Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Australian firewall trials start

In Australia plans are being made to set up a internet filtering program for children. The Program will start out blacklisting certain sites which seems pretty ridiculous because of how many sites could be deemed as a blacklist site but its a start. The 'cyber safety plan' will cost up to $126 million dollars and will take atleast four years to place in to action. People all over are skepticle of how this plan will work. Stephen Conroy will be leading the way and has some doubts of his own, which even increases the amount of skepticism I have for this plan. The only other countries that have similar plans are ones that have free speech as a major issue, for example: China and Saudi Arabia. Does Australia really want to be placed in a group with these countries in terms of civil rights? I doubt it. It seems like theyre willing to do so though. The internet industry says that this plan could slow down internet as well as limit what its users can view. Another issue is if Australia has the technology to create a program or some type of system to filter out these sites with out having to look through the thousands of different sites that could contain some sort of explicit material. We'll see what happens though, nobody besides this teacher in the article seems to be very enthusiastic about this new plan. It would be nice to see australia succeed and create something that the whole world could use.

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