The Australian government and web filtering

The Australian Government is well intentioned, but hopelessly misinformed in its continuing intention to apply web filtering technology. The government will not stop the type of people that want to access extreme illegal pornographic material.

People that want to look at the illegal extreme pornographic sites can bypass the government web filtering technology using encrypted VPNs (Virtual Private Networks).

Ironically, forcing these people to use VPNs will make it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to detect illegal activity. Also, inevitably once an automated cross match between an Australian Government sanctioned DNS server is done with an external DNS server, perverts will have a handy list of illegal sites to visit, kindly selected by the Australian Government!

Learn from past experience?

Example 1. When Facebook was blocked in Vietnam recently, many users just changed their DNS settings (eg OpenDNS).

Example 2. The Howard government's million-dollar expenditure on its "net nanny" software available for free download to the public. This quickly became embarrasing when a teenager cracked the software soon after release. On one estimation, the taxpayer-paid software ended up costing hundreds, if not thousands, per installation.

Example 3. High definition DVD decryption was cracked despite the industry's best efforts.