Recently I stumbled across this post on the ABC Unleashed website by Lucy Saunders. It presents an interesting way at looking at issues that we’ve posted about before [1] [2] [3] [4]. From the post:

Enjoy your unfiltered internet access while it lasts. As we speak, the government is hard at work building a device to censor the internet. Presumably this will be followed by a machine to beam KEVIN11 propaganda straight into people’s brains, then a giant ray gun to obliterate dissidents from space.

Okay, that’s probably a little bit of an overreaction, but it is true that Stephen Conroy, the Communications Minister expects the mandatory internet filters blocking “inappropriate material” to be ready for field testing by the end of June.

Hopefully these field tests will check whether the filters slow download speeds to the point where it takes an hour to load this page, or can be circumvented in minutes by an average ten-year-old, thus becoming a total waste of time and money. What remains to be seen is if some kind of coherent definition of what constitutes “inappropriate material” will be ready by then.

The post is well worth a read, as are the large number of comments.