Anyone heard about those ISP's who may wish to participate in the governments filering poilicy ? lol

anyone agree/disagree or wanna discuss that issue ?

Cause i feel its another waste of time, rather than getting on with building better or more FTTN or FTTH connections, developing nation wide coverage is what the government should be spending time discussing on and not spend time thinking about parental guidance issues and the internet, they have too much time and not solving any of the other major issues yet, there is and are programs such as Nanny Net that is quite good for families who are worried about young minds getting corrupted... etc, its not the governments problem, so why waste time making a legislation on such a household issue... ?

well thts what i think....
if i posted this in the wrong section or someone already spoke abt this issue, i do apologize sry...

I've been following it in the paper and on Whirlpool.

It's another one of those hot topics that makes the Government feel like there doing something.

From what I've been reading it's a really big waste of money, They haven't clearly stated what will be covered by the black list and how they plan on running the system. Not to mention how it'll effect internet speeds. Kinda makes the whole NBN and FTTN pointless if it's gonna be slow and be like china where you can't access anything.

If it gets a production stage I can see VPS and VM providers in the USA making lots of money.

Every time I see this discussed there are two main points that I feel many people miss:

1) The really bad stuff isn't on websites anyway! It's on peer-to-peer technology, and usually the less common ones from what I hear ... (websites get yanked down too quickly, similar to spammers/phishers)

2) You can get really good filtering right now, for free, with no speed issue, by using a service like OpenDNS. Several of my friends with small kids are using OpenDNS to great effect.

With OpenDNS you can choose what categories of web site to allow through. Really a great solution; domains in the blocked categories resolve to a warning page. It can of course be worked around, as can any DNS solution, but it does about 90% of the job in one easy hit.

But, I guess they need to be seen to be creating something rather than using a perfectly good solution that already works ...

Meh,

Online Filtering has been a hot/cold topic for decades. If I remember correctly the Howard government in the early days wanted to push through with mandatory filtering but got quashed by the Telstra monster. Then only recently Howard did the whole client side filter thing but take up numbers were used as justification for it to be shutdown (by the Rudd government).

The numbers WERE tiny, whether it was because the 'protect the children' advocates were the vocal minority or that the software was crap anyway who knows but it's gone now and the company that did the rebadge has walked away with a pretty penny regardless anyway I'd imagine.

As for this one, well, technical issues were the major factor when Howard tried it but that fizzled. Technology has come a long way but actually effectively protecting users from everything would be highly difficult. Pure identification and throttling equipment at the moment will cost you at least ~40K to cover ~Gbit of traffic. To most ISPs the entry cost of such a thing would be bad (particularly your budget operators).

Let them do their tests, let them do a technical report and then they'll say 'well, we want to but technically it doesnt work' and it'll fizzle out until the next bunch of child protectors come by.

I'm not a parent but seriously, it's their responsibility to monitor the kids. ISPs are ALREADY required to have a recommended and resold filtering package for their customers (ie. it's mandatory).

Finally, the ACMA blacklist already exists and is already in play. There ARE ALREADY websites on the internet Australians can't get to it's just that it's really really small (ie. <500 IPs or something). There has been for quite sometime (at least 5 years). As for whether it should be expanded, well, that's what the privacy advocates are going on about....

BrianOZ, I think the thing Conroy is going at is to protect the kids not stop the pedophiles and co from getting their wares. Filtering won't work nearly as effectively as a copper pretending they are a 17 y/o and requesting subscriber info from ISPs.

Stu

What is any impact do you think it will have for hosts and or dedicated server providers?

Angus

I wouldnt worry too much, I cant see them getting this up and running and WORKING.

Red

Trouble shooting for one. With the massive failure rate a lot of clients will complain about the filter to you and tell you to get it off the black list etc etc... Start budgeting for an increase on that 1800 number inbound bill mate

All in all, its just another stupid Labor government, I hope that the people see the errors of their ways and change the government again at the next election.

They (the Rudd Government) are a bunch of communist luny tunes, telling us what we can and can't visit online. Giving banks unlimited guarantees without checking with industry to see how this might affect other people like self funded retirees, non-bank lenders etc. Telling people if your super fund has put a hold on your cash, just make an appointment to visit Centerlink is absurd. The list goes on. They can't blame the GFC for this either as the Dec cash grab (or what I call the trickle up effect) didn't work, they should have introduced tax cuts. Heck a drop in the corporate tax rate from 30% to say 27% would instantly create jobs over night.

The simple fact that they shut down any sort of public discussion on any of their public policies outrages me to the point I've stopped watching the news, reading Australian news websites and limit my reading of the newspaper to the "fluff pieces" to keep by blood pressure down.

Anyone got a good link that explains what is actually planned?

LOL. Because it's policy on the run, and the public isn't allow to discuss it, only bits and pieces of what the govt wants to do has been made public.

The best thing I can recommend is read up on what Mark Newton, a Network Engineer at Internode has written on the subject. He's got a summery << SNIP: Wrong link>> and also if you Google his name you can read a lot of the additional articles/blog entries etc which are going around.

He's been on TV, Raido and will basically talk to anyone who will listen. His ideas are clear and thought out, and the Rudd government has tried to gag him a number of times. Both by threatening his employer, and using Internet Industry Association (IIA) which he is a member of, to try and shut him up.

Here is the letter Mark Newton wrote to the Gov.

http://users.on.net/~newton/ellis-2008-10-20.pdf

Be good if they could just block all incoming traffic and allow all outgoing. No-one visits Aussie sites anyway apart from aussies Oh and the people looking for the best job in the world etc. Be good to keep the nigerians out of the oz net space too. I am all for the great firewall of Oz.

That makes for an interesting point

The filter is intended to "protect" those in Australia from blacklisted content but anyone viewing a site hosted in Australia will be subject to the same restrictions and slow down in speed as soon as their connection hits and Aus ISP

EDIT - by the way thanks for those links - much appreciated