Fatal flaws in website censorship plan, says report - web - Technology - The Diigo Meta page

• 22 Dec 08
  

  Jess McCulloch

  flaws censorship theage

  • Professor Landfeldt, one of Australia's leading
    telecommunications experts, says some of the fundamental flaws of
    the scheme raised in his report include:

    
    

    � All filtering systems will be easily circumvented using
    readily available software.

    
    

    � Censors maintaining the blacklist will never be able to
    keep up with the amount of new content published on the web every
    second.

    
    

    � Filters using real-time analysis of sites to determine
    whether content is inappropriate are not effective, capture wanted
    content, are easy to bypass and slow network speeds exponentially
    as accuracy increases.

    
    

    � Entire user-generated content sites such as YouTube and
    Wikipedia could be blocked over a single video or article.

    
    

    � Filters would be costly and difficult to implement for
    ISPs and put many smaller ISPs out of business.

    
    

    � While the communciations authority's blacklist would be
    withheld from internet users, all 700 ISPs would have access to it,
    so it could easily be leaked.

    
    

    � The filters would not censor content on peer-to-peer
    file sharing networks such as LimeWire, chat rooms, email and
    instant messaging;

    
    

    � ISPs and the Government could be legally liable for the
    scheme's failures, particularly as content providers have no right
    to appeal against being blocked unnecessarily.

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