Friday, December 12, 2008

Interesting Spin on Proposed Internet Filtering

Oh, December seems to be rant month.

Some Swinburne University students asked me for a little more clarification on why the proposed Australian Labour Government's filtering idea is a bad one.

I'll be writing my concerns up at length and back-posting them here as they are finished. However, because tomorrow is protest day, i'll post an couple of interesting links you may wish to read:



  • The ACMA's Report on Closed-Environment Filtering for 2008 : Basically suggests 'The Filters were better than the last time we tested them in 2005, because they filter SSL based traffic now, but they could still degrade network performance between 2 and 87 percent and still have a 23 to 40 percent chance of false-positive filtering.


  • Telstra Says No To Filtering - The Australian : When Australia's Largest Carrier decides they can't participate because of 'customer management issues' (possibly due to them moving a large chunk of their support staff, who'd receive the brunt of the complaints offshore earlier in the week) -- it says something about the ways this particular idea will effect everyone in the country, in one way or another.


  • How To Easily Bypass Australia's Internet Filters (for free) - Sydney Morning Herald : Explains to the technical neophyte how to use VPN software and other proxy methods to bypass the filter, in a worst case scenerio.


  • Labor’s Mandatory ISP Internet Blocking Plan - Electronic Frontiers Australia : Analysis of the ACMA proposal, discussions on why this proposal effects everything from online commerce to the civil liberties of Australian citizens and a well reasoned argument on why parents should filter their children's use, followed by a locally installed filter on the computers in the home -- If you haven't read this, you certainly should.

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