ISP filtering trial company confident it will silence the critics

You're kidding!

Enix considers a trial ISP consisting of 15 customers, and ISPs which had around 1% of the customer base opt-in as evidence of a policy which will be mandated to all ISPs, including Bigpond which has millions of customers who will all be filtered?

Where's the high traffic URLs which were conveniently omitted from the trial? Were the omitted because "Given the technology we tested, it wouldn’t have made any difference."? Surely not...

Enex must be stupid if they think the trial results will silence critics.

The trial was poorly conducted thanks to shoddy government-mandated methodology and a lack of serious amount of participants. Enex knows this but won't admit it in order to hang on to the $800,000 bribe, er, payment they were given for the trial.

All in all, Enex's credibility has gone right down the toilet.

I hope Enex are proud of themselves for helping the government in their attempts to censor the entire country.

they claimed WHAT?

Watchdog international, the filtering vendor used in MOST of the trial ISP's, just released a whitepaper based on their experience in the trial. It explicitly states that their filter CANNOT handle several types of URL on the list, and that they had to exclude from the list pages on high-traffic sites such as Youtube. They claim that this is ok because Youtube has takedown policies, but fail to realise that the content on youtube that is on the filter list (the peacefull pill handbook video edition) IS rated RC in Australia and so would have to be blocked, but is perfectly legal in the US and every other western country, so wouldn't be removed. Watchdog, therefore, cannot be used for the filter, and other filtering vendors will have the same problem.

The watchdog Whitepaper is available from their website <a href="http://www.watchdoginternational.net/images/listwhitepaper_3.pdf">Here</a> (pdf)

No silcence from me.

As long as this stupid crappy tax payers waste of money of a filter nee censorship is going I am not going to be silent about it.

Not convinced

“It’ll be funny once it’s over, it’s just like the ACMA thing, just a storm in a teacup - maybe not the politics or the ethics but the actual testing,” he said.

I'll reserve final judgement until the report is in the public domain. Not the report DBCDE generates, but the Enex report. There's no chance of critics shutting up on the politics and ethics of this.

When a filter specifically built for blocking known urls needs to whitelist high volume sites that have blacklisted URLs that's hardly fit for purpose.

After the embarrassment of the actual contents of the ACMA secret list becoming public apparently X18+, R18+ etc is being dropped. Scaling back to RC is still an issue. That's a phenomenal amount of content. Far more than 1300 or 10,000 URLs on a list is going to be needed (add lots more zeroes)

There is likely to be hundreds of clips in Youtube alone that fall foul of our RC (including RC film 70k.. already classified by our CB). So we can dispense with even RC being the worst of the worst content. Youtube aren't going to be taking those clips down and Youtube isn't exactly a den of depravity.

RC is very broad. It's not just child sexual assault material.

Nearly all networking technology be it modems or routers etc perform differently when they have a load of 15 users compared to 100,000's, especially equipment that has to inspect packets to find their destination and then let them pass or block entirely. I can't believe that they've said "Given the technology we tested, it wouldn’t have made any difference."!

The only reason I can think of is the filters using some sort of DNS poisoning, which potentially makes it even easier to bypass than before.

I'd love to see the Enex report, not the DBCDE's report on Enex's findings simply because I would love to know how they tested, and WHAT they tested. And testing users on ISP who already offer filtering that they’ve CHOSEN to sign up for isn’t going to give you enough of a “hostile” user base to test how easily or how many users are able to bypass the filters.

The most important information we need is how many users took place. Internet technology doesn't work like TV ratings. An almost insignificant user base cannot be up scaled to represent the entire user base.

Since most ISPs allowed users to opt-OUT of the trial, or specifically had to opt-IN to the trial there is no way there was 100% uptake, so even with iPrimus and Optus being among the participants the actual user base could still have been miserably small, especially compared to the total number of users who will be forced down this path once the filters are made mandatory.

Senator Conroy, it’s now time for some of that Transparency and “Evidence” based approach you’ve been talking about. If we don’t get to see the Enex report, the one that is apparently peer reviewed, yet unreleased to peers, and you use it as “Evidence”, opponents of the filter then have all the “Evidence” needed to prove you’re lying to the country to pass this misguided policy (actually, thanks to the Senate Question Time, we already know you are)!

Enex, If you conducted your trial properly then I almost feel sorry for the position you are in, but if everything is as it appears you've brought this mess on yourselves and deserve all that's coming you way.

That's one magical piece of hardware

<cite>“Given the technology we tested, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The technologies that were participating in the trials from a filtering perspective wouldn’t have made any difference really,” he claimed. </cite>

I want a one of these filtering boxes that can scale infinitely! Who does he think he's kidding of course load would have made an effect!

How can filtering one client be the same as filtering thousands of clients? That's some pretty damn efficient filtering software and hardware, why didn't anyone tell me you could buy sticks of infinite RAM?

What I get from this article is that Tett is saying they tested accuracy more than performance. From the tone, it seems they are wanting to silence those folks that are complaining about over/under blocking. I agree that it's easy to be 100% accurate with a static list of addresses. What he is conveniently avoiding is that it's hard to scale that up to tens or hundreds of thousands of users. And that's something he wasn't able to test. In any case, it's pointless for Tett to make these assertions as his report won't be available for peer review by the very critics he hopes will be silenced by it.

Even if its a success in terms of accuracy and performance, it still will not silence its critics.

The main criticism is not of how effective or accurate it is, but the very act of censoring the internet in the first place. It is a disgrace of an idea, putting us alongside other high-functioning human-rights violators such as Iran, Saudi-Arabia, China etc.

Roddy = Netsweeper.

Roddy would appear to be our favourite "Security Techo" from Netsweeper, obliquely referring to their deal with BSNL in India.

Keep on astroturfin'...

Enex's credibility falling by the day

If they genuinely believe that having more ISPs and more test participants wouldn't have provided more accurate results from the "trials" then they have seriously deluded themselves and demonstrated a lack of understanding of technology. They also seem to have forgotten that one of the ISPs that they referred to as being one of the biggest critics that they wanted involved, iiNet, was excluded from testing by DBCDE because iiNet wanted the tests to be realistic!

pfft

The wowser government is destroying Australia

BSNL? Nah...

Nice try, but not BSNL...

Bigger.

This will NOT silence the crtitics at all -

The only way the will silence the critics is by abandoning this scheme all together ... given that it can be by passed via VPN or other methods it's a waste of money. The report (apparently released tomorrow) is going to be a total whitewash given that it's been written by the ministers department and not by a independant no bais party!! Another reason why the critics will not be silenced!

You'd silence more critics if the government took the word "mandatory" out of the equlation.

Enex have not creditablity in saying anything in relation to this trail as we know it's a facade.

Yes, our government is exactly like Iran's. Australians have national dress codes and morality police patroling the streets.

Please, people, a little perspective. Hysteria from the anti-filtering brigade does no one any favours - in fact, it just makes your entire argument look really silly.