pacifist

Who on earth really thought through with an understanding of all the concepts and thought this scheme was a good or feasible idea?

There are a multitude of fundamental reasons why this is a terrible idea, on many wildy varying fronts including technical, financial and societal.

- As a technologist I'll lay out now, there is *NO* technical way you can block bad content being on the internet; it was designed to be decentralized and resistant to attack and though it's less decentralized than it once was there is still no way you can filter successfully; see 'WASTE'(encrypted peer to peer) VPN(virtual private networking - encrypted links), freeNet(see wikipedia) and many others, worse, it seems that no less than 3% of legitimate websites *will* currently be blocked; that's a *HUGE* number, and unlike connection troubles you wont be able to simply try and reload the page.. the legitimate page will *never* work. Good going.

- The ridiculous expense that will be incurred as a result of this disaster will destroy parts of a budget that might actually subsidize the future of the children you wish to protect; see climate change, it's a much greater threat, and you'll actually achieve something spending that budget on renewables.

-This filtering scheme can't stop bad stuff from being on the internet, but it indeed it will certainly also be used in some cases to block or attack something legitimate; not neccesarily by the government rather by third parties, I'm not being a conspiracy theorist; simply by people using an anonymous connection through TOR people could upload child porn to a legitimate site (wikipedia? a comment on blogs/smh?) and get the legitimate page blocked, all with the filter doing nothing to stop it, but the filter doing everything to enable the attack. Additionally as others have mentioned, is free speech on abortion or euthanasia going to be blocked?... because that is certainly something it should not be doing. I'm sure some of the closed-minded un-tech-savy groups that pushed for this burden want that, but the internet is the best place for free speech. Are we to become as 'free' as China?

- In the end nothings changed from five years ago, it's the place of the parents to raise their children, not the government, having it implement something like this is just... frankly an horrific waste of funds... and enough to have me convinced I shouldn't vote for Rudd next time round despite all his other good work.

This farce has to stop; it'll be doing great damage, and despite it being unlikely to work, if they magically fix the kinks and it does, that'll be a greater sin than if it doesn't.