[LINK] Senate Standing Committee: NetAlert/Mandatory filtering updates

[Stilgherrian]

On 19/2/08 11:32 AM, "Glen Turner" <gdt at gdt.id.au> wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-02-18 at 20:42 +1000, Michael Meloni wrote:
> 
>> Senate Standing Committee update 2: 8:48PM ACMA says they are looking to
>> expand black list. Liaising with International groups.Current sites
>> listed on the trial will only need to block the current ACMA blacklist -
>> just 800 URLs. Expected final black list numbers unable to be answered.
> 
> That's URLs, not IP addresses. So the implication is that ISPs will
> need to place a firewall in the core of their network.  Firewalls
> are not reliable devices, so this isn't a good engineering outcome.
> Obviously a ISP can't filter IP addresses if the list is of URLs,
> that would lead to customer contract issues.
> 
> I'd really like to see some details of the ISP trial in Tasmania.
> *Tasmania*!  Think about that, how little traffic can we be talking
> about when you struggle to get 155Mbps onto the island?  There's
> also one exit point from the island, so a logical place to do
> filtering exists.
> 
> In comparison, AARNet pulls that from a single small university and
> has a multitude of exit points (to prevent failures).  In short,
> the trial is rigged to produce the best result.

The specific term used last night was "URLs", by the ACMA staffer who
presumably knows what she's referring to.

There didn't seem to be any comprehension that 800 or 1500 URLs is still the
same kind of problem -- and vastly different from what would presumably me
hundreds of thousands or even millions of URLs if any "inappropriate"
content is to be filtered.

There was also some mention of "technbical means to assess material", which
I assume is content-level filtering rather than URL-level or IP-level
filtering.

One. Big. Can. Of. Worms.

Stil


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