[LINK] Aussie government to rig filter testing

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Aussie government to rig filter testing
Opponents of Great Aussie Firewall take to the streets
By John Ozimek
8th December 2008 11:29 GMT
The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/08/aussie_firewall_opposition/

The great Aussie firewall is coming apart at the seams, as opposition 
mounts, and critics have a field day dissecting inept government plans 
for testing their shiny new filters.

While the government might expect opposition from, well, the opposition, 
it is possible that the architect of the plan, Labour Senator and 
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, was not expecting dissent to 
come from within his own ranks. However, last week’s Conference of New 
South Wales’ Young Labour passed a motion calling for an opt-in system 
instead of the mandatory one proposed by the government. Motion 42 read:

"The internet is a free medium for the open communication of ideas and 
opinions without hindrance, and thus, should not be censored.

"NSW Young Labor supports individual discretion and choice with respect 
to the internet, rather than censoring the world wide web and its content."

Further embarrassment lurks in the testing plan for the internet filter 
now being tacked together by the government. According to a response 
sent to a member of the Australian Whirlpool forum, 
<http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1097810&p=42#r837> 
the test will not actually involve any live customers.

The letter explains:

"In consultations with ISPs, concerns have been raised that filtering a 
blacklist beyond 10,000 URLs may raise network performance issues, 
depending on the configuration of the filter. The pilot will therefore 
seek to also test network performance against a test list of 10,000 URLs.

"This will be a closed network test and will not involve actual 
customers. The list of 10,000 sites will be developed by the technical 
organisation assisting the Department on the pilot, which has access to 
lists of this size. As this test is only being performed to test the 
impact on network performance against a list of this size, and actual 
customers are not involved, the make-up of the list is not an issue."

In a well-argued piece that our own internet censors over at the 
Internet Watch Foundation could possibly learn from, Ars author and 
former ISP techie Iljitsch van Beijnum writes: 
<http://arstechnica.com/authors.ars/iljitsch>

"There's no way to build a filter box that can filter all the URLs where 
porn is hosted throughout the internet. A DNS-based filter that helps 
naive users avoid being confronted with explicit content would probably 
work to a certain degree. An IP-based filter for a small amount of very 
illegal content ... may also work. But anything more ambitious than that 
is certain to fail; either it won't work very well, or it will bankrupt 
the ISPs".

Piling on the government’s woes, opposition is now moving off the web 
and onto the streets. Protests are planned to take place on Saturday 
December 13 in all States: in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, 
Adelaide and Hobart. Event details can be found on the Stop the Clean 
Feed website. <http://www.stopthecleanfeed.com/>

-- 
 
Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au