[LINK] Weinstein: Conroy Bananas

[Richard Chirgwin]

Ivan Trundle wrote:
>
> 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?
Because they've all seen demonstrations from vendors "proving" that the 
filters work, and heard long dissertations on how the blacklists are 
continuously updated; and because it doesn't really matter if the filter 
does / does not work, as long as you can stand up with a media statement 
about protecting Strayan families online.

RC
>
> 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
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