[AusNOG] Happy new year / New rules for age-restricted internetand mobile content after the 20th of january 2008

[Bevan Slattery]

Hi 'nogers.

Sorry if I offend people with my contrary popular views on the matter,
but in the interest of providing discussion points here we go :)

Technically providing a clean feed isn't as hard as everyone makes it
out to be.  We know of numerous ISP's pushing serious amounts of data
and intercepting traffic (for eg. HTTP, P2P) and pushing cached copies
out.  We know a number of P2P caches now have 10GbE interfaces and I
would have thought injecting P2P cache files would be a more technically
challenging interception problem than stopping Johny from going to
whitehouse.com .  I know such a solution would cost more, but that's
another argument altogether.  But fundamentally arguing that the cost to
intercept large amounts of internet bandwidth (n x 10G) is technically
impossible and probably more importantly cause significant latency is
not entirely accurate and possibly misleading.  I think the latency
argument is simply setting yourself up for an industry expert to come
and prove you wrong and thus give the freshly minted Senator with
ammunition to label you as 'creating arguments to remove your
responsibilities to protect Australia's children'.

The fundamental issue here is one which Government is completely
clueless on the problems they are creating.  It is PRACTICALLY
impossible to guarantee a clean feed.  If you can't guarantee a clean
feed, then you are providing parents with a false sense of security
thinking they have.  Ultimately, parents will still have to install
filtering software on their computers and supervise their kids.

The Netalert filter system implemented by DCITA back in the 1999 days
was an absolute disgrace.  Most people don't know my history, but we
(iSeek) licenced the N2H2 filtering system for Australia, New Zealand
and parts of Asia.  Our system is what filters about 50% of Australian
schools today (well at least two years ago it was - don't know what has
happened since).  We were part of the original approved filtering
systems under Netaltert.

At the time (1999), our system had 5.5 million URL's in it's list.  As
part of the approval to be on the list we had to include the list of
sites (as updated from time to time) to our list of potentially
offensive sites.  Over 12 months and many millions of dollars, the
Government list had approx 220 URL's.  Yes, that's right, 220 compared
to the then 9 million URL's we had.  And all 220 of the Government URL's
were already on our list.  Probably worked out to about $50,000 per URL
or more.

N2H2 had a permanent team of reviewers being fed URL's that were either
referred to by existing users (users could report sites) or via an
intelligent spider that had access to the direct search engine feeds we
got from Inktomi and others.  The reviewers were about 30 people at any
one time working in 4 hour shifts.  This was based in Seattle and
included numerous multi-language students who could assist with the
then, massive growth of pr0n coming from Asia (remember this was 1999).
So I'd say there was around 200+ reviewers on the books (casual,
part-time and permanent).

Like most of the new government Internet policies, they are big on
ideas, even bigger on hype and will be huge on collateral damage.  This
will be an absolute failure and I would feel that any ISP that is forced
to provide a 'clean feed' should be afforded indemnity by the Federal
Government for the class action that will follow when parents sue for
false and misleading advertising when they realize a clean feed is not
actually a clean feed.

It is the governments responsibility to provide the list and a suitable
indemnity from legal prosecution.  Like everything else the government
is proposing, we need to get them to push out the details on how it is
going to be implemented and the framework associated.  We should hit
them with a list of questions in the absence of the framework.

Cheers

[b]