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Protecting Australian Families Online program, which will cost $160 million, is under the auspices of NetAlert, Australia?s Internet safety advisory body. The program will kick in August 20 and include a package of measures that the government says will help parents protect their children from online dangers.
Howard announced the slew of changes last week in a joint Webcast with opposition leader Kevin Rudd, broadcast to 770 churches and watched by an estimated 100,000 Christians.
The lion's share of the cash--$71.8 million--will go into a filtering program offered to individual homes and public libraries. Parents will be able to choose either to install filtering software on their home PCs or to request a "clean" connection from their service provider, which will be responsible for blocking pornographic content at the ISP level.
The government will post a list of approved filtering software providers on its Web site and mandate that all sanctioned vendors update their products as the threat landscape changes.
While individual filters will be available beginning later this month, ISP-level blocking may take some time to implement. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is currently planning a trial of ISP-level filtering in Tasmania that will inform the government's decision on a national launch.
The federal government has already examined the potential ISP-level filtering three times, starting in 1999.
Following the most recent trial, Coonan acknowledged problems with the concept saying: "Each report has found significant problems with content filter products operating at the ISP-level...The Australian trials have also found the effect on performance of the Internet by ISP filtering to be substantial and a lack of scalability of the filters to larger ISPs."
NetAlert's Protecting Australian Families Online program will also see publicity campaigns stepped up, including an $18.6 million awareness scheme to "inform parents and (caretakers) of children about online safety issues and provide information about where they can go to receive support and assistance", and 10 new ACMA Internet safety officers who will visit schools to talk about online dangers.
More "Web police" will be added to the Online Child Sex Exploitation Team, which will receive a $36.8 million cash injection to pay 36 new hires in 2007-08, rising to a total of 90 in 2009-10. The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions will also receive a funding boost to cope with the expected increase in prosecutions resulting from the additional Web police.
Other changes include an extension of the ACMA Blacklist, which includes pornography denied classification by regulators, to cover malicious software and terror sites.
The plan comes in addition to a previously announced government initiatives to curb online pornography. Communications Minister Helen Coonan first unveiled the plan to launch content filters last year, although the program has been beset with delays since then.
Coonan welcomed last week's announcement, saying in a statement: "Unfortunately, no single measure alone can protect children from online harm and, in fact, traditional parenting skills have never been more important."
Jo Best of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.
See more CNET content tagged:
Helen Coonan, Tasmania, porn, home PC, trial
I've never seen a child search for or receive porn when their parent is sitting right there next to them. It just doesn't happen.
Doesn't it make more sense to let the parents be the parents and keep the goverment and big business out of the home?
If parents would keep tabs on what their kids are doing on the family computer, this would never be an issue.
Of course, many adults today only know how to serf the web and check email, and their kids are the ones with all the computer knowledge.
Now that's an interesting thought.
constantly having to make changes to allow access to legitimate
sites.
Normal sites get blocked and objectionable sites get through. And
it isn't hard, if you know what you are doing, to bypass filters
entirely.
Filters don't work.
Who doesn't want to 'protect the children' and 'fight the evils of child pornography', or even protect us from those 'evil terrorists'? Obviously we all do, but at what point do the ends no longer justify the means? When do a government's efforts to "protect" us become worse than the dangers from which we're being protected?
Installing mandatory, government-issued filters to limit free thought on the Internet is a DANGEROUS activity, one that Australians should be extremely wary of, even if the proposal only calls for blocking out porn. As the initial filters fail miserably in their designed task the choice will have to be made to scrap the idea or to make the filters MUCH more draconian.
Protecting the children of our world may well be the most noble cause out there, but that does not mean one should blindly accept a proposal just because it purports to do so!
The plan for ISPs to provide "clean" connections is a joke, as well as this funding to provide ALL parents with filters... over half will not install the software, understand how to configure it etc.
An an Australian, this is a waste of public money. I am against porn, however, I am also against election-year, policy-on-the-run decisions.
YOU: Reader post by: rturner2
Posted on: August 13, 2007, 3:55 PM PDT
I am against stopping, especially kids, being exposed to porn...
ME: Don't think this is exactly what you meant to say. Or are you really against stopping kids being exposed to porn. Hmmmm.
;)
In the early days of the commercial internet, my company started being blocked by a number of porn filters. After some research, I found out that it was because we shared an IP address with a porn site.
later we moved to our own server, however we were blocked by an anti spam filter. Why? because we use Server Beach. The anti spam company did not like Server Beaches TOS, so they labeled all Server Beach customers as spammers.
This is now fixed, but it shows that filters can be dangerous.
Not all RBL's are bad. With a little research, they can actually be very useful.
But... none should be made mandatory. If an ISP wishes to filter the nasty bits, good for them; I hope they sell well. If an ISP is forced to, then it becomes gov't meddling in business, and due to the nature of any blacklist, it is a restriction on free speech. I'm not sure what guarantees Australia has concerning freedom of speech, but one would hope it would be respected.
/P
And why would the Christians care either way?! Their Bible pretty much said /not/ to judge anything, that being God's job.
It should be noted that filters also block stand alone pure text pages from porn sites. If one wants an article from an adult site, say an industry organization, describing efforts to prosecute child pornographers, or promoting safe search techniques, the filter will block it.
I like the idea of the ISP asking the user, "Do you want porn filtering?"
They do need to make sure that the account holder has the ability to bypass the filter, and that the filter is accurate.
I agree that pornography is something I don't want in my home, but I don't need the government to take care of that for me. I perfectly capable of doing so myself. If other parents can not do the same I fail to see why tax dollars from people who don't even have kids, some who probably love internet pornography, should go to help these totally inept and lazy parents.
Personally, I have no problem with there being additional help from the government on items like this and I would have no problem watching my tax dollars be used towards keeping youngsters away from that type of garbage.
They're not outlawing adult material. Your tax dollars are used for plenty of things you don't agree with. Why would you be so against this one?
Charles R. Whealton
Charles Whealton @ pleasedontspam.com
I sat my daughters down and told them what sex was at the tender age of 2, explained what it was and what it was for (pleasure, baby-making) with no fabrications or ********. They are now 15 and 17, have never been sexually assaulted (though they have been sexually active since very early, by their own admission to me) and are very good students and very good people.
It is time to realize that much of the 'bad' in the world is coming from people trying to protect other people from knowledge that they think is 'obscene' or 'bad'. Those people need to have a SERIOUS wakeup call, to the point of being put in prison if they try to force their religious and sexual views on everyone else, INCLUDING and ESPECIALLY children!
- Well that was fun...
- by Antarell August 20, 2007 7:02 AM PDT
- Just spent the last hour circumventing both the Windows offerings without any help from the net (or from just uninstalling them).... One of the offerings had 100mb of RAM and a bunch of CPU tied up as well... considering most home PC's would have 256mb (or 512mb if your lucky, and Norton AV using the other 100mb of RAM) you can kiss using the internet (or the PC for that matter) goodbye.
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