[clug] Internet Censorship - Advice?

[Jason]

I wonder if we could not come up with a better technical solution to the clean feed system. In fact I'm sure there already are better systems already in existence and fully implemented.

I imagine a system like the current certificate system on websites, concerned surfers run their browsers in a mode that warns them if they are about to go to a site that hasn't had its certificates signed by one of the surfers approved authorities. Parents who want to stop there children going to unapproved sites would have a browser implemented solution stopping any sites not on the approved list. You do the whole thing with white lists. The lists could be additive so you could take the government list and the google list and the linux.com.au list and add them to your local machines list.

Best of all we could probably get a system like that up and running with a bit of bandwidth and a firefox plug-in. No  need for isp involvement or slowing down anyones computer, or millions of dollars. A small extra cost for child friendly sites to prove to a certifier that they are an ok place to be. Sites could even self certify giving parents a one click solution to putting disney.com onto their aproved list.

I'm taking the white list angle because I think by the nature of the Internet a black list system would always fail. Take ipv6 for instance, how many ip addresses can a website have pointing to it? how may domain names can they throw at it for little cost 11111111111.whateverTheNewestTopLevelDomanIs and who is going to report their favourite site to filter in the first place? And this is just staying within the narrow speck of only filtering the web, look how unsuccessful everyone has been at filtering email.


Jason




On Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:29:11 +1100, David Adams <u2552331 at anu.edu.au> wrote:

> Heya CLUGers,
>
> I'm back in Darwin for a bit and I managed to convince the chairwoman of
> the Country Liberals up here to let me give a short (10/15 minutes, with
> additional time for questions) presentation to the party regarding the
> proposed Internet censorship package proposed by Senator Conroy. I had a
> quick chat with her about it and was concerned (but not surprised) that
> she knew very little about it, its unintended side effects or why it has
> to be stopped.
>
> As most of you will probably agree, this issue is one that has to be
> fought anywhere it can be- if the APL or Family First or One Nation or
> whoever ask me to give a similar talk, I'd happily oblige. So, politics
> aside- anyone have any advice on how I should go about giving this talk,
> given in mind the very, very non-technical audience here? I'm
> particularly looking for clever analogies, interesting stories, relevant
> pictures or visuals, facts, statistics and things I can throw into a
> neat graph or powerpoint presentation. There's some good stuff on
> www.nocleanfeed.com, but if anyone has any insightful commentary to add,
> I'd appreciate it. I want to do this right.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave.