Professor Landfeldt, one of Australia's leading
telecommunications experts, says some of the fundamental flaws of
the scheme raised in his report include:
� All filtering systems will be easily circumvented using
readily available software.
� Censors maintaining the blacklist will never be able to
keep up with the amount of new content published on the web every
second.
� Filters using real-time analysis of sites to determine
whether content is inappropriate are not effective, capture wanted
content, are easy to bypass and slow network speeds exponentially
as accuracy increases.
� Entire user-generated content sites such as YouTube and
Wikipedia could be blocked over a single video or article.
� Filters would be costly and difficult to implement for
ISPs and put many smaller ISPs out of business.
� While the communciations authority's blacklist would be
withheld from internet users, all 700 ISPs would have access to it,
so it could easily be leaked.
� The filters would not censor content on peer-to-peer
file sharing networks such as LimeWire, chat rooms, email and
instant messaging;
� ISPs and the Government could be legally liable for the
scheme's failures, particularly as content providers have no right
to appeal against being blocked unnecessarily.
Rhondda Powling on 16 Sep 12Ebooks outlawed in class. The September issue of School Library Journal addressed not one, but two reader issues pertaining to digital access by K-12 students. Pat Scales, chair of the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, has dealt with many a book challenge and attempts to ban library materials. In her column, "Scales on Censorship," she addresses situations faced by readers. But "this is the first I've encountered in which a book's format has been censored," she writes.
