Technology news and Jobs 
Telecommunications Aussie System Admin Guild says NO to net filtering
Telecommunications Aussie System Admin Guild says NO to net filtering | Aussie System Admin Guild says NO to net filtering |
|
| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Friday, 19 December 2008 | |
|
Page 1 of 2   
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
The letter is from the System Administrator’s Guide of Australia (SAGE-AU) and is as follows: Open letter from SAGE-AU to Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy December 18, 9008 The Hon. Senator Stephen Conroy Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Parliament House, Canberra Dear Minister: Re. SAGE-AU opposition to the proposed Internet filtering initiative As the representative organisation for Australian system administrators, SAGE-AU is writing to state that it is unable to support the Federal Government’s proposed Internet filtering initiative and to outline the significant concerns that inform SAGE-AU’s position on this issue. The System Administrators Guild of Australia (SAGE-AU) represents professional system administrators across Australia. System administrators are the technical people behind commercial networks and computing systems, large and small. Accordingly, we believe SAGE-AU is in an excellent position to contribute to the discussion of the technical issues with your Department's proposed network filter. Our Code of Ethics [1] requires that we communicate with users regarding computing issues likely to affect them; and thus we feel it essential that we explain these issues to you. We trust that you will find this letter helpful. The proposed Internet filter cannot achieve its stated goal In summary, the current proposals -- to be trialled by commercial ISPs including Optus [2] for potential mandatory implementation -- cannot and will not achieve the stated goal of providing safer Internet access for all Australians. Moreover, the trial, and any subsequent implementation, cannot and will not have any impact on any illegal activities being undertaken on the Internet. There are several inherent flaws with the filters as proposed. The evidence of this is in the Australian Communications and Media Authority's own report on the matter [3]. The ACMA noted that filters were incapable of dealing with traffic utilising communication protocols other than HTTP (traditional "web" traffic). However, several major Internet Service Providers report that HTTP traffic now consists of less than 50 per cent of a typical day's Internet use). There are also concerns with the performance of the filters, both in terms of reliability, and in terms of speed. Fast-functioning filters block one in 12 legitimate websites The worst performing in terms of filtering capability were the fastest in terms of network traffic throughput; the fastest resulted in a two per cent slowdown under test conditions, but blocked eight per cent - or one in twelve - of the legitimate websites tested. This level of unreliability would result in every Australian Internet user being denied access to legitimate websites on a daily basis. This filter also failed to detect twelve per cent of the illegal content against which it was tested; an unacceptably large failure rate if the intention is to stop access to illegal or unwanted content. Slow filters decrease Internet speeds by as much as 87 per cent The converse is also true. The most effective filter decreases performance against the baseline by 87 per cent. This is an unacceptable performance reduction for modern Internet users. However, even this filter was still unable to detect three per cent of the illegal content presented to it, and blocked one per cent of the legitimate websites presented to it. An application of Bayes' Theorem, shows that even for the most generous interpretation of the filters' accuracy, the chance of a randomly selected page actually containing unwanted material when it is blocked is only 55%; the remaining blocked pages will be collateral damage and contain no such illegal material. [4] DBCDE testing mechanisms do not reflect actual patterns of internet use The testing mechanisms proposed [5] by the Department of Broadband, Communications, and the Digital Economy are also of concern. These methods do not reflect the use patterns of the regular Internet-using population, so the results are unlikely to be unrepresentative. The testing framework also explicitly ignores connection speeds above 12Mbps. This is troubling, as your Government's own Next-Generation Broadband Network plans call for 12Mbps or faster connection speeds to 98 per cent of Australians; failing to test the filter under these conditions is short-sighted at best. The letter from SAGE-AU to Australia's Minister for Communications, Senator Stephen Conroy, continues on page 2. Please read on. |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
