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.