'Phil'
What makes you think Gordon Brown is a 'fool',it's his & Tony Blair's SOLE PURPOSE to destroy the Labour movement,once they have secured their own financial futures.
Those two, have been 'sleepers' in Labour's midst,since Scargill & D Hatton's prescence in that party.
We & this country, mean absolutely NOTHING to them,money is what they care about.

1) It won't work.
2) It won't been finished on time.
3) By the time it's out it will be so oudated that I will disappear into obscurity.
4) The way this Labour government is going they will be out by May next year. People are sick of them trying to diminish our civil liberties (I.D. cards etc) and many MP's in the Labour party are against these policies because they know how unpopular they are. Gordon Brown is acting like he is Tony Blair in 1997 but he is a fool to neglect the fact that Labour's popularity is in the toilet and trying to ram through this kind of idea is going to get them kicked out.

It's pointless a typical filter problem is the Dutch town: Sexbirum
That town has been filtered more then once, but it's the name of the town :-)

BTW, filtering is silly, parents should talk to their children and explain good versus bad.
Not leaving their job in the hands of others.
It's so typical these days, parents not knowing what their kids do, let alone be home for the kids.
Too much people work, while there should be somebody home for them, and I don't mean somebody you pay to do it.
If you take kids, make damn sure you have time for them! Then the Internet is not a problem either.

There are numerous ways to get around just about any censorship imposed on the internet by ISPs and/or governments. The easiest is to use non-censored DNS and proxy servers that are outside the censored region or even create and use your own DNS. There are several ways listed in an article here: http://www.zensur.freerk.com/index.htm

Down with censorship!

Arsepurgers is contagious amoungst politicians.

Sites get blacklisted, so do subdomains. And if a "special" browser is needed for that scheme, then the researchers working on the filtering tech will have their own copy. And don't even think about legal implications, that crap will never be stated "as is" legally. It goes just like law enforcement: they try, but don't blame them if they fail. But I gotta admit, when you consider there are huge piles of cash being invested in this kind of tech, it has to be for obscure reasons (from my citizen's perpective). Smart people work on restrictive technologies, but when the public finds out about the implications, they get smarter hella fast!

Business idea

Once the filter is implemented, does that mean that anything I can get my hands on without circumventing the filter is ‘approved’? If so, does that mean we will see government officials charged for distributing illegal material?

Will copyright layers take the next step and put filtering on music files? Will gambling sites and foreign bank websites be filtered next to raise revenue?

So here is the idea.

Create a site called ‘reverse.[insert site name]’. All data in that site will be in translated format eg. swap bits around so that 1=0 and 0=1. Since the data will become meaningless, the filter fails to pickup positives and become useless. Yet, your browser/decoder will be able to cope with this without any issues. This is legal and there is nothing filters can do about it. It also takes 10 hours of programming (if you lazy or new to this sort of thing).

Wow Nikki, I thought you were like, totally in favor of the nanny state, because it makes you so safe. What ever made you pen such rubbish?

HB

Article 5, paragraph 1 of the German constitution guarantees the right to expert an opion in speech, writing and picture. It also guarantees the free access to such opinion, and the freedom of the press. The last sentence of paragraph 1 says "Eine Zensur findet nicht statt." (Censorship does not happen.) But paragraph 2 of article says that this right is limited by laws, and explicitly mentions the protection of the youth. Paragraph 3 then underlines that art, science and research are free (as in speech).
Now, the first part of paragraph 2 is extremely inexplicit, while its second part, the protection of the youth, is absolutely explicit. It would not look good for the government to call on the first part of paragraph 2, which is why they use the second part, the protection of the youth. The whole act has of course nothing to do with protecting the youth, or fighting terrorism. There is another parallel development in Germany, and other European countries, namely a change of privacy. So far privacy was regarded as right worthy of protection. However, the current draft of a new law not only forces ISPs to record and store all information about connections made by users (IP addresses, phone numbers), but now also ***allows*** ISPs to inspect their customers' traffic, store the information, and ***forward*** the information to authorities and (!) copyright holders of the entertainment industry.

Once they make circumventing the mandated filtering a crime, they create a new class of criminal for the establishment to incarcerate and marginalize. Turning law-abiding citizens into convicts with the stroke of a pen is perfectly standard operating procedures for burgeoning police states.

'If the governments of Germany and Australia are prepared to keep paying for an unpopular system that will not do anything, in the middle of a recession, then they deserve to find out how pointless they are.'

The Governments of the world don't give a toss, it's the publics money they're spending, and there's always more ways to ring more cash out of them.