The Australian Anti-Pornography Filter is Cracked

Tom Wood, a teenager from Melbourne, age 16, declared that it took him 30 minutes to avoid the protection measures of the free filter offered by the Australian government starting this week.

The technique used by Tom is not affecting the icon from the tool bar, the parents, if watching the computer, will be convinced that the filter is still working, adult content is still blocked. Tom is afraid that a child, with some computer skills, could avoid the protection measures, and after use the Internet in other means, as accessing adult web sites, or other related content that is not normally accessible with the filter installed.

The costs of the project were estimated to a sum of 84 million Australian dollars (approx. 60 million dollars) "It is a horrible waste of money. They could have obtained a much better filter for a few million dollars, developed in Australia, than paying foreign companies for an inefficient one. For 84 million dollars, I would have expected a strong, high quality filter" says Tom.

Helen Coonan, the Communications Minister, declared that the company commercializing the product is investigating the problem discovered by the teenager, and the contract that was made with the company includes for the company offering the software to also offer constant updates, if issues are found within the software code, or the product becomes obsolete.

The Australian NetAlert program, sponsored with 189 million Australian dollars by the government included 84 million dollars for the National Filtering Scheme,funds for implementing and sustaining an on line assistance hot line and also for supporting education programs that take place on the Internet. The project is part of a huge initiative of the government against immoral and damaging content that is shared on the Internet daily. In this country, the child care organizations insist on forcing a content filter on all Internet Service Providers, in order to manage better the restriction of access to children to different content that could affect directly their behavior.

Such content may contain from adult web sites, to violent videos that could also affect the thinking of a young mind after being watched.

This filter software is resemblant to the filters that were implemented by China, but has less restrictions, and is restricting only children, and not adults. Also the reasoning for the filtering is completely different, the Australian government fears that children may be affected by pornography and other Internet related threats while the Chines are afraid that the country is not ready yet for the Internet revolution.

Source: http://www.newlaunches.com