James

As a parent of quite a few children I fail to see the need for the type of internet filtering proposed, simply because it is quite hard for them to 'stumble across' material and, frankly, I find it more effective to find out what they're doing and take an interest in them. Personally I find the stuff they're exposed to already in various media (advertisements, movies, TV shows &c.) already beyond their age and appropriateness anyway. As a technology professional with many years of experience in computer and networking it is a technological solution doomed to failure. It is easily circumvented and if the false-positive rates are even half the reported values then it's still far too intrusive and inconvenient. As a sometime gamer and user of software I find the proposal to include bittorrent in filtering completely perplexing. Bittorrent simply a protocol used to efficiently distribute large files and blocking this would make network congestion even worse. It is used legitimately for everything from distribution software distributions (like Linux) and software patches to game upgrades (like World of Warcraft and EVE Online). This is akin to banning photocopiers because people can use them to copy books rather than buying them. Rethink this ill-considered proposal.