ISP Filtering Live Report

The ISP Filtering Live Pilot Report was just released. I've linked to an alternate URL since the site seems to be down. So what does it tell us?

"All six ISPs achieved 100 percent accuracy blocking the ACMA blacklist." Of 1000 URLs. Well, that doesn't seem very realistic since 1000 URLs isn't very many. But that's OK, there was another part to the test:

"In addition the above blacklist, filtering a wider range and volume of material to provide some level of protection to children using the internet." "In blocking additional categories of content all six ISPs achieved 78 percent to 84 percent accuracy when assessed against the test list of URLs compiled by Enex TestLab (Enex)." Hmm, that doesn't sound so good.

But at least there aren't blocking innocent material right?

"Testing was also undertaken against a list of content, prepared by Enex, considered to be innocuous and which should not be blocked by a filter. All participants experienced some level of over-blocking in this test (i.e. blocking of some legitimate URLs). All filters blocked less than 3.4 percent of such content."

Oh dear. Well, at least circumvention isn't an issue right? Because at least we can stop people from downloading prohibited material which is the point of the legislation (summary from wikipedia):

"A collection of both federal and state laws apply, but the most important are the provisions of Schedule 5 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 inserted in 1999 and since amended.^[6] Under this regime, if a complaint is issued about material "on the Internet" the ACMA is allowed to examine the material under the guidelines for film and video. If the material would be classified R18+ or X18+ and the site does not have an adult verification system, or would be refused classification, and is hosted in Australia, the ABA is empowered to issue a "takedown notice" under which the material must be removed from the site. If the site is hosted outside Australia, the site is added to a list of banned sites. This list of banned sites is then added to filtering software, which must be offered to all consumers by their Internet Service Providers."

From the report:

"A technically competent user could, if they wished, circumvent the filtering

technology."

Well... at least it didn't impact performance:

"Testing revealed that the three ISPs filtering only the ACMA blacklist had no noticeable performance degradation that could be attributed to the filter itself."

So it wouldn't actually stop someone if they were competent, and if you implemented a realistic sized list then you probably won't catch all URLs, and in any case you are probably going to get false positives. But at least it didn't affect performance. Although if you did want to actually prevent circumvention:

"As a general rule, there appears to be a relationship between measures to counter deliberate circumvention and impact on internet performance (i.e. stronger circumvention prevention measures can result in greater degradation of internet performance)."

Oh dear.