Just my pondering for the night.

Myself, as very much a technical person, practical solutions to the core. With current filtering technologies, any automated filter is pretty much a shotgun with its accuracy. When using a shotgun you get a spread, sometimes if that target you’re aiming at is close to something else you don’t want to hit – there’s a good risk you might hit that unwanted target anyway.

Therein lies the reason how filtering can used as a breach into freedom of expression, as well as a poor method of attacking ‘unwanted’ content.

Intentional or not, certain people and groups play politics – which may eventually be abused to edge the filtering system into the realm of suppression of information. If not, it’ll at least make the thought of mistakenly blocked content more palatable, making us more accepting as the filtering eventually works its way deeper and deeper into the content of the internet.

Technically as the filter list gets larger and more dynamic. The requirements for the filtering system become larger – most likely not just linearly, potentially exponentially. As do the costs, and for the ISPs that have to provide the system, passing those costs back onto us – the customers – quite a substantial increase in internet costs. Inherently as network response times increase, hardware costs will increase to rectify the situation.

The government won’t be able to help as each ISP is unique in its own way, and custom solutions cost more. I’m sure lesser ISPs will begin to fail providing filtering and not provide any internet at all to their paying customers – who by now will have already begun to shoulder quite a hefty burden of the filtering.

In these times of economic uncertainty and desperation – adding extra baseline costs to companies and businesses who pass costs onto consumers can’t be a good thing. Increased baselines costs can’t be a good thing for international trade, why bother with a country’s industry that is so hampered by risks and additional costs lumped on by an Internet filter intended to protect the country’s children.

Children who by this time on their slowed down, unreasonably more expensive Internet because the NBN also did not properly address future communications requirements, have already learned to bypass the filtering system that was deemed necessary to protect them while they send their self-shot nude photos to some lacking in life adult across the world via IM/Social networking from their government funded laptop.

All the while their parents are in the next room enjoying their newly acquired Digital HD TV bought with child support bonuses just in time for analogue tv transmission to be turned off.

While at this moment the Government has only pledged about $15M for the bushfire recovery funds, although government is happy to spend $128M on this internet filtering shenanigans.

Every night I confuse myself with how mandatory ISP level filtering could actually be considered at any level as being beneficial for our country’s future.

A person in the know, a technical person, an engineer perhaps even gets asked a question. They recommend that it’s a bad idea. Oh okay. Then the person asking the question asks for some numbers. 0.4% failure rate. OH THAT’S NOT SO BAD THEN. And so it goes ahead anyway.

Talking scaling, 0.4% on a sample of 50 is pretty much nothing.  However there’s a reason some companies try and maintain a six-sigma process control that considers even 3 defective parts per million opportunities a minimum. Something that NASA goes above and beyond in their stuff.  Once you’re handling something that scales up, that “oh that’s not so bad” starts to become a big number.

Looking at one end for nice numbers can look good, but until you’re looking at the other end of things and side-effects which perhaps may not be so numberly which is where things can happen down the track can get predator-face ugly.  If it was a simple as pulling a test and taking some numbers, we’d be building tanks out of glass, and have chefs being replaced by robots.

That’s why the people in the know when they’re asked a question already know that something’s a pretty bad idea in the first place, before the somewhat small numbers begin seeming insignificant.

What does a number mean when the people making the decisions don’t understand or comprehend the weight on a value?

What’s the chances that this Internet filtering thing in Australia has been brought so far based upon the misunderstanding of a few ’small’ numbers?

Apparently I do.  Or so Bernadette McMenamin, CEO of ChildWise says. She probably cooks these ideas up in between counting the hundreds of thousands of dollars she’s collected from the Government using either false or unverified statistics and facts.

Chief executive of child protection group Child Wise, Bernadette McMenamin, said most of the criticisms levelled at the internet filter scheme were founded on misinformation.

“It’s disturbing that people are getting hysterical about all the misinformation that is being spread about the internet filter,” Ms McMenamin said.

“Instead of hearing hysteria from the minority we need to hear from the Government and exactly what it intends to ban.”

Ms McMenamin was equally critical of the past weekend’s protests and the DLC’s plans for future action.

“Let the 300 people march on Canberra because it looks pathetic,” he said. “It looks pathetic and shameful because most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect, advocating child p-rnography.”

Sign the petition below if you like your Internet. In fact, sign if you believe the Government is better off spending our money trying to boil the ocean.

The Australian Government has today issued their request for expressions of interest for ISPs who would want to participate in the live trials of the Government’s ISP-Level Internet Filtering scheme.  So far, there has been no further information released by El Senor Senator Conroy, his office or anyone else in the Government for that matter.

The fight is still continuing and raging, while the Government continues to run away with their fingers in their ears tralalalala’ing that it will still work. Even the countries that Conroy have claimed that Australia would be emulating are going WTF.

Actions taken by the online community have been mostly met with standard policy lines and template emails from the L&L parties that are normally based around “We value the protection of the children” toe-lines. That’s understandable given pretty much every member of the House of Representatives or the Senate has no previous history in a technical field.

Except perhaps one Liberal lower house rep who has responded with his own email saying that “The bottom line is that mandatory filtering does not work and it is up to the individual to protect themselves and their families.”  It was expected though as his own experiences in the big old technology world include a decade-plus history for the military in Intelligence and Security, a Masters in IT, Masters in Business Administration, Graduate Diploma in Information Analysis and founded an IT services firm who featured in BRW’s Fast 100 list.

Then there’s Malcolm Turnbull, new Leader of the Opposition – ex-Chairman of ISP OzEmail. (Who remembers them?)

Seems there’s lots of little fires that have sprung up in recent. Adult classification for games teasing the public with a let’s talk then scrubbing talks before it even began; The National Broadband Network is getting sucked under the waterfall as poor requirements and lack of decision makings bite back; and then the Government is determined to make Australia the first country in the world to protect the children from the big bad Internet.

Which brings me to the point, how can people who have absolutely no understanding themselves of the things that they are bringing into effect “in representation” of the Australian population have the final say?

Bring on the engineer politicians.

UserFriendly.org has some advice for the Australian Government.

Further reading:

• ? OCAU Wiki on Australian Internet Filtering
• ? Mark Newton, Filter advocates need to check their facts

Left 4 Dead is really really awesome.

I’ve been busy with a few things in the last week. Added a ‘contact us’ email link to the left in the navigation bar, should also see a new theme for the front page appear in the next week.

In the mean time I leave you with a cue for your brain to take leave.

Oscar Peterson (1925 – 2007).

WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK W…… nevermind.

BRAAIIIINNSSSS…

Was out and about today. Was at a workplace that used fairly standard firewall software by the looks of things.  I got blocked trying to access The Australian IT.   The story in question? Stephen Conroy wades into child porn net flood.

What are the chances that the intended system will perform better than a commercial off the shelf solution?

(To prevent the ohno-sayers: Take note of the methods listed by the error box)

Well you might assume it wouldn’t be a problem in a filter the Australian Government is dumping a whole heap of money on. Or will it?

Mr Rizvi—At a very broad level, the purpose of the pilot is to look at two streams of potential filtering. The first stream of filtering is in terms of just filtering the ACMA black list and different methodologies for filtering the ACMA black list. What we will seek to test is the impact of that type of filtering in terms of a range of criteria. We will also test more sophisticated types of filtering that go beyond just simply testing the ACMA black list through to filtering larger black lists and also looking at other types of filtering including dynamic filtering, filtering using key words—those sorts of methodologies—to see what the impact of that type of filtering is in terms of both the ISP and the customer.

Following off of somebodythinkofthechildren.com and the previous “How to be Senator Conroy” post.

5. Bully and silence your critics.

Mark Newton, an engineer at Internode, has heavily criticised the Government and its filtering policy on the Whirlpool broadband community forum, going as far as saying it would enable child abuse.

…

On Tuesday, a policy advisor for Senator Conroy, Belinda Dennett, wrote an email to Internet Industry Association (IIA) board member Carolyn Dalton in an attempt to pressure Newton into reining in his dissent.

“In your capacity as a board member of the IIA I would like to express my serious concern that a IIA member would be sending out this sort of message. I have also advised [IIA chief executive] Peter Coroneos of my disappointment in this sort of irresponsible behaviour ,” the email, read.

It is understood the email was accompanied by a phone call demanding that the message be passed on to senior Internode management.  SMH

It should be noted the SMH article makes mention that even Youtube could be censored.

Far flung, but I have not seen any mention of how these banned site lists will be generated, if the porno-really-kiddy-bad-thanasia-fiddler-banned sites will be derived from the many already commercially available filtering software available off the shelf or whether they will be outsourcing an Indian company to seek out the most horrible filth on the Internet in the name of saving the children.

On that I leave you with a word from Ben (Franklin).

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Also I have received a few emails regarding my lack of pictures. Here’s your damn picture.

That’s bubble-wrap.