Aussie government defends Internet censorship technology
THE AUSSIE government has had to defend its censorship technology from a leaked report by a panel of experts who claimed that its Internet filtering software is flawed.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said that the Internet Industry Association report must be wrong because it was paid for by the former Howard government.
He said that the panel didn't test the filtering technology to arrive at its conclusions, forgetting that you don't have to waste millions testing something when you know it won't work.
Quite why an independent panel would say something to butter up the former government is not clear. It's also not clear why any panel of techies would say anything other than filtering will slow down the Internet and probably not work.
The report, which we talked about yesterday, was sat on for months by Conroy, who found the information a bit embarrassing. Unfortunately it was eventually leaked, forcing Conroy to go into damage control mode.
He said that the report simply involved interviews and surveys and reviewing existing literature. It was "not an analysis of the ALP's policy," according to Conroy. He added that the government's pilot trial beginning in mid-January will provide 'real world' evidence on the impact of Internet content filtering.
Conroy denied that Labour is wasting cash trialling the technology in spite of the fact it was told by experts that Internet filtering will not work.
He is aware of the technical concerns raised in the report and that is why the government is conducting a pilot, he said. He seems to forget that you trial software to iron out bugs, not to see if it works at all.
Any day now we expect Conroy to announce that the government will be holding trials to see if maybe the sky is green rather than blue, or find out if black is white. µ
L'Inq
AP
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Isn't a "conroy" a known sex act? So wont any page mentioning one need to be banned?
Can you please stop referring to the Australian Labor (no u) Party as "Labour". They're an embarrassment to the meaning of the word.
"He added that the government's pilot trial beginning in mid-January will provide 'real world' evidence on the impact of Internet content filtering."
Except that it has now been revealed that the "real world" evidence won't actually involve any customers, and won't actually be filtering any real internet data streams, oh, and won't be using the actual blocklist, um, and probably won't be trying to block P2P yet.
So all in all it will be crowned a resounding success, despite the fact that the only thing they will actually be testing is the ISP's ability to install the servers into their data centres.
Conroy ftw!
If the aussies are anything like me they will either bypass the fascist crap or demonstratively do away with internet, which would mean they suddenly would have 10 times the bandwidth available from the people leaving internet behind (and emigrating perhaps) and so any loss in speed is compensated and they can also say 'success'.
If your "testing" does not include a 15 year old geek male high school student you fail at even creating a viable test.
Knowing how TCP/IP networks work it should take a horny kid about 5 minutes to work around this "filter."
I could do it in about 30 seconds. Or at least my wife thinks so. Doh!
Let China get their mates sorted.
The Outsaucing of Aussies.
If this filter goes ahead~ As soon as i get my degree i'm so out of this country~
Man, i'm going to sweden~
I don't need an e-babysitter
The report wasn't leaked, but it's true that Labor were sitting on it for months and weren't intending to release it at all. Senator Nick Michin demanded that the report be released and Conroy complied.
There are many other recent Australian reports damning the issue that are publically available so I don't know why everyone is focussing soley on this one.
There's also alot of protest about this filter that I notice alot of international coverage seems to miss, we Aussies aren't that laid back ya know.
These 'trials' were scheduled to start yesterday but the sheer incompetance of the DBCDE means that they are post-poned until mid-january, this is confirmed on the ministers website.
Here's hoping these trials are post-poned indefinatly and this stupid idea scrapped. Australia doesn't want or need this 'protection.'
Anyone with a reasonable grasp of the technology realises what a con job this internet filter is. Makes you wonder about their other policies, like the environment, their supposed 'bill of rights' and their investments in infrastructure. Are they con jobs too?
that filthy book of murder, rape, incest and paedophila that's been floating around.
Cult members often call it The Bible or simply 'the Book' since they often read nothing else.