Why would anyone be “curious” about child porn? This is simply a line not to be crossed. No grey area, no muddy waters, simply a place you don’t go or you will have seriously bad consequences dealt to you. I don’t wish to protect potential child pornographers, I would rather they were outed so we can deal to them and protect our kids.

Chris G – spot on observation. It is irrelevant which label you stick on them, desire for power and control is a politician thing rather than a “left” or “right” thing. We really do all need to start looking at the issues and not the issuers. A good policy, idea or decision is good no matter what political party it comes from. Too many people ensconce themselves in their “corner” and that’s the end of it.

A secret list control by some bureaucrat in a government department I have complete faith. Oh but as long as it is audited by another government department then it’ll be fine.

Leave a loaded gun around and somebody will pull the trigger.

England wanted to make seat belt wearing compulsory for everyone but face strong opposition from the proponents of freedom so they made seat-belts compulsory for children. Who would not want to keep their child safe?

You say it’s voluntary. Not for ISP customers it’s not. Not really.

But as for whether it’s technically difficult to have some customers filtered and others not. It’s not.

Consider Xtra’s port 25 filtering (which they have been doing for about 3 years). You can opt out of that. They can do it. No matter what they tell you, they can, even if it means putting in a second gateway router which doesn’t listen to the DIA BGP updates and direct opted out customers through that one.

remember to save the children it’s not just porn. There’s drugs, gangs, extreme nationalists, racists, atheists, slightly extreme nationalists, Satanists, fatty foods, Islamist’, moderate nationalists, sugar, bomb making, Catholics, nationalists, guns, boy racers, alcohol and oh National.

[DPF: I don't see this as a partisan issue. The idea of a voluntary filter has been explored for three to four years. I doubt Ministers took a lot of notice of a $150K line item.

A key thing for me is this is only child porn, not porn. One is a matter of private morals and the other exploits child rape and paedophilia.]

In fact, surely all but the most stupid of them have enough sense to do that already, so they don’t leave a trail?

Maybe I’m technically ignorant, but on the face of it this looks more like an expensive PR exercise than anything of any practical use.

And the irony of the filter technology being purchased from Sweden, the society in which the Pirate Bay group flourished, is interesting.

The fact is that the Australian internet filter is being pushed through by a left wing government, over the concerns of many in Oz. Sadly, restraint is not something the left seem to be able to practice well. You may see though the arguments, but many on your side of the political spectrum don’t.

Yes, you’ve just highlighted the problem with filtering systems that relies on urls & textual content, since these systems will completely missed those sites which involve porno images only. There are a few off-shore systems that can detect pornographic image materials & automatically tagged these as objectionable material site.

One of the earliest one ( around ~ 2000) that I recalled was a commercial system named WIPE that was developed based on the work of researchers from Stanford and it had reasonable accuracy back then. I am sure that they’re more accurate today. Original WIPE (Wavelet Image Pornography Elimination) paper is available. WARNING! The paper contains some porno images that may offend some readers.

We laws against contempt of court to prevent a miscarriage of justice. However, we would be on very dangerous grounds if authorities monitored and blocked sites that they felt were in contempt of court. If people take it upon themselves to publish evidence that is not admissible in court they should be punished severely enough to discourage others from doing the same.

From reading comments it appears there is no way to stop someone who really wants to view child porn from doing so. Hopefully it may be possible to detect and punish them after the event. The same I presume would apply to bomb making. Someone who is computer savvy could probably find a site. Blocking such sites might stop some nutter with fewer computer skills from making a bomb.

There are some who would like bring in hate speech laws. I should have the right to say that homosexuals offend against children at a rate greatly disproportionate to their number in the population. However, if I state seriously that homosexuals should be stoned to death before they get a chance to molest your children that should be covered by incitement to violence. This sort of statement should be prosecuted but not blocked.

Would it be possible to have a limited number of sites blocked for say child porn and bomb making but have a small group to monitor if those blocking the sites exceed their brief?

First, That’s ridiculous. This shouldn’t be a government requirement. If private businesses want to do it themselves, it should be up to them and not the government to dictate.

Second, why is there is always when government is looking for IT solutions they go offshore. There are a number of local software vendors that can do the same thing as the (expensive) swedish-devised software quoted above. These decision-makers should first look for solutions locally, because in doing so, it supports our local industry.

Sadly, most of the DIA prosecutions come about due to the inspectors ‘getting lucky’ in identifying users online or through information received from overseas.

The fact is that, as DPF alludes to, most of the offenders in New Zealand seem to use peer to peer networking and the like to facilitate exchanges. There are other work arounds that I have seen in DIA briefs of evidence and technical information, but apprehension of offenders does appear to be haphazard.

That is not a criticism of the DIA, it is just a statement of the reality of the internet.

I do worry, as Redbaiter and Chris G point out above, that a blacklist will go the way of the Aussies and will take on a ‘social control’ favour. Once it is in place I struggle to believe that the DIA, Injustice and the Police won’t want to make it compulsory and then start to include so-called ‘hate’ sites, as chosen by them. It is the way of all government that once you have control of an area you begin to extend it. If you label it ‘preventive’ then you will obviously get support from the left, who think that there is no problem with micro-controlling people’s lives. Then all you need to do is wait for Labour to win an election.

Question I have is whether a few objectionable images, deleted after a day or so, amongst tens of thousands of other images, would be enough to have this site censored.

Ie – is this law workable, or would the approach be that they have to save the poor helpless peons from themselves and ban first, ask later?

Since when was this such a glaring problem that it needed this scheme? I can only assume that if I were Stupid enough to search key terms on google to try and find some of the vile stuff, the cops would be on to me pretty quickly.

Okay, I have just looked at the Wikileaks list of Aussie blacklist. Everyone must go and look at it. Just shows you how fucking stupid our blacklist will inevitably be.

Notable inclusion: youporn.com (aka. the largest streaming porn website) – not kid porn.

Thanks a lot, but DILIGAF?

Er No, and for those of you who don’t know what patronising is.