[AusNOG] Conroy announcement on filtering

[Adrian Chadd]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009, Mark Newton wrote:

> > Don't attack this at a technical level, or I'll just get off my
> > ass and solve it in FOSS at a technical level just to make sure
> > focus is shifted where it should be - ie, elsewhere.
> 
> I certainly haven't been focusing on technical attacks.

I'm not saying there is.

> 1.  There's no real problem to solve.

Sure there is. It's political and social.

> 2.  Even if there was, there's no public demand to solve it.

There's _some_ public demand somewhere, even if it's just being  used to
generate political support. I count that as indirect public support -
the "public" may not support this specific issue, but they may support
the general notion of protecting children.

> 3.  Even if there was, the proposed solution won't work.

It won't work -well-.

> 4.  Even if it did, it's going to be massively expensive and unreliable.

That is not demonstratably provable.

> 5.  Even if it was perfect, it'll be administered by the same calibre
>     of public servant that decided "V for Vendetta" was "Prohibited 
>     Content" on the Internet in Australia, and will be so incompetently
>     executed that it'll be as useless as a chocolate teapot.

No argument there. :) But then, the rest of the country is ticking along
somehow with this level of public servant.

IMHO, the list should be at least public, or at least open to audits to
ensure this kind of crap doesn't occur. Just like what is available with
the film censorship, no?

> 6.  Even if it was perfectly administered by exemplary public servants,
>     the blacklist will leak, thereby enhancing the distribution and
>     visibility of banned material via the well-understood "Streisand
>     Effect."

That's a technically solvable problem. I've already explained this to
the relevant parties who asked.

> 7.  There is absolutely no probability whatsoever that the blacklist
>     won't leak.

Again, it isn't possible to prove that, but it certainly is possible to
distribute the list without distributing the cleartext list.

The core problem is not the filtering issue, it is why it appeared in the
first place.



Adrian