John Linton .....and I appear to fit both the age bracket and knowledge bracket of that ages old observation.
It's always nice to be proved wrong on long held views - not that I personally have any competence in or detailed knowledge of network engineering at all. The current case in point being the effect "network filtering" may have on general network traffic speeds and access. I have always understood (in my completely non-technical way) that the more checks you do on the packet headers being routed the slower you make the delivery of the packets themselves - even if it's only a few milliseconds. A simplistic and basically incorrect assumption in general terms as our successive implementations of P2P controlling, Akamai caching and PeerApp caching have demonstrated over the past few years.
However, I think I have been in the significant majority of ignorant people (and apparently some very knowledgeable people) on the subject of the Labor party's previous trials of network filtering that seemed to produce horrific results 'leaked' to the more hysterical media outlets of slowing traffic delivery by "up to 76%". I never believed those claims (even my meagre and simplistic knowledge told me it was nonsense) but I did understand (because it was explained to me by someone competent) that 'null routing' would produce undesirable side effects like 'false positives'. False positives in this instance meaning sites sharing the same macro URL address as the 'evil' site and therefore being blocked in error (as has widely been reported by all sorts of people when trying to 'prove' that filtering is technically impossible).
So, over the past 6 - 9 months we have listened to the various suppliers of 'filtering technology' (just as we have listened over the past fifteen or so years to the purveyors of all other new network technologies including WIFI, Wireless, HSPA, VoIP, Caching, P2P filtering, P2P boosting etc) and dismissed, perhaps too thoughtlessly, claim after claim about 'zero speed impact' and 'zero false positives' as hype and in some cases just outrageous lying. But, as with all technologies, someone eventually solved all of those 'problems' and appeared to come up with a totally non-invasive 'filtering' system that had none of the previous disadvantages. So we decided, at no/minimal cost to ourselves to trial that product. By no cost I mean we didn't pay for any equipment nor for any time by the putative supplier to set up and operate the test - all we incurred was our own network engineering time.
We have been doing that for three days now (including a 'switch off period' to test the claims of "the omg the filter ate my 'homework'" customers) and subject to the next two days not showing anything different we can say that 100% of our many, many tens of thousands of users suffered no speed degradation problems and no false positives were encountered during the test period. Is such a test definitive? - probably not. Is such a test very indicative of an ongoing likely scenario? - almost certainly.
We will complete the testing sometime on Sunday 3rd May and will now be in a better position to judge whether any future legislation imposing some sort of mandatory 'filtering' on Australian ISPs will cause us operational or financial problems. Currently the answers to those two questions are no and no (assuming the cost of the filtering service is re-imbursed by the Labor Party who would be responsible for making us buy it). Even if we have to buy the software ourselves it will not be expensive and, if that were to be the case would only add cents per month onto the current costs - if the government provides it then, of course, there is no cost whatsoever.
I don't know how the Labor Party's own 'official testing' is going but I assume those ISPs that are using the solution we 'privately' tested will have produced similar results and that raises an interesting future scenario which is that despite the ignorant claims by the more public media spotlight hungry "industry leaders" that "filtering will slow the internet to unacceptable speeds" those baseless claims will not be tenable in the future. So 'technically' it appears that internet filtering can be done with no speed loss for the customer and no significant changes to a suppliers network topology or costs. The testing we have done, which breaks down the URL to the actual /32 IP address, also has had no blocking of unintended sites so far which is the other major issue that a successful filter system has to overcome. So, as far as we can see - there is no technical problems and no customer impact from introducing a filtering system along the lines of the one we are testing.
This is good - if the 'official testers' of this solution are seeing what we are seeing then it removes the technological baseless babble of "it will ruin the speeds of the internet" from interfering with any decision on the real issue of filtering "undesirable material" and places the Australian Labor Party in a place it would prefer not to be in - i.e. it will have no excuse NOT to proceed with it's silly 'filtering' election promise based on technical grounds and therefore will have to make a decision (which it has already made) to go ahead with 'filtering' on ideological grounds.
Perfect result!
If it backs down it has broken yet another "election winning promise" - because of the widespread opposition and vote losing potential it's hard to see how it won't die a quiet death.
If it doesn't back down and goes ahead it will lose the next election - despite Krudd lashing out yet another $A700 million to tie up the five Tasmanian seats. (must be the highest cost per seat in pork barrelling history)
"Hung by his own own petard" ring a bell? "Heavens to Betsy Paw - winning an election is easy but having to deliver on all the lies we told to win it - well, that's a whole different kettle of cat fish"
...and for the record - I personally think the concept of internet filtering is ridiculous - for all the sensible reasons - but, at this moment, I can't say that it will inconvenience anyone technically in terms of speed or false positives.
http://radioadelaidebreakfast.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/internet-filter.wav