Fatal flaws in website censorship plan, says report - web - T...

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.

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