Internet filtering trial report released
Back in January I posted about what a dumb idea compulsory internet filtering is. I wrote to Minister for teh Internets Steven Conroy, and finally received a response from the Department in June. The response boiled down to: Thanks for your letter, we appreciate your concerns, here is a paragraph about the legislation which totally doesn't address any of what you wrote, the government is doing it anyway.
Now that the report on the trial of six ISP-level filters is out, I will be writing a reply.
There's a nice summary here about the less-than-impressive results of the trial:
Apparently the best blocking rate was 92% - so 2 in every 25 bad sites gets through.
The best 'over-filtering' rate was 1% - that's one in every hundred perfectly legitimate sites being blocked. (Now think about how many legitimate sites exist on the Web...)
Internet speeds were slowed by the various filters by between 2% to more than 75%. As predicted, filtering leads to slower connections, or more expensive connections if ISPs buy extra capacity to compensate.
Not to mention: NONE of the products could effectively filter instant messaging, streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing like BitTorrent, newsgroups or newly-invented Internet protocols except by blocking them entirely.
*sigh*
We can has sensible policy over rhetoric, plskthnx?
Thanks to Hoyden About Town for the heads up - I should visit more regularly.
Now that the report on the trial of six ISP-level filters is out, I will be writing a reply.
There's a nice summary here about the less-than-impressive results of the trial:
Apparently the best blocking rate was 92% - so 2 in every 25 bad sites gets through.
The best 'over-filtering' rate was 1% - that's one in every hundred perfectly legitimate sites being blocked. (Now think about how many legitimate sites exist on the Web...)
Internet speeds were slowed by the various filters by between 2% to more than 75%. As predicted, filtering leads to slower connections, or more expensive connections if ISPs buy extra capacity to compensate.
Not to mention: NONE of the products could effectively filter instant messaging, streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing like BitTorrent, newsgroups or newly-invented Internet protocols except by blocking them entirely.
*sigh*
We can has sensible policy over rhetoric, plskthnx?
Thanks to Hoyden About Town for the heads up - I should visit more regularly.