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We spoke to CensorNet, a UK company that provides software that enables official bodies to filter out content in the UK, and which is speaking to a couple of Australian ISPs about this project. Its view is that the slow down feared by ISPs is unlikely.

However, the firm foresees two issues with any solution. Most filters tackle just the HTTP. But HTTP accounts for an average of 25 per cent of a user's bandwidth, with the rest taken up by other traffic, including email, peer-to-peer and instant messaging.

CensorNet uses the RuleSpace technology, which automatically classifies web content before filtering.

A spokesperson for Stephen Conroy’s office tells us that fears are misplaced and nothing has yet been finalised. Rather, they are "in the final stages of preparing an expressions of interest document for ISPs to take part in a field pilot".

They add that $128.5m has been set aside "for a comprehensive cyber-safety program that focuses on education, research, ISP filtering and law enforcement". The focus will be on material such as "child pornography, cruelty or real violence, and sexual violence" that is "already illegal".

Their plans are not unrealistic, because this sort of material "is currently being filtered by a number of ISPs in countries such as the UK, Sweden, Norway and Canada with no impact on network speeds or performance".

This is not strictly true: some minor filtering of web content goes on in these jurisdictions, but nothing on the scale envisaged by the Australian Government.

In the end, what happens in Australia will affect us all. If their filtering scheme falls flat on its face, expect to hear little more of it. If it is implemented and works in however half-arsed a fashion, look forward to proposals to filter the UK internet in a couple of years time.

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said by Link Logger :

said by Blackbird :

It's all so sad. This can hardly be what Al Gore envisioned when he invented the Internet.

The Internet was just Gore's first act as later he went and invented the environment, is there no limit to Al's abilities, what possibly will he invent next?

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Claim: Vice-President Al Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet.

Status: False.

Origins: Despite the derisive references that continue even today, Al Gore did not claim he "invented" the Internet, nor did he say anything that could reasonably be interpreted that way. The "Al Gore said he 'invented' the Internet" put-downs were misleading, out-of-context distortions of something he said during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN's "Late Edition" program on 9 March 1999. When asked to describe what distinguished him from his challenger for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gore replied (in part):

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

Clearly, although Gore's phrasing might have been a bit clumsy (and perhaps self-serving), he was not claiming that he "invented" the Internet (in the sense of having designed or implemented it), but that he was responsible, in an economic and legislative sense, for fostering the development the technology that we now know as the Internet. To claim that Gore was seriously trying to take credit for the "invention" of the Internet is, frankly, just silly political posturing that arose out of a close presidential campaign.

If President Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while president, "created" the Interstate Highway System, we would not have seen dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Ike meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with his Internet statement.

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