too much exposed flesh. Or block news pages, blogs etc. because they have the word child porn in it...
That'll do for now, but if you want to have a real debate, e-mail me or check the chat room below. But be warned, it could get very heated indeed if i get into it...
