Rubenerd

Senator Conroy's saga continues today with reports that he is ready to initiate a so called "pilot" run of the Great Australian Firewall. I wish I was making this nonsense up. According to the NoCleanFeed.com blog, the trial will begin soon:

The Government has announced its ["clean feed"] filtering pilot is going ahead, and has called for ISPs to participate. The Expression of Interest document requires ISPs to filter the ACMA blacklist, with optional extensions such as dynamic filtering.

What I suspect will happen is that the trial will be a dismal failure; it will slow down internet connections substantially and the blocks put in place will easily be circumvented. I'm looking forward to seeing all the screenshots of sites detailing bomb making on computers involved in the trial, and subsequent screenshots showing blocked pages for breast cancer awareness.

The problem is, such an abysmal result will not deter Senator Conroy or his vocal minority (minority… minority… minority…) of supporters because their belief that such a system is useful and practical isn't rooted in facts, figures or even common sense, but rather in an unfounded idea that what they're doing is right and that everyone else is wrong, regardless. As with other adherents to similar ideologies that utilise such reasoning, they're incredibly hard to talk rationally to because they already have their conclusion before they have their facts.

In the meantime we don't even have telecommunications infrastructure that works half the time. How much money is Senator Conroy spending rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Senator Conroy, the person who wants to censor Australian internet

Now for the obligatory further reading links in case you haven't read about the issue here before: for more information about the federal government's plan to filter and censor the internet, check out NoCleanFeed.com where you can also pick up badges to put on your websites; at least before the government decides to block you for such illicit behaviour. You can also find out more at the Electronic Frontiers Australia website. You can email Senator Conroy at his website. Don't forget to also write to your local federal parliament member in your electorate.