Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

$84 million for 30 minutes ‘protection’

I live in London, there are lots of Aussies here, usually whinging about everything - the weather, the food, whinging Poms etc. but generally a good laugh. You’ve seen the pictures of the Mardi-Gras and the closing ceremony at the Sydney Olympics….however it hides a dark secret, many of the Aussies back home are nearly as scarily right-wing and religious as their US counterparts. In fact they have spent $84 million on an internet porn filter, which a 16 year bypassed inside 30 minutes. OK, so a government spending money on dumb ideas is nothing new, as always it’s the quotes that make the interesting reading….

“It’s a horrible waste of money,” he (Tom Wood, the kid that disabled the block) said. “They could get a much better filter for a few million dollars made here rather than paying overseas companies for an ineffective one.”

er shouldn’t that be “They could get an ineffective filter for a few million dollars made here rather than paying overseas companies for one”?

Now onto the political lobbyists, who once again come up with something sane and insightful

“You need both. You need it at the ISP and at the PC level,” Senator Fielding (a cyber safety campaigner) said. “The Government has not listened to common sense and it leaves kids exposed.”

So throwing more money and bad legislation at it will make everything O will it? What planet do these people live on, do they really think kids have no knowledge of what goes on out there? That somehow blocking the outside world will suddenly make kids into those cute fluffy things you see on TV commercials or The Cosby Show? Post puberty kids get interested in this stuff. I grew up well before the internet and there was a healthy(!) black market in dodgy magazines (or even sections of!) back then. If someone wants to get hold of this stuff it will never be difficult. You are not going to stop the lot, the internet is organic, new sites will come up that filters will miss. Or kids can simply go round to their mates place and use a non-school computer to get the stuff. Most employers do not let you download porn at work, neither should schools, but trying to stop it before it gets there is futile and a waste of money. As for the issues around privacy…..