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Would you like yours filtered?

By Chris Abood - posted Monday, 14 April 2008


For the 100th time, filtering content at the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level does not work.

The federal government is currently looking at making ISP’s provide a “clean feed” into your home. However, a clean feed is not 100 per cent clean, can prevent you from accessing legitimate sites and is easily circumvented. Providing a clean feed does not address the major problems: children who are groomed, harassed and bullied via email, social websites, chat rooms and mobile phones.

A more effective way to protect children (and adults) from accessing inappropriate content is for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organisation that controls website names and addresses, to mandate categorisation of websites, which is controlled through your browser. However, there is no substitute for parental supervision and education.

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Currently, most people try to control what can be accessed via a browser using a filtering system installed onto the home computer. Most filtering systems work by maintaining lists of website addresses that are known to contain content of a particular nature. In effect, they provide their own categorisation of websites, but this is not always successful.

They also search for key phrases and some of the more sophisticated (and more expensive) filters analyse pictures to determine if they are pornographic. However, this approach can lead to false positives, for instance determining that a picture of a breast is deemed pornographic even though it is displayed as part of a breast-feeding information site.

These filters are relatively effective in giving parents control over what is displayed; however these filters are not readily installed correctly and can be bypassed by enterprising youngsters. To properly install and maintain a filtering system on your home PC requires some expertise and effort. This is perhaps why the previous federal government’s Net Alert program that gave away free filters was not such a success.

The current federal government is looking to mandate filtering content at the ISP level even though customers will (at this stage) have the option of opting out of a clean feed. However, filtered content at the ISP level is easily circumvented such as the use of anonymous proxy servers which bypass your ISP altogether.

Currently, if you wish to visit a website, your web browser would send the request off to your ISP. Your ISP would then consult the local Domain Name Server (DNS), the Internet’s address book, and controlled by ICANN, to find out where to go to access the required website which is housed on a server somewhere on the planet. The website server having received your request will then send you the website page to be displayed on your screen via your ISP.

An anonymous proxy server takes all this up a level. Its like instead of you going to the shop to buy a loaf of bread, you get someone else to buy it for you. To take this analogy further with regards to filtering at the ISP level, your doctor tells the local store they can only sell you wholemeal bread. When you go to your store, they will refuse to give you white bread. So you get someone else to buy you the white bread and ask them to put it in a brown paper bag. To the outside observer, all they see is someone walking into your house with a bag of which they do not know the contents.

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Filtering at the ISP level will also not prevent access to unassigned domain sites (a web server that can only be accessed by typing in an IP address - 64.233.167.99 instead of www.google.com) and web servers accessed directly through portals that use virtual network computing.

It will also not prevent you accessing inappropriate content accessed via news groups, which can be delivered in encrypted form, from direct download sites and via peer-to-peer networks. It has been canvassed that filtering at the ISP level will stop downloading of music and TV shows via peer-to-peer networks such as bittorrent. But this shows a complete ignorance of how peer-to-peer networks operate.

There are also other ways around ISP level filtering. But filtering at the ISP level does raise questions:

  • if I subscribe to a clean feed and I access an illegal site, is my responsibility mitigated and is the ISP liable?;
  • if I choose to opt out of a clean feed, am I assumed to want to visit inappropriate sites, would I go onto a watch list by the authorities?;
  • what exactly would be censored in a clean feed? Websites that portray child pornography, suicide, rape, violence, racial hate and how to build a thermal nuclear device in your kitchen would be obvious, but what if the government decides to ban sites that do not meet their ideological philosophies?;
  • will filtering at the ISP level transfer parental responsibility to the government and ISP’s? Every expert will tell you there is no substitute for parental supervision and guidance;
  • by filtering at the ISP level, how does that make us any different to other countries such as China that censor content?; and
  • will mandating ISP filtering be another one of this government’s tick in the box tasks only to find six months later that the problems still exist?

A far more effective and cheaper way to filter content is through categorisation. Currently when you register for a website you need to provide certain details such as who will own this site. You can find out this information by visiting sites such as www.whois.net. It would not take much to mandate that all website owners categorise their website. They can nominate if it is an adult site, a news site, a shopping site, a gambling site and so on. All website owners currently utilise a portal to maintain details about their site such as who is the contact person. The category information can easily be incorporated into these portals and the information would be kept on the DNS servers.

It would then be incumbent on providers of browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox make up most of the market) to provide a password-protected facility where you would select which categories you do not wish to view. You can also select whether to view uncategorised or unassigned sites. Anonymous proxy servers are another category that you can select. It would also not take much for browsers to provide different levels of category viewership. For instance, you may not wish your children to visit a breast-feeding information site, but you would.

What is needed is for ICANN to provide a facility to challenge the category of a site. So if you view IHaveHugeHooters.com because it was categorised as an information site, then you would have an avenue to request a re-categorisation. Penalties such as forfeiture of the domain name can be imposed for wrongful categorisation.

However, children accessing inappropriate sites are not their greatest threat. Predators who groom them via chat rooms; bullies who harass and intimidate them via email and mobile phones; nasties who post photos of you taken without your permission; those who spread lies and rumours about you via social network sites; thugs who upload a clip of them beating you up - these are the real problems facing children.

Instead of giving yet another company a wad of cash to purchase their filtering system, the government would be better to address the above problems. But as always, the first and most important line of defence is with the parents. There is no substitute for parental supervision and education.

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About the Author

Chris Abood is a teacher and computer programmer. He has taught at TAFE and private RTOs, and has worked as a computer programmer mainly in banking and finance. He is concerned with the effects and use of technology within society. These opinions are his own.

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All articles by Chris Abood

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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