Integral senator changes his mind on the filter.
Our government has been a little vehement lately about their idea of a Net Filter, essentially a way of removing access to illegal content for the whole country.
As we reported last year, a list of 10,000 sites were to be blacklisted as inaccessible, but here's where we hit the problem - the filter would also indiscrimintely block perfectly legit sites too.
So far the initiative had the backing of the majority of senators, and was gaining a lot of momentum along the way, until Senator Nick Xenophon decided that the entire idea was shaky:
"there are too many unanswered questions.... will move to block any legislation that comes through."
Even though only one major senator is opposing it so far, Nick is an essential supporter of the initiative and without his backing it certainly will have a much harder time getting off the ground, even though the government's own study proved that it would be a detriment to Internet speeds.
In fact, the technical difficulties in this are huge - needing huge amounts of processing power to filter every single Aussie using the net - after all, there are 21-odd million of us.
Really, if people want to access this content badly enough then something like a filter isn't going to stop them, much the opposite. We certainly don't want our net filtered, for the simple reason that we live and breathe it as a part of using tech and want as much speed as we can grab.
And after all, do we really want to add a chapter to the history of the net that shows Australia kicking off a worldwide filtering of content?
Arstechnica provides more on the issue, as well as an overlook on the net filtering drama so far.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010