Evolving Thoughts

The stupidity of ISP filtering no barrier to its implementation

The Labor government has a policy to force ISPs to filter web requests to prevent child pornography. Sounds nice in theory, but I’ve been using a filtered ISP at my university (they’re running a trial) and what I can do online at home in one minutes takes the better part of fifteen at work. I am doing all work online at home in the mornings before I go to work, because just trying to find images for my slides is grindingly slow. Now a consultant’s report gives it a tick (what else? They’re being paid to), and no matter what the results, minister for communications Stephen Conroy says it will go ahead. Of course, it won’t work because the pornographers will use proxy servers and non-web channels to evade the simplistic filtering protocols. So, like the onerous security at airports which in no way actually makes it hard for the terrorists but incredibly unpleasant and expensive for everyone else, this will screw everyone else except the child pornographers.

And of course once it’s in place, no government will be able to resist blocking other unpleasant sites, like those that, say, give the Arab perspective on the “war on terror”, or which “offend” a religious group, or which say something the government declares to be hate speech, and so on. As the right to free speech is only implicit in Australian and common law, it’s very vulnerable to restrictions by over-zealous governments acting with best intentions, the road to somewhere is paved by.

Politics Sermon

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Comments (9)

  1. This is what a Labour government does after all those years in the wilderness? They’re never getting my second preference again while they pursue these sorts of authoritarian policies. It’s similar to the Labour government here in the UK, which I would also not support. At least here they have the Lib Dems as a viable option.
    Have the Australian Democrats got their house in order yet?

  2. This is what a Labour government does after all those years in the wilderness? They’re never getting my second preference again while they pursue these sorts of authoritarian policies. It’s similar to the Labour government here in the UK, which I would also not support. At least here they have the Lib Dems as a viable option.
    Have the Australian Democrats got their house in order yet?

  3. It’s “Labor” in Australia. And no, the Dems have evaporated in a burst of quantum foam. They left the Greens as the third choice, which isn’t fantastic for me.

  5. It’s sad. I don’t think it’s yet sunk in to the-powers-that-be that those “pictures” and “movies” are only bit streams – they can come in any wrapper (brown paper bags? 😉

  6. It’s sad. I don’t think it’s yet sunk in to the-powers-that-be that those “pictures” and “movies” are only bit streams – they can come in any wrapper (brown paper bags? 😉

  7. At a high school I taught at, they had a pretty stringent site blocker program installed. I was helping some students do an independent research project. I wanted to get them a couple of journal articles via my university’s online journal access, which I should be able to sign onto anywhere. I was blocked from my UNIVERSITY LIBRARY’s site. And when I called their IT department to ask them to unblock it, they told me that they can’t unblock a single site–their software just blocks “types” of sites, and to unblock one type, they had to unblock another type. Meanwhile, all of the instant messenger sites were completely accessible.
    I don’t know how people expect teachers to develop lesson plans that use online resources when there’s no way to predict what sites will be blocked.

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