Content Blocking Report

Danny Yee (danny@staff.cs.usyd.edu.au)
Wed, 5 Aug 1998 00:31:13 +1000 (EST)

Check out the Content Blocking report commissioned by NOIE, at
http://www.noie.gov.au/reports/blocking/index.html

It's not _all_ bad, but it proposes that anyone publishing material online
should be check its legality in the jurisdiction of the connecting client
before letting it be accessed. I kid you not.

I've seen many clueless proposals for online content regulation, but
this has to be one of the silliest. It would require content producers
to understand the censorship systems of every country on the planet AND
content hosting services to be able to determine the jurisdiction of
connecting clients in real time. (Would you believe they propose using
_ident_ to do the latter?)

The weird thing is that the rest of the report explains why blocking
content using either packet-filtering or application-level gateways
isn't practical... but what they propose is even less feasible.

Danny.