Rubenerd

Another day goes by, another group of people have a negative opinion of the Great Australian Firewall that Senator Conroy is so desperate to implement. It's got to the stage where even the American Slashdot website has an article almost every other day about it.

This afternoon, chief operating officer Greg Winn of Australia's largest telco Telstra has compared attempts to filter the internet to boiling the ocean. According to the IT section of the Australian newspaper:

“My view on that is that’s like trying to boil the ocean … to think that you’re going to be able to centrally filter everything, I think that’s a pipe dream,” Mr Winn told reporters and analysts yesterday.

Child protection agencies have welcomed the Government’s move to filter the internet but civil libetarians, ISPs and the technical community have rallied against it for various reasons.

Mr Winn agreed with broad comments from the ISP community that internet filtering would make surfing the web a slower process.

“The one thing I do know is that once you start filtering, then you’re going to add latency no matter what,” he said.

And it seems when asked, Senator Conroy babbled on incessantly in Parliament in a typical attempt to avoid the question. This would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.

Meanwhile, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy came under fire this week for failing to reveal details of the trial.

During question time on Wednesday Senator Conroy was asked how many participants would ISPs have to enlist for the live trials to be credible.

South Australian Liberal MP Cory Bernardi also asked if the results of the trials would be independently verified.

Senator Conroy couldn’t provide answers to both questions within the two-minute timeframe provided.