Once again the Australian Government, in league this time with a website filtering company, has revealed a lack of understanding about information and how it works.

This story appears in today's Sydney Morning Herald and dots all the i's and crosses all the t's

Print this article | Close this window
Filter's prudish paranoia clogs research
By Mike Seccombe
May 22 2003

Pornography, drugs, gambling, racism, how to make bombs or conduct computer crime - it's all out there on the Internet, and 105 bureaucrats in Parliament House want to make sure they can get it whenever they need it.

They are the information and research staff of the Parliamentary Library and they are fuming at the prospect of having access to net nasties cut off by a new filtering system.

The filtering system, provided by the American company, Websense, covers more than four million restricted sites, and

for the staff of what is called "program one" of the library fighting the filter has become a campaign. For they are the ones under pressure to provide timely responses to their impatient political masters on all manner of subjects.

The Websense database, they found, blocked the site of an group funding vaccinations for children in India as "sex".

The Autism Behaviour Intervention Queensland site was blocked as "gambling".

A German site which examines historians who deny the Holocaust was blocked as "racism/hate".

They found data which showed filters designed to block pornography could also cut out 55 per
cent of references to condoms, 50 per cent of safe sex sites, 60 per cent of gay health sites and even 32 per cent of pregnancy sites.

How could they research sex slavery in Australia without access to ads for Asian sex workers? How could they research a harm-minimisation approach to drugs when the system reflected America's zero- tolerance approach?

Yesterday the man behind the introduction of the filter, library official John Templeton, said its application to the research staff was on hold.

Throughout the recent history of information technologies, the porn merchants have always been the first to "get" the idea. Video uptake and business development was largely driven by porn, the Internet proved another godsend as they adapted their models and adopted the technologies.

Now, according to a CBS Marketwatch that hit my desktop this morning, they are cracking Peer to Peer as well.

PORN COMPANIES EMBRACE PEER-TO-PEER

LOS ANGELES (CBS.MW) -- Adult filmmakers are making love to online file sharing, not rejecting it, according to a published report. "The porn guys are smart; they've figured out how to use the technology," said Wayne Rosso, president of Grokster, a developer of software designed for use in file sharing.

Independent researchers estimate as much as 38 percent of online file sharing involves adult material. Producers freely make available small segments of programming, to promote visits to subscription sites. Porn producers have also married digital rights management technology with their programming to create pay-per-view downloads. The adult film industry is "leveraging the power of peer-to-peer," said Aram Sinnreich, an entertainment industry analyst in comments to the San Francisco Chronicle. There's a lesson in this for the recording industry, he said. Namely, "how do you use free to promote paid?"

Meanwhile the one business that seems to have understood the music game online is Apple. Although SFGate's Mark Morford has a valid point in Highway To $0.99 Hell
Apple's iTunes music store: A rockin' revolution, or same ol' corporate song and dance?

I'm in the midst of reading Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee : The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal which is, in itself an interesting book and raises the valid questions about how different we are from other animals on the planet, and where those differences might be taking us.

The latest research on the genetic differences goes even further, suggesting that chimps and people should be classified as homo, the same genus, indistinguishable on 99.4% of the DNA that matters and 98.4, even in other areas of the genome.

What interests me even more than that is this: if so little difference can make such an enormous difference once the process is fully expressed, why on earth do we assume that the significant differences that we are making to the ecosystem should not be important? The question is not how much we can do without "harming" the system and rather how little we might need to do to change it irrevocably, and to our detriment.

The answer is, we don't know, OUR answer is, "we'll risk it anyway"