K. Rudd: Internet filter not perfect, but we’re ploughing ahead

It's certainly not perfect. In fact, it's worse than useless. Why would Rudd support a system knowing that the blacklist will leak, just like it did 3 times before in Australia, and how it leaked for China, Thailand, Norway, Denmark, and almost any other country where ISP filtering is currently in use? Oh, and barely any, if any, content on those blacklists were actually child abuse material.

Since the government and everyone supports eradicating the "awful" material the Rudd outlined, simply redirect ALL the funds which would be doing into Internet censorship to the police. Simple.

What really sickens me is the government using child abuse as an excuse to set up Internet censorship, knowing that RC goes well beyond such descriptions. That is extremely low.

How effective can it be? Conroy said that the filter could handle ten thousand URLs before performance issues come into play.
Considering that the internet is a trillion (1000000000000) urls in size and growing at a billion (1000000000) urls a day.
Lets not forget that the blacklists are secret. Therefore no accountability or oversight until it gets leaked (again as it has already been leaked twice)
Also Conroy killed off the Netalert scheme, in which filters were provided by the government free for people to downlad and install on their own computers IF THEY SO CHOSE.
This Censorship scheme is not about protecting the children.
There can only be one reason why the Rudd government are implementing this, and that is for censorship.

Wow, i've seen everything now I think. Rudd is completely insane. There are so many things wrong with what he just said it's astonishing.

He's either a liar or completely inept.

When is this constant attempt at spin, actually going to be set straight by someone?

No different than movies and videos?

THAT IS WHAT MAKES THE INTERNET GREAT!

Thats is why in the next election(next year or this year), a majority amount of people will vote against, for this piece of useless rubbish(education is MUCH BETTER) and his so-called insulation program.

Thanks Rudd.

Thanks for admitting your crap policy won't work.

Thanks for admitting it will in fact slow speeds down.

Thanks for making the decision that we should sacrifice our right to speed, and our right to self determination, without consulting us.

Thanks for being a self righteous idiot.

Thank you Prime Minister Rudd for being a hypocrite. Thanks for going to New York, going to a strip club and being 'too drunk to recall' if you had tried to lay hands on a stripper. Thanks for setting a wonderful example for our kids by showing them that there are no consequences if you imbibe too much alcohol (your choice) and abuse a woman. Thanks for then trying to moralise to those same youth about the dangers of alcohol, attempting to lift the drinking age and generally trying to run everyone's lives for them.

Thanks for abusing the stewardess on the flight for not having a meal to your liking. Thanks for showing us that a short temper and intolerance is the best way to resolve a situation.

Thanks for not sacking Garrett. Thanks for sitting idly by while Australians died and houses burned. Thanks for feeling 'personally responsible' but suffering no significant consequence. Thanks for showing our children that there is no honest need to make amends for your misdeeds, the ones you took on board as your personal responsibility.

Thanks. Thanks for being a two faced hypocrit with all the credibility of a TV evangilist. Thanks for showing us exactly why Labor is no longer the left wing party of the people but Liberal-lite. All the conservative right wing wowserism with none of the fiscal responsibility.

Thank you.

Unlike our PM, I have a clue....... This is not simply a case of being less-than-perfect, this filter does *nothing* to address the problem. It does *NOTHING* in the same way that another coat of paint doesn't fix the HUGE GAPING CRACK in your wall. It does NOTHING because astonishingly-close-to-zero-percent of the child pornography is "traded on websites". It does NOTHING in the same way that sweeping *ANYTHING* under the carpet does not actually get rid of a problem.

ANYONE who thinks this filter should go ahead is quite frankly out of touch with reality, and desperately needs to LISTEN TO the people out there who every day do their best to fight this horrible problem. People like the federal police, child protection agencies, and suchlike. NONE, absolutely NOT ONE of these real-world experts supports this internet filter.

NOT - A - SINGLE - PERSON.

Surely nobody in this dear country of ours honestly thinks that *all* of those front-line warriors are *completely, absolutely, horribly wrong*?

in other news kevin rudd tells internet users to go f*** themselves.

@M19
Its not only this filter but Australia has been chipped away by these politicians for a long time with their stupidity.

I was hoping that Rudd would make a difference in Australia and making Australia a better place to live in. Even I didn't vote for Labor. But all Labor has done is made Australia worse with their failed attempts. I make no apologies that I feel let down by out current government and I feel pissed off that the government is using dirty tactics to censor Australia.

Do you think I enjoy feeling this way about Australia?
No I bloody don't.

So please save the sanctimonious BS ok!

“Is any system perfect in dealing with [inappropriate material]? No, but is it our challenge to reduce it to the absolute extent possible? Yes.”

Wouldn't spending 50 million dollars on policing go a lot further to reducing this material than throwing up a fence with holes in it (really it's more like putting the fence posts in for a fence around Australia, but only filling in one section)

The burden of filtering doesn't belong at the ISP level, it belongs at home with filters installed on local PC's, it's more efficient in processing terms, and it's less likely to break down because of one malicious act (compare distributed computing vs running everything on one machine)

It's a little like email filtering; I have 4 people on my server, I know these people really well, I know their tastes, habits, and trends. Filtering their email is really easy - I get a 99.999% success rate with my email filters maintained at 0 false positives.
Back when I was running the mail server for 4000 ISP customers, it was a little more difficult to maintain such an effective rate. I would have to say my success rate then was around 70%, and I did get a lot false positives, somewhere in the range of 4%.

The moral of that story (for the politicions) is - it's easy to filter small scale for a few people, as soon as you start increasing that (in my case, 1000 fold increase - in yours... you're going from from thousands to hundreds of millions) the bolts start falling out.

The ALP will suffer at the voting booth over this useless and deceptive measure.

Solution. Vote KRudd and his cronies out at the first opportunity. He has no clue about this. What else will he screw up ?

"The Prime Minister claimed filtering the “awful material” online is no different to regulations imposed on movies and videos."

Actually that is not true. The Classification system in Australia is designed to advise about content. It is not intended to censor material completely. The very first paragraph states that adults should be free to choose what they view. Thus a video that is rated MA15+ clearly sends a message that it is not for children, but that does not stop irresponsible adults from letting their kids watch it.
An RC rating means that the material cannot be sold or displayed in australia, but it is legal to own and view it. In both cases the decision behind the classification are in the public realm and can be examined and appealed if necessary.

If I wanted to watch a controversial movie like "Salo" I could get a friend in the USA to buy it and send me the DVD. Nothing illegal occurs. The same applies if I view the same title over the internet.

Whereas what Mr Rudd is supporting will be a secret list of banned media. This does not bring the internet in line with film and books. This equates to censorship.

But let us not forget the illegal material. Child sexual abuse material is illegal. As such most of it is hidden, because to put it on a web page is inviting arrest and punishment. If I was to cover up for someone who abused a child I would be charged with being an accessory after the fact. However, what Mr Rudd proposes is to do just that, simply cover up the crime by blocking webpages.

A pro-internet freedom activist in Germany actually sent e-mails to the hosting services of webpages that were on several countries' blacklists. The result was a whole lot of child pornography was removed from the internet. Action taken by one man - imagine what a whole police taskforce could do.

This is yet another smoke screen from Labor. Why do anything, if you can just consult a panel/start an inquiry/write a greenpaper/launch a webpage or just spin, spin, spin.

I'd like to make an inference to what Rudd and Conroy are in effect saying-

Their line: "This filter is designed to stop the minority, the socially and morally displaced or inept - those undesirables etc.; from accessing peculiar content".

The effect: the filter is applied nationwide so 1+1, applies about just to everyone.

The inference: Rudd and Conroy believes every Australian is a little inclined to be a social misfit by scouring for that peculiar peculiar content, thus the hard hand of paternalism (cough, elitism) must reign over you feeble feeble Australians.

The verdict: wtf?

This is dumb. Kev says he wants to reduce the access to as much deplorable content as possible? Why not teach lazy and complacent parents and guardians how to use parental controls on their operating system? Hell, you could even buy software which has parental locks for any/every concerned Australian household instead of wasting taxpayers money on garbage which is only destined to fail.

Kevin Rudd Lies Blatantly to Australians on National television.

RC content or Refused Classification material is material that has been submitted by the:
Film-Makers/Authors/Publishers/Film distributors/Video-game distributors etc , To The Australian Classification Board,
and has subsequently been Refused Classification.

Child Pornographers and Paedophiles do not submit their material to the Classification board.

Child Porn -Child Sexual Abuse/Molestation images/video- Cannot be classed as Refused Classification material because it never was submitted to the Classification Board by it's original Producers / Makers in the first place.

Child Porn is Illegal and Criminal material, RC material is Not.

The Lies and Half-Truths being told initially by Conroy and now Repeated Verbatim by Rudd to try to Blur the Lines between Legal and Illegal material in order to sell the Internet Filter are Appalling, and a Blight on Australian Democracy.

For more than a decade now, there has been alarmist and polarised rhetoric distorting important new findings about the risks and benefits of children's use of the Internet. The debate has been polarised around two conflicting myths - The Myth of the Columbine Generation and the Myth of the Digital Generation. One is generated by fear and the other hope and both distort the reality. Parents, educators and policymakers can get whiplash trying to respond to the competing pull of these two myths.

Fortunately, there has been millions of dollars spent on rational academic research done by appropriately qualified psychologists and sociologists that disproves both myths.

http://www.york.ac.uk/res/e-society/projects/1/UKCGOsurveyreport.pdf

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/

http://digitalyouth.ischool.berkeley.edu/

http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/bestof.html

But of course the authorities dwell on past isssues and drive ICT further back into the dark ages. ICT in Australia is a laggard (almost last) in terms of comparison with other OECD nations.

An Observation: Everytime the police actually do their job and bust child porn rings, check the profiles of the offenders - politicians, teachers, clergymen, police etc etc.

It is shameful!

I am sick and tired of the bible bashing do gooders also telling us what we can and can't see on our tv screens, movies, games and now our computers. Rudd, Conroy and the Labor party are going to get a backlash at the next election for this. Yet another Labor debarcle. I made a mistake of voting for the Rudd Govt at the last election, but believe you me, I learn well from my mistakes. If you want to look after the kids as you profess and then put more federal police in internet chat rooms and on facebook and the like. Take your head out of your bible and your do-gooding moralistic views for five minutes Rudd, Conroy and others and you might realise that the "muck" you refer to is freely and legally available in shops in the "politician belt" in the ACT. Whys is that Mr Rudd. Law abiding Australians Mr Rudd, don't like being told what we are allowed to see and do. This is (was) a free country so spend some time finding out what the real issue is with the internet, protect the children by stopping the preditors and stop wasting time filtering the so called (legal) muck off the net. If you are so wholesome and pure Mr Rudd, you could start by looking in your own back yard and filtering the "muck" that comes out of your gutter mouth from time to time

"He's either a liar or completely inept."
A bit of colum A and a bit of colum B.

The problem here isn't politicians.
The only ones with any real spine anymore. They need to react wildly to any issue as publicly as possible. Just look at the home insulation shambles.
The problem is our yellow journalism here in Australia and the power and money church lobby groups have.
They've given idiots like Conroy and Rudd the free license to put this Jesus filter in effect by whipping lazy parents into a frenzy.
The majority of parents nowadays seem to raising their kids with as little input as possible.
They've been treating the Internet like just another TV where it is not.
TV is a child minder. It's heavily regulated.
The internet is a busy city street.
It's the free exchange of all information and some of that is unsuitable and illegal.
Just like on a street you wouldn't leave your child to listen and interact with every crazy, parents need to look after their kids while they use the internet.
Not just pay the bill then go watch two and a half men.
It's pathetic. The internet need to be a free flow of information, otherwise you defeat it's purpose.
It's more then obvious by now this is a thinly veiled attempt by the government to control the largest growing outlet of media on the planet. Be if for there own form of censorship or their corporate sponsors.
As I understand it four hundred million so far and growing has been pissed into the wind over this, imagine what the computer crimes unite of the police force could have done with that.
They've now lumped us in with China and Dubai.
One country that hollows out it's dissidents and sells their organs and another that allows child slavery to continue with little resistance.
Fantastic.

2 issues:

1) Of course its different to classifying movies and books.

There is a published list of banned movies, books:

1. go to http://www.oflc.gov.au/www/cob/find.nsf/Search?OpenForm
2. Select "include adult and RC material"
3. Select "Classification Types" = "RC"
4. Click search.

However, the internet black list is private, unpublished and not open to public scrutiny.

2) The "but think of the children" argument doesn't work. Yes, you may stop the odd kid wandering across one particular pornography site, but you want stop determined pederasts from obtaining the material they desire. As far as I am aware, there is no such thing as a "casual" pedophile, or if there is, they are not the ones going out capturing and grooming children to fulfil their fantasies and those of their community.

You won't win this technological race. Civil libertarians will find ways around it faster that you can lock it down - simply through force of numbers - and the really dangerous people will leverage their work to undo what you are trying to achieve.

Even if one was to believe the preasent government were totally honest (I do not) what about the next & the next, and all with the power to edit free legal discussion on anything they don't think the public should now or see. I am ashamed i voted labour. This is the last probverbiale straw that broke the camels back. Disgusting... using children as a means to further control the public. Just add it to gaming classification as another broken idear. We will join in line with other great nations government's who think there people should have no say or freedom like, Nth Korea, China, my god say no more.