Australia’s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy is certainly happy these days with news that his plans for a “voluntary mandatory” Net filtering plan has had a minimal effect on the connection speeds of a majority of the participants connections speeds.

In case you’ve forgotten, Minister Conroy is the same one behind the country’s much criticized efforts for “mandatory voluntary” filtering of “”offensive and illegal material,” pornography, P2P, gambling websites, and even the recently disclosed online gaming sites, per his ill-conceived plan to “protect the children.”

“From a technical perspective we’re more than confident that if the government decided to roll out a mandatory Internet filter based on or around an Australian Communications and Media Authority [ACMA] blacklist or subset thereof, then it can be done without any impact whatsoever to the speed of the Internet,” said Webshield managing director, Anthony Pillion.

A total of 9 ISPs participated in the Filtering Live Pilot, 5 of which, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect, reported “minimal speed disruptions or technology problems.” The remaining 4, Tech2U, Highway1, Unwired, and Optus either had no comment or refused requests for one.

One ISP did report that some customers complained that legal sites had been blocked, an obvious admission that the site blacklist needs a lot of careful oversight and moderation.

“Some of the customers complained because the block list really hadn’t been moderated well enough,” OMNIconnect chief technician, Graeme Lee, said. “One in particular was a site called Redtube.com. The whole site had been blocked and it was just a standard pornography site,” Hutton said.

However, it’s safe to argue that the trial is a pretty poor representation of what it’ll be like when they begin filtering the activities of millions of users. ISP Nelson Bay Online for example, had only 15 participants.

iiNet, Australia’s largest ISP, has been conspicuously absent from the whole affair noting last November “how stupid” the plan is. It initially agreed to participate to give the govt some “hard numbers” and prove the plan unworkable, but later quit after concluding that it was no longer about child pornography, but a “much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as “unwanted material’ without an explanation of what that includes.”

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

There’s an interesting report from Australian IT which says that the Australian government has allocated $125.8 million in taxpayers money to help internet security initiatives – an unknown amount going to implement content filtering technology.

The move might, at least, raise eyebrows for many observers because over a month ago, a study was conducted in Australia concluded that the technology to filter protocols like p2p were insufficient at best. These findings may be something Internet Evolution can agree on since they conducted a similar study with very similar results.

The report suggests that some are pegging as much as $60 million is likely to go to web filtering specifically, but it’s unclear how much money it will cost to filter the internet.

Australian Internet Service Providers in the mean time seem to be getting dragged along in all of this against their will. After the study was released, they commented how it shouldn’t be up to them to police the internet and that if there is a problem with something found on the internet, appropriate measures can be taken.

Still, it seems that the Australian government is all to happy to push forward with this even though the previous attempt to filter the internet completely failed. Last year, a 16 year old student in Australia, during a half an hour of his free time, cracked the Australian governments $84 million dollar porn filter during a bout of curiosity. Security experts noted this as a text-book example on why security can never be perfect among other things. The student won internet-wide fame that year, not to mention being called the “porn cracker” at school for his experiment and left the Australian government pink with embarrassment.

After looking back at the previous case and looking at the current case, it leaves one to wonder how long a cheap little $60 million dollar web filter can last when an $84 million dollar porn filter can be defeated by a teenager in a half an hour of free time. Perhaps one observation can be made that the Australian government appears to have a tighter grip on the purse strings this time around at the very least – and probably with very good reason as well.

ZeroPaid has already reported on the MPAAs error in a 2005 and also reported on the fact that the MPAA isn’t backing off of its attack. Despite faulty numbers, the congress in the house has passed the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 which contains the “Campus Digital Theft Prevention” requirement.

Interestingly enough, there is currently two versions of this act. There is the version introduced (H.R.4137.IH) in the house and one that was reported (H.R.4137.RH) in the house. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has reported that the senates version does not have the “Campus Digital Theft Prevention” requirement while the version that passed in congress has the requirement.

“The House and the Senate must meet “in conference” to reconcile differences in their respective versions of the same college funding bill, and the Senate’s version of the COAA does not contain the mandate for exploring alternative downloading services and network filters.” The EFF explained, “There’s still a chance that members of Congress involved in the conference process will see through the smoke and mirrors to stand up for students and universities in rejecting this unnecessary and dangerous mandate.”

“Short of appointing a copyright hall monitor for every dorm room,” The EFF commented earlier in The Washington Post, “there is no way digital copying will be meaningfully reduced. Technical efforts to block file-sharing will be met with clever countermeasures from sharp computer science majors. Even if students were completely cut off from the Internet, they would continue to copy CDs, swap hard drives and pool their laptops.”

Effectively speaking, the requirement has two provisions: the first is to block “unauthorized” traffic and the other provision gets colleges to push students to use “authorized” services like iTunes.

“Intellectual property theft costs over 140,000 American jobs each year — a significant loss in this volatile economy,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the MPAA told The Holleywood Reporter, “We are pleased that Congress is taking this important step toward helping us find ways to curb intellectual property theft on college campuses.”

While not in law yet, it’ll be interesting to see how the bill fairs in the senate, particularly when there is, in fact, two versions with big differences.

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