His entry was:

That’s not her arse you’re grabbing.

Now I never got around to organising a prize, and I’m not sure we really need one. However Fiona Patten has said she’s “happy to go thru the toy box and find a prize if the winner is interested”.

Benno, Ms Patten is executive officer of the Eros Association. Would you like her to rummage in her box for you?

What is wrong with this picture? Here’s me, Sex Party and Eros Association representative Fiona Patten, and Fairfax technology journalist and editor Ben Grubb at the Internet Industry Association’s Harbour Nautical Policy Party last Thursday afternoon.

I reckon we should have a competition for the best caption. Entries in the comments below, please, and they closes 5pm this Friday 9 December 2011 Sydney time. We’ll choose the winner between us. Somehow. Stop asking me questions.

I suppose I should think of a prize.

If you need more details to inspire you, zoom in or look at the original uncropped image.

Maybe Ben can be the prize.

No, I think that’s illegal.

Does someone have a prize?

My first op-ed for CSO, “The Resource for Data Security Executives”, has just been posted. It’s voluntary ISP-level internet filtering, but a different angle from my Crikey piece earlier today.

After nearly four chaotic years, Australia’s internet filtering scheme is finally coming together in a way that makes sense technically and politically, if not necessarily for effective child protection.

The chaos wasn’t all communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy’s fault. The “clean feed” was announced as Labor policy back in March 2006 by then-leader Kim Beazley. ISPs would filter out the nasties hosted overseas, where they couldn’t be hit with a takedown notice from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

But Conroy’s name was on Labor’s Plan for Cyber-safety published just five days out from the federal election in late 2007, and once in government it was Conroy’s job to explain that plan and sell it to voters. Everyone presumably imagined it’d be a protect-the-kiddies no-brainer.

Problem was, neither the plan not Conroy’s explanations were clear…

As I say, it’s my first outing for CSO, but if all goes according to plan there’ll be more. And in case you’re wondering, CSO is a job title. Chief Security Officer.

Over at Crikey I’ve written a summary of what’s happening with Australia’s internet filter.

Australia’s mandatory internet filtering by internet service providers (ISPs) won’t happen for at least two years. But we’re getting filtering anyway. Voluntarily. By ISPs. Next month…

Telstra and Optus are expected to have their filters ready within weeks, although the situation with Primus is unclear…

The Internet Industry Association (IIA) is also about to release a voluntary industry code that would see an estimated 80% to 90% of Australian internet connections filtered by the Interpol blacklist over the next year. Attempts to access domains on the list would be redirected to an Interpol block page.

Overall, I reckon the process that’s now unfolding could well result in the gvernment’s planned mandatory ISP-level filtering disappearing off the table entirely.

As a bonus link, here’s Interpol’s explanation of their “worst-of” blacklist of child exploitation material.

Australia’s mandatory internet filter is at least two years away, but Telstra and Optus are only weeks from implementing their “voluntary” equivalents. Where are we up to with this controversial issue?

That’s what I covered in yesterday’s Patch Monday podcast for ZDNet Australia. And as I explained on the weekend, I’m returning to my habit of doing a blog post here for each episode.

For this internet filtering update, I spoke with Peter Black, who teaches internet and media law at the Queensland University of Technology; network engineer Mark Newton; and Lyle Shelton, chief of staff for the Australian Christian Lobby.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Since this podcast was recorded, we’ve discovered that Primus isn’t so sure about voluntary filtering any more. They were the third ISP to commit to the plan last year. However the Internet Industry Association (IIA) has said most Australian ISPs will filter via the Interpol list this year.

Previous podcast on this issue covered the meaning of the Refused Classification content category, Senator Conroy’s announcement of the strategy in July 2010, and the apparent fact that parents don’t act on their cybersafety fears.

Please let me know what you think. Comments below. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

It’s almost old news now, but last Thursday the Federal Court ruled that internet service providers (ISPs) are not responsible for the copyright infringements done by their customers.

The full decision by Justice Dennis Cowdroy is almost 200 pages long, yet I found it relatively easy to read and learned a lot.

I’ve written three stories for Crikey so far:

1. iiTrial: ISPs not responsible for users’ copyright infringement, which was published just a few hours after the decision was handed down. It’s the basic facts of the decision.
2. iiNet decision a slapdown for AFACT, movie industry, which focuses on Justice Cowdroy’s comprehensive criticism of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) — not just the way they conducted themselves in court but their whole approach to dealing with copyright infringement.
3. Conroy tells movie industry, ISPs to kiss and make up, published yesterday. AFACT looked like they expected the government to intervene, but communications minister Senator Stephen Conroy is instead asking the movie and ISP industries to negotiate a code of practice themselves, presumably via the Internet Industry Association.

I daresay I’ll be writing more soon. Meanwhile, if you have any questions…

“If you had to identify the biggest single issue confronting the security and safety and the confidence of the internet these days, particularly in the commercial space, you could only point to zombie botnets as the major concern,” says Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA).

On Wednesday, ZDNet.com.au published my feature story Zombie Generation: The spreading infection, which kicks off with a backgrounder on zombie botnets and then some worrying trends.

• The malware used to create botnets is getting more sophisticated. Traditional stay-safe-online messages are no longer adequate — if they ever were.
• Young people’s eagerness to share cool new things amongst their peers is natural human behaviour, but it runs counter to the “don’t share” messages.
• It’s easy for kids to break out of the security restrictions of the laptops supplied under the Australian Government’s Digital Education Revolution program — something we also spoke about on Patch Monday.

Australian ISPs are now developing a more formal code of practice to detect and deal with their customers’ zombie computers.

I also posted a lengthy rebuttal to some fool trying to over-simplify this as “a Microsoft problem”.

• How Twitter works in theory | Epeus’ epigone: There is much in this commentary of Twitter which I support, particularly the concepts of flow and the overlapping social networks. Read and learn.
• Industry cooperation looming on filtering? | CommsDay: There have been rumours, from reliable sources, that Senator Conroy is hoping Australia’s Internet industry will come up with its own answer to censorship.
• Dear Associated Press: Come On, Attribution is Not That Hard | Whatever: John Scalzi is annoyed that AP cited him as “another user” on Twitter, when his name is just a click away. This fits with something I hinted at in Crikey this week. More about that another time.
• How journalists and media brands can get the maximum benefit from Twitter | Write, edit, blog: A nice collection of thoughts about… well, what the title says.
• Public Radio Exchange: “An online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming.” Free registration means you can listen to this stuff yourself. Hours and hours of it.
• Programmatic specificity: what is Rudd talking about? | En Passant: An earlier essay, from July, with another take on Ruddspeak.
• Rudd's robust language is not the problem | Woolly Days: A nice analysis of why Prime Minister Kevin Rudd using the f-word really of little consequence, whereas bureaucratic evasiveness like “detailed programmatic specificity” is.
• Caring for Your Introvert | The Atlantic (March 2003): An oldie but a goodie. Kind of. If you’re an introvert, it might be worth showing this to those extroverts who are pissing you off.
• LIFE photo archive hosted by Google: All of the photos from LIFE magazine from 1936 to 1972 are on Google Images. This isn’t new — the archive was created in 2008 — but I was reminded of it this week.
• WP Greet Box WordPress Plugin | OMNINOGGIN: A different message is displayed to blog visitors, depending on how they found you. Do I have a use for this, or it it just another annoyance to maintain?
• Is the Internet melting our brains? | Salon Books: Despite the provocative headline, this interview with linguist Dennis Baron from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a sensible debunking of the fears.
• The Interregnum Revisited | Jon Taplin’ Blog: This essay deserves slow and careful reading. It links the themes of the cyclic nature of right-wing fear-mongering and paranoia with longer-term US political history — with some disturbing conclusions.
• Can Sheepdogs Round Up Magpies? | BitingTheDust: A great story from Robbo, currently in the Gibson Desert. And a great photo.
• MacSpeech Dictate 1.5: I’d been meaning to find decent dictation software for OS X, and John Birmingham mentioned this one. Must check it out.
• Average Web Page Size Triples Since 2003 | WebSiteOptimization.com: Web pages now average more than 300KB and 50 objects per page. I know my own attitude has been that everyone now has broadband. But what about mobile devices and the Third World?

[This article was first published in Crikey on Monday 2 March. Nothing's changed since then.]

The villain gets thrown off the cliff. He bounces off the rocks into the river and his limp, bleeding form is flushed downstream. Hurrah! But just as our heroes down their first celebratory drinks, the door bursts open and the villain is back — soaking wet and angrier than ever…

“The Government’s plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled,” wrote Asher Moses last Thursday when independent Senator Nick Xenophon withdrew support for the Rudd government’s internet “filtering” plans. Opponents of Senator Conroy’s scheme popped open the virtual champagne and started sending congratulatory messages to anti-censorship lobbyists.

But as blogger Kieran Salsone’s headline put it, “Twitterati blow load over Xenophon: Lobbyists still without cigarette”. Despite Senator Xenophon’s announcement, nothing has actually changed and Senator Conroy has yet to comment.

True, any legislation would need support in the Senate from the Coalition or all seven minor party and independent senators. With the Coalition expressing grave reservations and calling the proposal insulting, and with the Greens and now Xenophon opposed too, any legislation would be blocked.

Blocked, that is, unless someone changes their mind.

While the Greens will presumably hold fast, it’s conceivable that Coalition senators could cross the floor, and Senator Xenophon’s position on almost any issue can be rather, um, flexible. Currently his highly-evolved political nostrils detect the whiff of unpopularity emanating from Senator Conroy’s direction — how could anyone miss it? But the wind may shift again. Particularly if the recently-emboldened Xenophon of the Murray is tossed another few hundred mind-changing millions.

Internet filtering could even be introduced without legislation — though that’s a more difficult path.

Dale Clapperton from Electronic Frontiers Australia reckons it’s possible through various ministerial and department actions — but it’d be hard work, requiring the cooperation of the Internet Industry Association in introducing a new Internet Industry Code of Practice. Even then it could be vetoed in the Senate.

As Peter Black, who lectures in internet law at QUT, told Crikey, “It certainly would be difficult — both legally and politically — to do without legislation, but it may be possible if the government can get the cooperation of the IIA (which may well not be forthcoming).”

Difficult or not, PM reported on Friday that “the minister is still looking into whether the filter would require legislation, or could be implemented through another means.”

Despite ever-mounting opposition, Senator Conroy isn’t saying die just yet. Not until after the trial results mid-year, anyway. Assuming he’s still Minister then.

Well, he is! As part of The Australian‘s “super blog” on Senator Conroy’s Rabbit-Proof Firewall plans, Clive Hamilton has remixed his favourite old party piece. This time his rant is entitled Web doesn’t belong to net libertarians. Have a look. It’s a giggle.

OK, back? Cool.

Now I’ve dismantled most of Hamilton’s logical fallacies, baseless slurs and misinformation before, here and over at Crikey. Still, if Clive wants to sing the same old tune I’m happy to hum along one more time…

Clive, you started by saying, “Here is the kind of situation the Government’s proposed internet filter is aimed at,” and then provide a detailed description of an unsupervised schoolboy looking for porn.

Is it?

I thought it was now about filtering the ACMA blacklist, and only the blacklist. At least that’s what Senator Conroy’s saying. Maybe you and he ought to catch up over a cuppa and get your story straight?

I wrote a lengthy comment for The Australian, but it has yet to get past the moderators. Here it is, with added linkage.

I see that Clive Hamilton is running exactly the same talking points as Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby. Is this a coincidence?

I see that he still doesn’t point to any social research other than the solitary study he commissioned himself back in 2003, just after he declared the internet was “primarily” for pornography.

I see that he’s still constructing straw men called “extreme libertarians” in an attempt to trigger all the scary extremist-terrorist-death-in-the-dark buttons in our minds, in the hope that we’ll stop thinking rationally.

He has still to point to a single person who has ever said that “people (including children) should be able to view whatever they like”. Maybe some have said “adults should be able to view legal material without government interference”. Maybe some have even said it’s the parents’ job to supervise their children — actually I think that point’s been made many times.

I see that he still misrepresents the EFA’s statements, perhaps forgetting that those statements, too, are on the internet for all to read.

I see that he still trundles out the furphy that “we have a censorship system governing films, television and magazines” while failing to mention that we also already have a system for the internet too — one which is remarkably like that for television, in fact, except that it’s secret, unaccountable, and permits even less to be seen without proving your age (e.g. MA15+ material) than can shown on network TV.

I see that he still fails to explain why the internet should be reduced to a suitable-for-children level for everyone, secretly, even if they’re adults with no children, when concerned or lazy parents can already avail themselves of a myriad of filtering tools for their own PCs or join one of the 13 ISPs already providing content-filtered internet access under the IIA’s Family-Friendly ISP program.

I also see that he’s still criticising GetUp! for cherry-picking numbers from the Phase 1 trials but does exactly the same himself. I believe that’s called hypocrisy. The filter he points to which “only” degraded performance by 2% was so bad at correctly classifying material that it’d be next to useless in the real world. But it’s irrelevant, as the lab set-up for those trials bore little relationship to the network infrastructure and traffic load of a real ISP, and bears little relationship to what’s about to be trialled in Phase 2.

And he still fails to explain why we should pour $44 million into an ill-defined IT project which meant taking away $2.8 million from the AFP’s OCSET team — you know, the men and women who actually do the dirty work of catching child abusers.

“Scare-mongering does not get more blatant than this,” says Hamilton. Actually, it does. It happens when someone spends five paragraphs describing some lurid scenario involving a schoolboy and then screeches about imaginary extremists.

Enough indeed, Hamilton. It’s time to move beyond this oft-repeated performance and catch up with the rest of the discussion.

Since Clive likes repetitive refrains, here’s a reprise of one of my faves…

Hamilton may think he’s taking the moral path, but he’s wrong. He’s behaving unethically. He’s being a hypocrite. In my view that’s truly filthy.

Anthony Albanese, my federal MP, replied to my letter about Internet censorship. It’s nothing but platitudes and a regurgitation of Labor’s policy-speak.

Network engineer Mark Newton met with his local MP Kate Ellis in Adelaide yesterday. She too had nothing but canned responses.

This is not good enough.

The same goes for “pro-family” lobbyists like the Australian Family Association’s Anh Nguyen in Online filtering recognises families’ concerns today, or the people quoted in the Courier Mail‘s Web filter ‘needed’ to protect kids from porn on Friday.

Detailed, coherent critiques have been put forward addressing the technical, economic and policy flaws in clear, straightforward language. If you can’t counter those arguments with evidence and logic, not more “think of the children” hand-wringing, then we must stop wasting time and taxpayers’ money on this “filtering” folly. Now.

I can almost excuse family lobbyists for failing to understand. If you’re deeply concerned about children emotionally, then logical analysis probably isn’t your strongest suit. If you’re so ignorant of the Internet that you imagine “hardcore pornography” (whatever that is) suddenly pops up to freak out your six-year-old every time you turn your back to stir the soup, then you might also imagine some magical technology which can automatically figure out what you do and don’t want your child to see.

But “all our members have families, and they think X” is not the same as “all people with families think X“. Every family is different. Every child is different. And there are plenty of families who don’t want this so-called “filtering”. And don’t bring religion into it either, because there are Christian mothers who think censorship is wrong too.

An elected representative has no excuse for ignorance, however. We pay good money to advisors to keep them informed. Mark Newton is quite rightly concerned about Kate Ellis’ ignorance.

She was unknowingly parroting the same factual errors that Conroy uses every time he opens his mouth on this issue. It’s obvious that there’s a set of talking points that has been distributed around the Parliamentary Labor Party, and no matter which member you talk to they’ll say the same things.

Those same things are easy targets, low-hanging fruit. Because they’ve so completely failed to educate themselves on the facts of this issue, they’re absolutely simple to demolish.

There was nothing Ms Ellis said at the meeting that couldn’t be drilled into the floor by the factual data I’d footnoted in my letter (and I’ll be following up the meeting with another letter drawing attention to that fact, and suggesting that she forward my footnotes to ALP policy hacks so that they can replace their current talking points with true ones).

The overwhelming impression I walked away with is that the ALP members who support this policy don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t researched it, they don’t understand the existing law, they don’t understand the scope of what they’re proposing; It seems that they actually believe the talking points because they don’t know any better.

Anh Nguyen reckons the Phase 2 filtering trials should go ahead, asking “Why not give some families a chance to pilot to see if it suits their requirements?”

My response to that is simple: You already have plenty of options without interfering with everyone else’s Internet.

Why aren’t you trying the existing “filtered” Internet available from ISPs in the Internet Industry Association’s Family Friendly ISP program?

Why aren’t you using the free taxpayer-funded filters downloadable from NetAlert?

If you’ve tried them already and they don’t work for you, why not try one of the many other filters on the market?

Why not band together with like-minded parents and start your own “safe” ISP?

Why, exactly, do you expect the government to do your child-minding for you, and every other taxpayer to pay for it?

Here’s the full text of the letter I received today. You can also download it as a text file for handy editing.

Dear Mr Stilgherrian

Thank you for your fax regarding ISP filtering. I am aware that the proposal has attracted some criticism from those, like yourself, who are concerned that it will lead to censorship of the internet. However, the Australian Government has no plans to stop adults from viewing material that is currently legal, if they wish to view such material.

The Government regards freedom of speech as very important and the Government’s cyber-safety policy is in no way designed to curtail this.

The internet is an essential tool for all Australian children through which they can exchange information, be entertained, socialise and do school work and research. The ability to use online tools effectively provides both a skill for life and the means to acquire new skills.

However, while the internet has created substantial benefits for children it has also exposed them to a number of dangers, including exposure to offensive content. As such, parents rightly expect the Government to play its part in the protection of children online.

The Government has committed $125.8 million over the next four years to a comprehensive range of cyber-safety measures, including law enforcement, filtering and education. Measures include:

• Australian Federal Police (AFP) Child Protection Operations Team – funding to detect and investigate online child sex exploitation;
• Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions – funding to help deal with the increased activity resulting from the work of the AFP to ensure that prosecutions are handled quickly;
• ISP level filtering – funding to develop and implement ISP filtering, including undertaking a real world ‘live’ pilot;
• Education activities – funding to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to implement a comprehensive range of education activities;
• Websites / Online helpline – funding to ACMA to improve current Government cyber-safety website resources and to make them easier for parents to use, and to provide up-to-date information. ACMA will also develop a children’s cybersafety website to provide information specifically for children, and improve the online helpline to provide a quick and easy way for children to report online incidents that cause them concern;
• Consultative Working Group – funding for an expanded Consultative Working Group. The Group will consider the broad range of cyber-safety issues and advise the Government, to ensure properly developed and targeted policy initiatives;
• Youth Advisory Group – funding for a Youth Advisory Group which will provide advice to the Consultative Working Group on cyber-safety issues from a young person’s perspective; and
• Research – funding for ongoing research into the changing digital environment to identify issues and target future policy and funding.

These initiatives will tackle the issue of cyber-safety from a number of directions to help clean up the online environment and protect Australian children from the dangers of the internet now and into the future. This approach acknowledges the key role parents and carers have in the online safety of children, and provides them with the necessary information to assist with this task. This initiative also recognises that there is no single solution to ensure children can access the internet safely.

A key part of the Government’s plan to make the internet a safer place for children is the introduction of ISP level filtering. The policy reflects our community’s growing belief that ISPs should take some responsibility for enabling the blocking of illegal material on the internet. Filtering would cover illegal and prohibited content using an expanded ACMA blacklist of prohibited sites, which includes images of the sexual abuse of children.

Consideration is being given to more sophisticated filtering techniques for those individual families who wish to exclude additional online content in their own homes.

The Government wants to ensure that Australian parents can access a ‘clean feed’ internet service. This will be informed by the technology adopted in countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Canada where ISP filtering, predominantly of child pornography, has been successfully introduced without affecting internet performance to a noticeable level.

The Government’s ISP filtering policy is being developed through an informed and considered approach, including industry consultation and close examination of overseas models to assess their suitability for Australia.

ACMA recently completed an extensive laboratory trial of available ISP filtering technology. The trial looked specifically at the effect of a range of filter products on network performance, effectiveness in identifying and blocking i”egal and

inappropriate content, scope to filter non-web traffic, and the ability to customise the filter to the requirements of different end-users.

The laboratory trial indicated that ISP filtering products have developed in their effectiveness since they were last assessed in 2005. The Government wll now proceed with a ‘live’ pilot in the second half of 2008 which will provide valuable information on the effectiveness and efficiency of filters installed in a ‘real world’ ISP network. An Expression of Interest will be released in due course seeking the participation of ISPs in the pilot.

The Government is committed to working closely with internet industries to address any concerns, including costs and internet speeds. These concerns will be carefully considered during the pilot and will further inform the Government’s cyber-safety policy.

Thank you for bringing your concerns to my attention. I trust this information will be of assistance.

Yours Sincerely,

Anthony Albanese MP
Federal Member for Grayndler
Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development & Local Government
Leader of the House

28 October 2008

Further Reading

21 December 2008: In the weeks since this post was written, I’ve written more on this issue, as have others.

If you have time to read only one article, make it Irene Graham’s incredibly well-researched Australian Gov’t Mandatory ISP Filtering/Censorship Plan. What Irene doesn’t know about this issue wouldn’t even cover half the head of a pin.

If you like my style of writing, then you might like these pieces:

• The lies of the internet censors: Your. Filter. Won’t. Work.
• My radio interview on 2SER FM’s Diffusion
• Clive Hamilton doesn’t quite win “Cnut of the Week”

There’s some earlier material, listed here newest-first:

• Conroy thoroughly tangled in his own Rabbit-Proof Firewall
• Cheap tricks not the right response on internet filtering
• Internet filters a success, if success = failure
• Labor’s dream of kid-friendly internet is flawed
• Angry geeks: “Don’t waste money on internet filters”
• Why government internet filtering won’t work

Gosh, this really has been my Issue of the Year, eh?