Australian Net censorship moves ahead with testing

The proposed tightening of Internet censorship in Australia is now in its first phase.

Australia's Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will soon be conducting tests of ISP-based filters in Tasmania before a nationwide field test deployment takes place.

Melbourne-based Enex Testlab will be evaluating the efficacy of filters by hardware and software vendors for the federal government. The tests are scheduled for completion by June 30, at which point the open testing phase begins.

Filters will be applied, Australian IT reports, to block inappropriate Web pages and automatically relay a "clean feed" to households. The ACMA released a report last week claiming Web 2.0 sites to be among the greatest threats to the country's younger generation, making children vulnerable to sexual predators, or data theft.

A major drawback to complex filtering and blocking, the report states, is the significant tax placed upon processing resources to carry it out. The report acknowledges that when similar solutions are deployed on the user's side, they do not noticeably affect performance.

The upcoming tests will determine how the country can best apply such filtering with a minimum reduction in performance.