Australians Anonymous

How ludicrous is it that Australia should be introducing net filters? The country the brought us Ned Kelly and Crocodile Dundee has decided that its citizens are not capable of making their own minds up on moral issues such as whether it is right to watch old episodes of Neighbours on YouTube or if they should copy a dodgy copy of a Rolf Harris album on to their MP3 player or not. I would not be surprised if the UK government wanted to play Aunty in this way but those big tough beer swilling Aussies, no way! Just because they have a state named Victoria does not mean they need to act like Victorians.

The Australian government says the filters are being put in place to stop pornographic and criminal sites. They have promised an internet filter that would block a list of banned websites, including those containing child abuse material. As anyone who has been involved with web filters knows all they do is generate false positives and slow networks to a crawl. Google and Yahoo have joined Australian organisations calling for a "rethink" of the country's controversial internet filter plans. The Australian Library and Information Association's (ALIA) Executive Director Sue Hutley said that the current filter proposals would create a "false sense of security" for Australian web users. Dealing with sites such as YouTube would cause additional load on the filtering infrastructure cause massive performance bottlenecks.

On 10 and 11 February an activist group called Anonymous attacked several official Australian government websites in protest, taking them offline for short periods of time and there is evidence that the attacks will continue and grow more frequent. The method they are using is known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). A man claiming to be a representative of the group said that around 500 people were involved in the attack. Support for the action appears to be growing from comments on social networking site such as Facebook and comments on Twitter.