Excetel say that web filtering trials are a runaway success
Based on the results from the Internet Service Provider Exetels recent trial of the technology, Internet content filtering could cost users as little as $6 a year and would in no way disrupt the network.
During a six-day trial, which concluded recently and ran separately from the filter pilot by the government, the filters worked perfectly. There was “no measureable impact on any Exetel router” and out of around 20 000 hits against a blacklist of alleged web sites containing child pornography no false positives were recorded.
John Linten, the managing director of Exetel said that assuming that each of the 20 000 hits are considered an attempt to access a child porn website on a particular IP range the filters could still be bypassed by anyone “mildly technically competent”, which makes this a bitter-sweet victory for the Federal Government.
On his blog Linton said “This trial also demonstrated why a child pornography filter is necessary; if you consider that Exetel has only around 1 percent of Internet users in Australia then you might be more than a little surprised at how many paedophiles that implies there are. Trials will not stop the mildly technically competent internet users availing themselves of the myriad of tools to use some form of remote proxy to access any list of blocked sites. Basically [the federal government] will have to decide on shelving blacklisting child pornography or they have to scrap their ACMA list and find a substitute that is acceptable to the senate and the wavering Labor voters before the next election,” he said. “They no longer have the cop out of ‘it won’t work technically’”.
In order to assess the financial and performance impact of having a content filtering system applied to its network Exetel launched a mandatory filtering trial last week. As featured on the government-prescribed list it used the WatchDog International Web filter, and although it didn’t use the blacklist from the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation is used its own blacklist which the ISP said is similar.
The trial was run irrespective of the views of management or subscribers according to Steve Waddington, writing in the ISP’s forum.
In an Exetel blog Waddington said “Yes, yes, I know content filtering is a travesty of our rights (…to watch porn), thought control by fascist regimes, a return to the dark ages, etc. And, as I have argued elsewhere, not something I agree with – it being inappropriate, in my opinion, to use technology as both scapegoat and cure for a social problem. Nevertheless, should … Rudd mandate it, we, the people who will have to put it in place at Exetel, need to know how to do that. So, agree with it in principle or not, a trial of the technology before that happens is a sensible thing to do.”
