ACMA report into ISP level filtering

The ACMA last week released a report into the ISP level fil­ter­ing. I have been spend­ing to much time on Friend­Feed com­mu­nic­at­ing with Amer­ic­ans and missed the release of this report. Note to self, open your feed reader more often.

I have man­aged to keep quiet on inter­net cen­sor­ship, mainly because oth­ers like Stilgher­rian have been doing a good job of provid­ing unbi­aised inform­a­tion on the issues. Then I tried to read what was attempt­ing to masquar­ade as a through sci­entific report, is was too much.

A few examples

In com­par­ing meth­ods of cir­cum­vent­ing fil­ter­ing by oth­ers (chil­dren) in the house­hold, at the PC level the report men­tions admin­is­trator access to the fil­ter soft­ware. Unfor­tu­nately the report fails to men­tion that the ISP fil­ter­ing ser­vice can be altered by the account holder using a pas­sowrd, log­ging in their ISP and chan­ging the settings.

The test­ing was car­ried out in Tas­mania. Unfor­tu­nately inter­net traffic to and from Tas­mania is very expens­ive. So large invest­ments in proxy and cach­ing serv­ers are used, which would make the myth­ical tier 3 ISP used for the tests hav­ing con­sid­er­ab­ley more hard­ware at their dis­pos­able than a typ­ical main­land tier 3 ISP

Though I must admit my favour­ite dis­aster is the mov­ing of strong M mater­ial from cat­egory 3 mater­ial that should not be blocked to cat­egory 2 mater­ial that should be blocked. Did the test­ers decided this con­tent which leg­ally should be avail­able, should be blocked because they know bet­ter than the cen­sors or because it gave them bet­ter results.

This is not an unbiased sci­entific report, this is a report to serve a pur­pose to show that ISP level fil­ter­ing has improved. Even tak­ing it on face value, it has not improved enough to imple­ment on a national level and I can not take the report on face value.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.