John Linton
I am 100% in favour of conducting trials that prove there is no technical problem in banning access to a list of sites provided by the Federal Government. I can't imagine anything more valuable being done in Australia at this time.
I have, vaguely, followed the various outpourings of choleric drivel regurgitated by almost every section of the press since Krudd instructed Stupid Stephen to actually scrap the previous government's 'free content filter' and push on in to the brave new world of Labor internet censorship. Where even people as stupid as Krudd and co came up with this ludicrous view (other than as a quid pro quo with the religious loony in the Senate) defies rational explanation but, they continue to 'press on regardless' despite what appears to be almost unanimous condemnation from every person who puts fingers to keyboard.
So I thought I'd add my less than valuable insights as, personally, I think it's a very, very good idea for Stupid Stephen/Krudd to not ony pursue their trials but then proceed to implement their censorship and they shouldn't be prevented from going ahead by lying technical assertions from some ISPs.
Firstly let me debunk the stupid assertions by so many people from BigPond downwards who claim that the cost of blocking some finite number of web sites is somehow expensive or will slow the overall internet by some significant (I think I read somewhere some moron was suggesting 85%) amount. Such assertions are dishonest (anyone with a smidgeon of technical knowledge would know that is not the case) at best and just plain criminally wrong at worst.
The most obvious reasons why the people from ISPs making these statements are so dishonest is that they all run caching of various sorts which involves 'packet inspection' to determine where to source the requested data from. Are they therefore saying that the internet services they are currently providing are being slowed by "up to 85%? I dooooon't thhhiiiinnnnk soooo.
Similarly these same ISPs all use 'lists' to ban certain sites for various reasons (spam/phishing/abuse) and, again, are they saying that running 'ban lists' slows their services by up to 85%? Again - I dooooont thiiiinnnnkkk sooo.
Thirdly, and most cogently and despite various denials, many/most Australian ISPs operate some sort of P2P access control hardware that detects encrypted P2P traffic for the purpose of controlling the bandwidth available to P2P traffic - Exetel has been doing that for over two years as has much of the rest of the world. Are those ISPs that use P2P control hardware saying that they are slowing the overall traffic though their networks by up to 85% - same answer.....of course it doesn't.
Sooooo....where does this leave the "technical" argument against the Federal Government implementing "ban lists"? It leaves any suggestion that implementing a ban list would degrade the overall operation of the internet in any way as total nonsense put out by people who are either being deliberately dishonest or technically stupid (or by people who personally know nothing and are being 'advised' by other people who are either totally dishonest or technically stupid).
Exetel operates both ban lists and the latest versions of Allot's Net Enforcer hardware/software and does so without impacting any user of the Exetel internet service. Of course the Allot and PeerApp boxes and software cost a lot of money (in terms of our tiny ISP) but then the Federal Government is offering to fund the purchase of such boxes so there is no problem for any ISP in terms of expense if, and only if, the requirement was to deal with encrypted data and/or specific protocols.
A ban list could be implemented without any additional hardware to that already in use on any ISP's network.
So, there are no technical problems to implementing any 'ban list' the elected government of the day (and remember over 50% of voters elected this particular government of the day) and if there was no need for 'encryption busting' then the cost to any ISP would be trivial. If there is a need to use DPI then the cost would be around $1.00 per internet user in Australia which the government of the day is offering to fund.
So I enthusiastically support running trials on behalf of Stupid Stephen and Krudd and demonstrating, without a shadow of a doubt, that their loony aspirations of internet censorship can be achieved quickly and inexpensively. My only fear is that they won't proceed with this "election promise" before the next election.
Why?
Because by those morons doing such a thing we would be guaranteed that they would lose the next election in a landslide which is an essential solution to the current situation where the current lunatics will totally bankrupt Australia because of their stupidity. The new government will then immediately repeal the legislation and there will be no more talk of government imposed censorship.
Although by that time they will have bankrupted the country and f***ed the future for the following 20 years (just as Whitlam did) at least they won't get another term to ensure that Australia never recovers.