This is a continuation of my previous rant about the proposed Australian mandatory ISP-level filtering.

The final problem I have with the filter is how what is blocked is determined. The blacklist is not public. It is not public because it can be bypassed and contains the addresses of illegal material. However, because it is not public, the public can not know what is being blocked. It’s kind of a lose-lose situation. If the blacklist is public, people who want to access the illegal material know where to go when they bypass the filter. If it is not public it raises freedom of speech and censorship issues: What if the government doesn’t only block illegal content, but anything it doesn’t agree with? This is proof that the filter can’t work: If it worked perfectly, the blacklist wouldn’t need to be secret.

Now to address the arguments of the people in support of the filter.

1. Porn is easy to find accidentally on the internet
In my experience porn is actually quite hard to come by unless you go looking for it or for other illegal stuff. This being the case, kids who find porn on the net were looking for it. Implementing a filter won’t help since kids who want to find porn will find it regardless – They generally know a lot more about the net than their parents or Stephen Conroy. Remember the 15-year old who broke the previous government’s filter in 30 minutes?

2. You can find kiddie porn easily on the web
I, who use the internet more than most people my age have not EVER come across kiddie porn on the web. The AFP said that most kiddie porn is transmitted using other protocols (P2P, email, VPN) than the web. The internet and the world wide web are 2 different things. This is further proof that the people who want this filter don’t actually understand the technology.

3. It will help protect children
In addition not blocking the main protocols over which child abuse material is distributed, the filter does not address other major forms of danger to children online: Online predators in chatrooms, cyber-bullying, etc.

Rant now continues:

As I’ve already stated, the blacklist is secret and unavailable under the freedom of information act. And the definition of the “other unwanted material” is hazy at best, including:

• Anything X-rated
• Anything R-rated and, in some cases, MA15+-rated, if it does not have a government-approved age verification page
• Anything that ACMA believe would be rated R, X or RC (refused classification), were it submitted to the OFLC

This is scary because people won’t know if something has been blocked or why. We could see the government blocking anything it doesn’t agree with, possibly including it’s competitors (unlikely, but possible under this plan).

Speed is another issue. In my opinion any delay created by a filter is unacceptable. Why? because a filter which introduces delay is only going to get worse as internet connection technology improves and will need to be upgraded. Many ISPs struggle to maintain quality connections when network utilisation is high without mandatory filtering.

Finally, peer-to-peer filtering. Stephen Conroy has stated that the technology to filter peer-to-peer communications exists and that they are testing this in the so-called “live trial”. Now deep-packet inspection tech does exist, but the processing power required simply to determine the type of a packet (used to throttle peer-to-peer) is already very high. To determine what specific data is being transmitted and then stopping that data being sent is even more difficult, maybe possible with a few megabytes per second and today’s equipment. ISPs today have to deal with gigabytes of peer-to-peer traffic every second. To filter this amount of traffic is, to put it simply, impossible. And there are legitimate uses for peer-to-peer as well. Blizzard pushes it’s patches out to customers via bittorrent, because they simply do not have the bandwidth to send (often 500MB+) patches out to 11 million people in a week. Steam (Valve’s electronic distribution software) uses a peer-to-peer distribution system for a similar reason. Simply put, peer-to-peer is the best way to put large files (eg. HD video) on the internet and its use is only going to increase so destroying its performance in Australia will be a sure-fire way to make sure we are stuck with 20th century internet in the 21st century.

Please, if you read these rants and actually care (and you should) go to http://www.nocleanfeed.com to find out more about the issues surrounding mandatory ISP-level filtering in Australia and how to take action.

/rant

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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