Beyond The Fringe

Technologist Elias Bizanne shares his comprehensive analysis of the faulty assumptions implicit in the government compulsory ISP-based net filtering plans, highlighting the political gauntlet Rudd and his government are fecklessly running:

… to mandate restricted access to information on the Internet, based on expensive imperfect technology that can be routed around, is a Brave New World that will not be tolerated by the broader electorate once they realise their individual freedoms are being restricted

A poll conducted by the Courier Mail is currently showing 91% of a total 5735 respondents reject the net filter – a VERY significant indication that Rudd’s policy is way out of step with the thoughts of the net community.

According to the Internet Service Provider Content Filtering Pilot Technical Pilot Technical Testing Framework, the trials starting on 24th December will aim to

test a range of different types of filtering including:
• ACMA blacklist filtering only (for a blacklist of up to 10,000 URLs); or
• ACMA blacklist filtering plus the filtering of other content using different approaches
to filtering which would, for example, include:
- Index filtering of different sized blacklists;
- Dynamic analysis filtering;
- IP versus URL filtering;
- DNS poisoning.

The Australian public have still not been informed specifically what “other content” will be filtered in the trials by our secretive government. However, if IP filtering is employed, innocuous sites hosted on the same IPs as blacklisted sites may also be unavailable.

Interestingly, as an aside, one of the callers on the ABC National program Australia Talks, drew attention to “The Porn Report”, an Australian book debunking common assumptions about porn.

The survey of pornography users was not random, but was broad enough to demonstrate that the common stereotypes are wrong: unsurprisingly, given that pornography users make up about a third of Australian adults, they are fairly representative of the broader population, with the major exception being that fewer than one in five of the respondents were women.

The Internet is a lot more diverse, but despite extensive efforts the authors managed to find not a single site with actual rape photographs, and only a handful of sites with faked ones.

…..

There is no evidence that pornography causes harm to its users: the studies that suggest this have involved pushing pornography on non-users in artificial laboratory experiments. In contrast, there has been almost no attempts to study the beneficial effects of pornography, even though consumers overwhelmingly report positive effects: “Pornography has made them more relaxed and comfortable, more tolerant and open-minded. It has given them pleasure and improved their relationships.”

Whilst listening to the Australia Talks podcast with Mark Pesce deconstructing the issue, read the complaints of Australian Democrats who are outraged that Senators’ computers are being filtered right now.

Senators could still access blocked websites by request, but Democrats Senator Lyn Allison said that was not good enough.

“It seems to me to be a form of censorship which has absolutely no purpose,” she told the Senate.

“And I object to the fact that someone else is deciding what is a morally appropriate website for me to observe and what is not.”

Senator Allison said the filter had blocked completely innocent websites she had tried to access, including news websites.

The Australian Computer Society has announced it has established a new e-task force to “look into the Federal government’s controversial ISP filtering scheme”, productively extending their investigations to the implications for e-security.

“At this stage the task force will develop sound technical advice on the feasibility and governance of the various ISP filtering options being investigated.”

The ACS was more welcoming of the Federal government’s general action ‘on e-security issues’, particularly with the NBN RFP process coming to a head.

“Online business activities have potential for huge productivity gains for the community and business with the introduction the new National Broadband Network,” said Parakala.

“Appropriate e-security frameworks and policies are necessary if we are to fully harness this potential.”

People concerned about the issue have the opportunity to attend a comprehensive forum on the internet filtering and censorship proposals hosted by the UNSW Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre to be held on the 27th November in Sydney.

Across the waves in the home of free speech, Obama’s cabinet is shaping up weirdly – looking more and more like a Clintonocracy with consequent baggage. I was warned it would be same ole thing before the election, and it’s coming to pass quickly.

Since my re-emergence here on the malingering Fringe blog and even more neglected twitter microblog, spurred more than anything by the potential damage to the Australian internet experience and net economy let alone Australian values and global image Conroy’s proposed compulsory net condom is likely to cause, as well as post-viral fallout from a noxious flu bug, I’ve been astounded by the proliferation of social networking throughout Australia. Compared to a year and a half ago, when I first twittered, the social net in Australia is flush with insta-info. A daily deluge of news bites, infoupmanship, politicization, rampant self and business promotion assaults on login- my early days with ICQ and IRC, with comfy virtual rooms and lengthy chats with like-minded folks from far away where information shared was discussed in detail have been supplanted with extraneous, sometimes intrusive snippets which require constant management so that one’s sources are streamlined and pure.

The burgeoning edifice of Facebook, with its imposed, annoying selectivity of friends’ status updates is another striking change in my net life – I’d sworn to keep my list selective, yet in just a few months, I have a coterie stretching to the moon, where just logging in means a deluge of trivia to sort through for gold. Time for a holiday, or another net identity?

Hang on, wasn’t technology meant to save me time so I could play more? It hasn’t happened. I envy those with a full-time assistant with whom I could take it in turns to complete my online social ‘duties’ – in these new cloudy internet days though, one imagines it won’t be long before there’ll be software that can search all one’s emails, facebooks and myriad other communication devices simultaneously for relevant information, then present it, neatly prioritised. Data portable Fringe, the next step – the Fringebot.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Australia, Censorship, Economy, Internet, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.