Clean Feed

The more the Prime Minister breaks his policy promises, the more Senator Conroy hides his policy homework.

For more than 2 months Senator Conroy has sat on the taxpayer-funded Implementation Study into the National Broadband Network. And he’s refusing to show how he will implement another promise: mandatory internet filtering.

This week, The Australian reported the Minister’s so-called ‘clean feed’ legislation won’t be introduced before Parliament’s spring sitting. Another Labor government “own-goal” and a vote of ‘no-confidence’ in its own policy promises.

Continue reading "Has the Government shelved the net filter too?" »

That pesky cyber-gang of hackers, Anonymous, struck again on the weekend, bringing down Senator Stephen Conroy’s website for almost 30 hours.

I know because I was there. It didn’t take much to predict that nerdy “hacktivists” against the internet filter would attack Government websites to coincide with real-life protests scheduled for Saturday.

Sure enough, a few clicks from Google led to a forum that set a date and time for the assault and, after a bit more digging, a chat room from which to watch the fireworks.

Continue reading "My weekend with a bunch of hackers" »

Unpredictable, addictive and unrestricted. Chatroulette has sparked a cult following, countless YouTube clips, a new genre of shocked screen-grabs, and at last, mainstream coverage.

It could now draw the attention of would-be censors.

John Herrman, from Gizmodo.com calls Chatroulette, “speed-dating the entire Internet”. In an instant, you’re connected bedroom-to-bedroom with one of 20 thousand online strangers, anywhere in the world, be it dorm, cafe or basement lair.

The result is a hybrid of Skype and Peep-Show. If your chat partner is bored, they flick you to another round of spin of the bottle. It’s a return to the Internet’s Wild Wild West, argues NY Magazine - a lawless place for thrill-seekers, voyeurs, artists and freaks.

Continue reading "Is Chatroulette.com playing Russian with the censors?" »

As we expected, there has been considerable online discussion about our announcement to introduce ISP-level filtering.

For those who missed it, the Government announced legislation that will require Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block web pages that under the National Classification System are rated RC (Refused Classification). RC-rated material includes child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence including rape and the detailed instruction of crime or drug use.

The Government has always maintained there is no silver-bullet solution to cyber-safety and this new measure is one part of a comprehensive suite to address the range of challenges online. For example, we have funded 91 Australian Federal Police officers to the Child Protection Operations Team, as well as extensive education programs for parents, teachers and children.

Continue reading "The truth about net filtering" »

In August this year I wrote on this site about the lunacy of the Rudd Government’s proposed mandatory ISP internet filtering.

At that stage it was a trial but on Tuesday this week Minister Conroy announced his intention to proceed with legislation to enact this mad idea.

This is a policy that is based on a fraud so much so the Minister could barely explain it with a straight face yesterday.

Continue reading "Net filtering ‘plan’ is a fraud" »

I once stumbled into a child porn chatroom. I was working at a magazine and having one of those “Hey, does anyone know if…?” conversations beloved of journos where we meander into oddball topics, debate them vigorously and call it work.

On this day, we were trying to remember whether Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of The Boy Scouts, was a confirmed paedo or whether it’s just that the organisation itself has the sour whiff of the kiddy-fiddler about it and we were wrongly maligning him. I Googled (or possibly Yahooed – this was a good seven years ago) something along the lines of ‘scouts, paedophilia, Baden-Powell”.

And before I knew it I’d clicked though to a site flooded with hundreds, possibly thousands of posts and replies from men defending – and describing - their lust (both imagined and enacted) for pre-pubescent children.

Continue reading "Child welfare is more important than net freedom" »

Computer nerds hate Senator Stephen Conroy’s plan to filter the Internet so that material which is refused classification (RC) becomes harder to access. But instead of moaning about how it might slow the Net or limit freedom of speech, they should just build a better filter that actually works.

Don’t doubt that geeks can do it. Napster, the late-90s phenomenon that shocked the music industry by enabling music piracy on a vast scale was written by a lone teenager. BitTorrent, the protocol currently used by millions of people around the world to share illegal copies of films and TV shows, was also created by a lone geek. Twitter was whipped up in few days of frenzied programming.

Sadly, some of the tools that geeks have created are now favourites of the perverts, criminals and hatemongers who want to access the vile material that Senator Conroy wants Internet Service Providers to block. Perverts uses these tools because they are far harder to detect than other methods of finding Internet nasties, leading to entirely justified criticism that the filter is a largely futile exercise that will drive creeps underground.

Continue reading "Hey geeks, stop the whining and build a better filter" »