[MLB-WIRELESS] Government Internet Filter - What do you think?

[mw at freenet.net.au]

G’day,

 

Funny to see iiNet on that list – since they have been so vocally critical of the latest filtering proposals.

 

I actually ran an ISP throughout in the 90s, and offered a “family friendly” service as well as a school service that eventually serviced a couple of hundred schools over the state govt VicOne network.

 

The domestic grade service simply offered web access through a proxy server with an ‘N2H2’ filter engine behind it.  The school service was pretty much the same.  The default arrangement was that they opened port 80 at the school gateway, and we ran it all through a transparent proxy with n2h2 behind it.   If the school wanted to, they could open additional ports as well (some of them wanted their own mail servers etc) then it was entirely up to them to manage the consequences of that.  If I’m not mistaken, most school services work pretty much the same.  Some of them offer additional bells and whistles (like ours had individual user authentication and download limits etc)  but they were usually implemented through a proxy of some kind.  Very few offered lower level controls (e.g www.webtraf.com.au) which use layer 7 filtering and so are way more effective at controlling traffic, but hugely resource intensive.

 

The only viable way to implement those sort of filtering technologies is in a widely distributed way (as in one filter engine at each site) – further upstream, at the isp or (foolishness) at a national level would require way too much processing power and/or bring throughput down to a crawl.

 

Cheers!


IIA 'Family Friendly' ISPs 


AUSTAR broadband <http://www.austar.com.au/>  
Gday.net <http://www.gday.net.au/>  
iiNet <http://www.iinet.net.au/>  
Optus <http://www.optus.com.au/home/index.html>  
Queensland IT Services <http://www.qldits.com/>  
Soul Communications <http://www.soulaustralia.com.au/> 
Telstra BigPond  <http://www.bigpond.com/homepage/> 
UQConnect  <http://uqconnect.net/> 
Virgin Broadband  <http://www.virginbroadband.com.au/> 
WebCentral  <http://www.webcentral.com.au/> 
Webshield <http://www.webshield.net.au/>  
Westnet  <http://www.westnet.com.au/> 
Wideband Networks <http://wideband.net.au/> 

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