Our rights are not yours to give away.

I wonder if your “accurate replication of Telstra’s residential broadband Internet service (BigPond)” was realistic enough to have the 40+ dropouts a day..

So, these testers, how many of them are paedophiles? How many of them are into the sort of content that is supposed to be RC? If we don’t know, then how can we know that underblocking isn’t an issue? People who look for content that they know is likely to be taken down if discovered by others use euphemisms and secret nomenclatures to look for it and generally try to avoid attention. Are these testers really qualified to test for underblocking? And as for overblocking, again, what were they actually trying to do? Check their hotmail, watch some youtube? Who knows?

“In any planned deployment Telstra would prevent customer access to non-Telstra DNS, thus eliminating an alternate DNS circumvention.” A lot of customers, for various legitimate reasons, use DNS servers that aren’t their ISP’s. I suspect if you did this, you would get a lot of disgruntled customers. Certainly, I would leave my ISP if they did this and would strongly recommend to anyone I knew to not sign up with them either.

“Given that the circumventions to this solution well known and in plain sight, circumvention testing was not performed.” Seriously? Of course the *well known* circumventions are well known, but why assume that they are the only ones that exist?

“Video clips from high traffic sites are very popular with typical Internet users, accounting for up to 10% of traffic. If any content from sites distributing these video clips were to appear on the blacklist the blocking solution would fail because 10% of 40Gb/s of traffic is greater than the 1Gb/s capacity of a proxy server.” Umm…cluster them?

The lack of “measurable performance difference” on 1.5Mbps ADSL does not fill me with confidence about its suitability for say, 24Mbps ADSL2+, which is not uncommon and will only become more common. Why weren’t a variety of end-user connections tested?

Claiming “100% accuracy” in this test is akin to “proving” that “radar guns are 100% effective in eliminating speeding” if you only pointed your radar at specially marked cars whose drivers had been told they would be radar-ed and they weren’t allowed to use radar jammers. It’s correct in context, but ultimately pointless.

Its called a proxy + encryption.

Most 13 year olds get around. When i went to school 7 years ago half of the people used it to get around the education one.

Its not going to stop anything and end up costing a lot of money which will eventually result in the government have infrastructure to say you can’t look at this.

They have even started talking about censoring gambling, hate talk and various other things. What next?

I don’t think I’ve ever stumbled across inappropriate content unintentionally and if i ever wanted to look for it a 1 second goggle search and wala. (I’m not saying I do)

I left Australia a few years ago, and recently decided to move back. But, I can’t find it. Australia I mean – it’s not where I left it. I mean geographically, there’s a big Australia-shaped land mass, but all that’s there is China.

Can anyone tell me where Australia went ?

Telstra executives, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

I use and recommend:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

If you don’t immediately recognise what this is and why you should use it how can we mount any campaign against “filtering” . As an avid highly trained Malware expert, who sees the Darkside of the Web everday, and the silly things people do online to get infected, the only fix for security online is Education.
If people in third world countries can trick Australians into sending them money because their Father died and they are waiting for an Inheritance from which they’ll share a million dollars, why can’t the idiots pushing for a Filter spend money on Security Education Online ? (Please ! )
Then we get sophisticated hackers and Hijackers who’ll take your credit card, and your identity too, these are the Educated “Bad Guy’s”, the Federal Government and Telstra are nowhere near playing with these guy’s…

PORN: if, (and there is) a way to filter it out you’d be using Firefox, NoScript, AdBlock plus, a HOSTS file with a simple *.Porn and numerous smart regular expessions to exclude this filth. You’re more likely to have to search out Porn however as they want dollars and aren’t in the business of giving away their product.

If people expect to use High Technology, they need Education through the proper channels; and not have all sorts of stupid information thrown at them by inept idiots .

A Senior School student who will remain nameless, could be anyone of your offspring has never been taught online security. They get up to becoming Administrators of the school’s Network, and playing online games,etc. who is watching, where is the Administrator who gets a wage ?

I also know for a fact that at least 90% of people using Computers online have little or no knowledge of Security over the convenience of spending their hard earned monies on the big bad Web.

Maybe a License to drive a Computer would be a more sensible idea ?

Force every ISP to have a working filter, then make it tighter, increase the filter to all objectionable content.

But make it optional. The end user can choose between performance/freedom and protection. It is the only socially acceptable choice in a secular free society.

I am an adult, treat me like one or there will be tears.

Im totally against mandatory filtering , Ill fight it with my last breathe , I feel sick to the stomach with the proposed mandatory filter, we are Australian adults who don’t want the government playing nanny , most children will find a way around the mandatory filter , I could go on but I feel sick every time i think of it happening to my beloved once free Australia – what the ‘government deems offensive ‘ scares the life out of me
btw Im a mum /grandmother who believes the filter will be adding harm to children because of a false sense of security they will be had by many parents.

It’s bad enough that the Federal government is trying to infringe our civil rights so enthusiastically without Telstra throwing their weight behind this stupid plan too.

I am thoroughly disgusted with the government over this mandatory Internet censorship. They were not mandated to impose it, and they ignore widespread voter protest, not to mention the facts about what actually works online.

Today, Conroy suddenly announces that they’re delaying the filter again (gee, election coming up?) and that they’re going to have an “independent” consultation on what makes up the RC content they intend to block (most of which is legal to view in Australia). It would be wonderful if this consultation actually addressed our broken classification system, but previous behaviour by this government makes it almost inevitable that it is just an ass-covering move of some kind. It will probably result in either the filter being snuck in after the election (by either party), or the filter being silently dropped without addressing any of our concerns or explaining where all the money went.

Telstra, you have network engineers who know much more than Conroy about this issue (actually, you have desks which know more than Conroy about this issue), so please don’t play his game. Tell him frankly and persistently what will work and what won’t work. You could also remind the ABC and other media that ISPs have always been willing to filter objectionable content, and don’t need a government blackmailing them into common-sense options.

Internode and iiNet have been exemplary in trying to deal with this combination of embedded ignorance and Fieldingesque prejudice in government. Why aren’t you leading the way?

Why isn’t the money being spent on filtering given directly to the police to convict the content creators?

Families with children would be better off using a host based content filter which offers much more refined control over what they can view.