I believe in three douchebags

Every time our dear Senator Conroy makes an announcement it is met with much ridicule. It almost seems that he goes out of his way to seem as incompetent as possible. The whole internet filtering fiasco has been becoming more and more farcical over the past year. I wouldn’t have thought it could get more ridiculous but it it did.

Duncan Riley explains in detail how the whole study is flawed in great detail here. The government report has all the hallmarks of the justifications for going to war in Iraq. Especially the part where they say that the trial was a 100% success except for handling high traffic (especially video streaming) sites.

WTF???!!! I mean apart from those evil evil pirates who use bittorrent a lot of the traffic will be to youtube. And this brings me to the title of the post - the three douchbags.

Due to how Testra set up their filter, and I am using Telstra as an example here, if there is just one page on a site that is blocked, the whole site goes through a proxy. So it takes one douchebag to upload something potentially objectionable up on youtube, second douchebag to object to it and a third douchebag to place that page on a blocked list and to grind youtube to a halt for everyone.

Knowing the very vocal conservatives in this country the video in question will probably be some documentary about abortion with a half a second still shot of a bloody foetus which is perfectly fine by youtube standards and even by most broadcasting standards. Once the site is on a black list I seriously doubt an ISP can proxy all their youtube traffic through a single proxy. Not without spending quite a bit on their proxy farm anyway.

Imagine the outrage. All the school kids coming home will have to wait 10 minutes for the video of a dog driving a race kart. Guess what’s going to happen. They will go into very very slimy corners of the internets to find out how to circumvent the filter. God knows what else they are going to find there. Heck even the older people who can vote will not take too kindly to having their internet slowed down.

It’s not going to fly. I can just see wikileaks ending up on a blocked list, along with a thousand of “what’s blocked” sites set up by pundits that will pop up in the near future. It will be continual bad press for the government. I am going to vote for the Pirate Party.