Politicians getting technical
Politicians always look pretty silly talking technical, so they usually don’t venture very far into IT. Their breed is better with eight second sound bites and photo opportunities with babies and young animals. Elections are often the only time our little patch attracts any attention at all, and to become a political football is an exciting change.
Fresh on the back of cutting the guts out of NBN funding to pay for earlier election promises, today we can read about the Coalitions new “Cyber Safety” plan with a promise of $100.5 million over four years. PC-based filtering gets $60 million. An education plan for teachers gets $30 million. The remaining 10.5 million goes to a cyber bully ‘Task force’, whatever that means.
The policy sales line is good. Stand up for Australia. Stand up for real action. Leaving no doubt as to what we should think of idiots who choose unreal action or who are obvious traitors. And of course, there’s the obligatory opposition jab at current policy. After three years Labour has not been able … highlighting the practical problems with its plan. The promise is a PC-based filter will be provided free to families.
I find at least three problems with this policy document, which can be downloaded from here.
Firstly, this idea it’s free to families is a bit of white lying. The announcement is the spending of $100 million tax payers dollars, so there’s an immediate and direct costs already. Add to that the suggestion the ISP is going to supply the solution paid for by the government. How will the ISP pay for all this distribution? What happens when their help desk is swamped by parents who are only half IT literate? Either these solutions will have to sold at a profit, or the costs recovered in higher internet charges for everyone.
Secondly, they make the following technical statement which simply isn’t true. No filter can be perfect. However, PC-based filters are much more dynamic and can access a wider range of contents than a static ISP level filter. All URL filters have to refer to a database that resides somewhere, regardless of which they are all updated dynamically. The quality of the database depends on the quality of the vendors engineering and has nothing to do with where the database resides. Also, if they are suggesting ever parent is going to download the entire database to their desktop and keep dynamically updated, it would interesting to know how much data that represents in a year and who pays for it. Even the last part of the statement isn’t true, there are agent based solutions that can monitor all the internet traffic, whether from Skype, P2P or a browser. All that’s needed are a few TCP stack shims and the like to detect and intercept that traffic. Microsoft did it with their Winsock client ten years ago, so it’s not even vaguely new or hard to do.
Lastly, there appears to be no allowance for complexity, meaning reality. There is nothing accidental or incompetent in the discovery that current government attempts have run into practical problems. That’s the natural outcome when politicians living in black and white simplicity land, get elected, roll their sleeves up and get down into the detail where those of us technical live every day. It won’t matter who gets elected, it’s going to get messy.
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