🚀 go-pugleaf

(Newsgroups trimmed!)

In article <30F37D40.2EF9@tamarcom.com.au> Andrew Connor, connor@tamarcom.com.au writes:
> If Governments want to do anything usefull in respect to 
> internet censorship, they should make it manditory for ISP's to 
> supply access restricting software with startup kits.  This 
> would leave it up to parents to look after what their kids see 
> intead of governments determining what we all see and do.

Such 'access restricting software' doesn't generally work (as I
explained to the Senate Select Committee in my submission, and as
I will explain to the ABA in my submission to them).

If it works by dropping packets with specific strings in them (which
is how most of them seem to work), then it's excluding access to
specific things, such as IRC channels. However, the things that one
might wish to exclude at any given time is a vast list of newsgroups,
WWW sites, and IRC channels. Aside from its enormous size, it also
changes extremely rapidly, leaving you with an out-of-date list of
excluded things in about a week (or five minutes, in the case of
IRC).

It's better if it allows access only to known acceptable items; that
gives you a much smaller list to keep up to date. However, doing so is
vastly harder. You can exclude IRC channels, for example, by dropping
outgoing packets that contain strings like "/J #HOTSEX"; to allow
access to only certain channels means assuming that every "/J #" is
the start of a join command, even if it appears in something unrelated
to IRC. If you take this path, the logic becomes extremely complex
very quickly, as you try to filter all the various protocols for IRC,
Usenet, the WWW, email, and whatever else people come up with.

So there is no technological fix as yet. All that parents can do is
stay with their children when they're signed on. (I know: what a
bummer. The Internet is not just another child minder like the TV.)


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Phil Herring                                              revdoc@uow.edu.au
Copyright 1996 Phil Herring. This article may not be reproduced for profit.
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