Untangling the web's shifting strands

Despite the failure of the Howard government's net filter scheme, and Senator Helen Coonan's second, superior attempt, both famously cracked by 16-year-old Tom Wood, the Rudd Government is embarking on a similar quest, starting with a six-week trial. It has invited the internet service providers to enlist, but the good news is that all of us can participate. Judging from comments in the blogosphere, geeks are lining up to be the first to prove how easily the system will be hacked. If redirecting proxies is not your thing, you could join the stop-watch subcommittee, whose job will be to monitor the drag of the content-filtering system on your computer's speed. Another task is to try to trick the system by putting in keywords that might be on the black list: 'jugs', 'hot', and 'doggy', for example. A top-down content-filtering system is doomed to fail. The internet was built to route around blockages.