This may or may not be a post that will not be followed up for months but here goes:
Internet Censorship in Australia.
My mum likes the idea of mandatory ISP-level filtering. As people go she’s not the most computer-literate; she doesn’t know the difference between a wireless network connection and an internet connection, for example. I asked her about it and she said: “There’s so much pornography on the internet, there has to be some way of blocking it all.”
Along comes the “honourable” Senator Stephen Conroy with his plan for mandatory ISP-level filtering in Australia. To the uninformed majority, his plan seems great: block all the porn and bad stuff (like child porn) on the internet before it comes into out homes. The problem is, like most great-sounding things, there’s a catch. In this case the “catch” is pretty massive: It won’t work. It can’t work. If it worked, spam would be non-existent the fact that spam still manages to get around the best filters is solid evidence to support that a technological solutions to this kind of problem simply do not exist. The nature of the internet is such that this can’t work: To quote some guy as Sun, “The network treats censorship as damage and routes around it”.
In addition to this major problem, the filtering scheme proposed only filters HTTP. I don’t know exact numbers but I can be fairly sure in saying that OVER 9000% over 60% of internet traffic is Peer-to-Peer. That’s over half the traffic on the internet that this filter will not even touch. Once convinced of this, he comes out and says that technology to filter peer-to-peer exists and may be included. Obviously he and his panel of “industry experts” have no idea of what kind of hardware that is needed to perform deep packet inspection on terabytes (petabytes in the not-too-distant future) of data every day without slowing the entire internet to a crawl (more on this later). “But, ” (they say) “won’t somebody think of the children?”.
Even deep packet inspection is useless agaisnt a VPN or other forms of encrypted traffic, which leads me to the next major problem: The very thing they’re trying to stop – child abuse – will, not aided exactly, but forced even further underground. A law-enforcement approac has resulted in recent arrest of a kiddie-porn ring in Australia. Implementing this filter will only force sich groups further underground, making them even harder to catch. Worse than this: the blacklist of sites, including known kiddie-porn websites WILL be leaked. When tens of thousands of people have access to a secret it WILL be leaked. Then, Australian polititians will be responsible (indirectly, but responsible nevertheless) for aiding child-abusers. People looking for kiddie-porn and other illegal sites – in Australia and around the world) will look at Australia’s leaked blacklist and go to sites on it, using whatever methods they already use to get around filters and remain anonymous.
Now, the speed issue. Any filtering will impact on speed, this is a fact. When a packet hits a major router, the router has nanoseconds to decide where to send it. If it has to first check a blacklist to see if the packet should be blocked, this WILL add latency and latency slows down the internet. Scale this to the billions of packets per minute that pass through major router and you have very large delays. Secondly, Australia’s internet is a joke by world standards. Anything that slows it down anymore is unacceptable. This is the same Senator Conroy who wants to introduce a new high-speed national broadband network (NBN) and yet the “live trials” only require ISPs to test up to 12Mbps. Our internet is currently at 12Mbps+ (in metro areas, anyway) and the NBN should increase this to a maximum of 100Mbps for us to be competitive with other countries (it won’t, but that’s a rant for another day) so testing at anything below this is going to give misleading results at best.
That’s all for now, I’ll continue my rant later, if I can be bothered.
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