[LINK] Weinstein: Conroy Bananas

[Ivan Trundle]

On 09/01/2008, at 6:33 PM, George Bray wrote:

> On Jan 9, 2008 1:51 PM, Brendan Scott <brendansweb at optusnet.com.au>  
> wrote:
>
>> I'm not following, I thought that the proposal was that anyone  
>> could elect to opt out of the filters?
>> If so, this argument doesn't make much sense to me.
>
> I just don't feel that anyone (Govt, carriers, ISPs) has the ability
> to achieve their censorship goal, and in the meantime everyone by
> default gets poorer internet performance. Leave alone the question of
> who decides what gets filtered and the prospect of some future
> authority extending the scope of censorship into other realms deemed
> "inappropriate".

  It appears that governments and less-than-clueful people assume that  
filters work because it is so easy to apply a regime AGAINST child  
porn (or whatever). However, this also assumes that detecting and  
tracing child porn (or other evil material) is a trivial task, and  
that maintaining a filter table is easily managed by a combination of  
computing power and human intelligence.

Why is it that political leaders and others in levels of society  
believe that this is so?

I would have thought that it was very easily demonstrable that finding  
*all* of the evil stuff is not that easy, and that filtering only part  
of it using a range of guesses a sub-optimal solution.

The collateral damage caused by weak/ineffective/incomplete/inaccurate  
filters will have an immediate effect on the community, as as been  
discussed at length on Link and elsewhere.

iT