Wow - Australia's new government is sure trying to look silly early - they have decided to mandate content filtering (pornography, hate sites, etc.). The problem, as always, is in the details: how do you filter the bad without also managing to whack some of the good?

Here's a story that goes into a fair bit of detail on the basic problem - filters are going to snag an awful lot of sites they shouldn't - from breast feeding to breast cancer, to take one simple example of the problem.

What we have here is an attempt at an early and cheap win by the new Australian government, in an area they expect little push-back from. I suspect that the glib advocates of this program are going to end up being ridiculed by examples like mine above, and they won't be hard to find. Additionally, their assertion that the filtering won't slow things down is just absurd.

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