Excellent riposte to Pericles, Pelican.

While I abhor limitations to freedom of speech, that doesn't mean giving free rein to the production child abuse, snuff porn sites.

I agree with both yours and KH's points.

I am very concerned at the current restrictions proposed by the Federal government as going too far and being about as transparent as the skies over Europe right now.

The best way is to provide the software for parents and free upgrades as with virus detection coupled with zero tolerance action on producers and purveyors of such types of porn. I never thought I would say I was in favour of zero tolerance on anything - but children are being harmed either by direct exploitation or psychological effects by inadvertent viewing of such content.

"The big advantage of freedom of speech is that it lets you identify the assholes".
Banning child porn isn't going to make it go away, nor will it cure the sickos who are interested in it. It simply means they will use encrypted peer to peer, emails and other means, making them almost impossible to catch.
It must be the hardest thing in the world to feel sympathy for predators so abhorrent, yet most, if not all of these people are victims themselves, in one way or another.
I have to say, I'm getting really sick of 'ratbag rules'. More and more laws are being created to catch that one ratbag in 10,000, regardless of how much it inconveniences the vast majority of the population.

Of course what is so flawed in the government argument is that for the filter to effectively work it requires matching against a "banned" url or "http://..." address.

If those addresses are already known to government then a $2.50 telephone call to the FBI or similar policing authority would set in chain a "take down" notice and likely arrest of the site owner/producers. Goodbye child pornography!

No need for tens of millions of dollars worth of investment in technology that as mosts posts have identified, is easily bypassed.

If it is not to be purely url based then every access, search and packet of data will need to be inspected by said filter with profound performance implications. Corporate users have been restricted for many years by products such as Surf Control and other high end filters.

These products are expensive and to be effective require constant updating...they have significant impact on performance even in the small scale implications within a company so a similar technology will have to scale massively to provide the same levels of function across a country.

As an IT provider of these systems we know they are partially effective but the jury is out as to how much content they actually block and the overall efficacy; of course a company does not have to worry about "false" positives as they can block anything whereas a country wide government filter MUST be more discerning.

Unfortunately this policy is ideology based not on logic!

The big question is,how will we know what they are censoring? History shows us that we cannot trust our Govts much less the corporates.

Money buys silence and submission.It is every Govts dreams to have total control, just like corporates wanting to exclude all competition.

Pelican's argument is "that we can have the best of both worlds - a free internet but without the illegal content that is not acceptable in any other sphere (other than illicit)."

While this thread has largely focused on the philosophical aspect of the filtering, the technical aspect has been glossed over.

Pelican's utopia is unfortunately far from reality, as the filter only blocks known sites. The distributors of the noxious content are masters of shifting the IP addresses of their sites, so any list is only valid for a short time, and the users with a modicum of knowledge can bypass the filter using either bit torrent, encryption or external intermediary sites that hide IP addresses.