[Chapter-delegates] Internet Filtering

Sun Jun 29 06:39:28 PDT 2008

Hello Alejandrao Pisantry,

If the Government of Australia and Palestine, there must similar
experiments happening elsewhere in the world as well. And there must
be several other governments, if not all, that are interested in some
of content and spam filtering.

Lot of money and efforts are redundantly replicated when each nation
tries to do that on its own. Rather than do it at a national level if
it can be done at the global level by a central, neutral authority it
can be more effectively done. .

There is an issue related to what is permissible in one country may be
unwanted in some other country.

For example:

Child Pornography:  Every country might want this filtered out.
Content related to perverted forms of pornography -  Some countries
might want them filtered out and others may not
Explicit Sex  Most countries might permit them as classified adult
content, but a few nations might want them filtered out.

Model A:  If there is a central server filtering out content, it could
filter out content in modules, each participating nation might choose
to allow or filter the module that it might choose.

At a global level, again we are talking about a situation where anyone
is free to upload any form of content and use and abuse the Internet
in the manner he wants to use. Someone can take an IP address, set up
a Gogle.com to make it a zombie of Google.com and can cause tremendous
damage by spreading malware or by causing phising attacks. Or someone
could use an IP address to upload child pornography content or content
such as how to take down the World Trade Center.

Model B: There is no system at the IP address organization to shut
down the IP addresses that are abused.  The transition to IPV6
provides a huge opportunity in this regard. I will set aside the
privacy and political issues and focus instead on the technical
feasibility for the moment:

Basic Idea of Model B:  The present thinking is that IPV4 continues to
be functional even when IPV4 allocation is stopped and IPV6 becomes
the norm. Model B would require the internet community to set a
deadline, say 5 years from the time the IPV4 allocation stops, for
complete transition to IPV6. i.e. IPV4 addresses are completely
translated into IPV6 by some re-allocation method.

There will be only IPV6 addresses and these addresses are to be
grouped for authenticity levels and content.

( It would take a complete change of thinking for a Universal
Declaration on malicious and harmful use of the Internet to be
promulgated into a law that would disallow creation of such content.
This will take years, if it is to happen. In the meantime, )

IPV4 has there classes, IPv6 can have a hundred.  Class 7 would be for
incorporated business, Class 14 for accreditted academic institutions,
 90 can be child pornography, Class 94 for Soft Pornogrphy, Class 98
for Potentially Destructive.

Australia and the World can choose to shut out Class 90,98 while
Palestine and a few other nations could shut out 94 and 98 and so on

A Class 7 IP address abusing its IP with class 98 content could be
centrally shut out.

The transition to IPV6 presents huge opportunities to streamline and
clean up the Internet of Destructive Elements, but how the Internet
Community would do that without paving way of loss of privacy and
freedom is a big question.

Sivasubramanian Muthusamy

2008/6/29 Alejandro Pisanty <apisan at servidor.unam.mx>:
> Hi Tony and OMar,
>
> a few years ago a unit I worked in took a very serious look into this and a
> more specific problem, anti-spam filtering.
>
> As Tony already hints, there is no general answer. This is an engineering
> problem as much as it is a political one. The engineering part should be
> derived from the requirements of the system. The impact on traffic
> throughput depends on what kind of filtering is made (ports? protocols?
> things happening at the header level? strings in the content of email or
> webpages? reputation filters? comparison against online or on-site lists?,
> evaporating the content or filing it? identifying who it was directed to and
> persecuting the user?, etc.) and with what processing capacity. There will
> be more technical terminology if you want to make this sound more
> engineerish.
>
> If you put a weak box in the middle of the stream and ask for it to do a lot
> of work (filtering contents by comparing against some forbidden strings),
> well, you are going to hit the traffic badly. If you put enough power you
> may make it impercetible for most users.
>
> Now of course someone has to craft the requirements and that will most
> probably be where the real problem lies - the political level. All the worse
> if at the backbone and in a non-transparent, non-revocable way for people to
> be able to bring back their sites, or email, onlne.
>
> Yours,
>
> Alejandro Pisanty
>
>
> .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . .  .  .  .  .  .
>     Dr. Alejandro Pisanty
> UNAM, Av. Universidad 3000, 04510 Mexico DF Mexico
>
> *Mi blog/My blog: http://pisanty.blogspot.com
> *LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pisanty
> *Unete al grupo UNAM en LinkedIn,
> http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/22285/4A106C0C8614
>
> ---->> Unete a ISOC Mexico, www.isoc.org
>  Participa en ICANN, www.icann.org
> .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
>
>
> On Sun, 29 Jun 2008, Tony Hill wrote:
>
>> Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:26:35 +1000
>> From: Tony Hill <tony at keanyhill.wattle.id.au>
>> To: Omar D. Al-Sahili <osahili at gmail.com>
>> Cc: 'Chapter Delegates' <chapter-delegates at elists.isoc.org>
>> Subject: Re: [Chapter-delegates] Internet Filtering
>>
>> Hi Omar
>>
>> Some work has been done on filtering in Australia, because the new
>> government has some plans for centralised filtering.
>>
>> The previous work seems to be from 2006, but a government supported
>> agency called NetAlert, A Study on Server Based Internet Filters:
>> Accuracy, Broadband Performance Degradation and some Effects on the User
>> Experience, see:
>> http://www.netalert.gov.au/programs/research.html
>>
>> Unfortunately, it looks like that report is not available for download
>> from the NetAlert site.  My memory is that it showed up to 70% reduction
>> in download speeds.  The report is quoted elsewhere as saying:
>> The research shows that network performance was reduced by 18 per cent
>> for the best performing filter and almost 78 per cent on the worst
>> performing filter. The research also demonstrated variable filter
>> performance across the different categories of restricted content.
>> see: http://libertus.net/censor/ispfiltering-au-govplan.html
>> 2006 NetAlert Research
>>
>> Also, check out reports by the Australian Communications and Media
>> Authority.  See Developments in Internet Filtering Technologies and
>> Other Measures for Promoting Online Safety (PDF 2.1mb), online at:
>> http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_90266
>>
>> There is also this nice piece of news about how quickly a new Internet
>> filter could be hacked by a 16 year old:
>>
>> http://librariesinteract.info/2008/02/28/australias-internet-filter-a-failure/
>>
>> I hope this info is helpful.
>>
>> regards, Tony Hill
>> ISOC Australia
>>
>> Omar D. Al-Sahili wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear All;
>>>
>>> Internet filtering for porno and Adult sites is now being discussed in
>>> Palestine at the backbone level. As it's being piloted, it is causing
>>> ridiculously slow Internet traffic. The funny thing is that some ISPs
>>> provide filtered connections for households and that did not cause much
>>> slowness.
>>>
>>> I would appreciate some feedback of similar country's experiences about
>>> this
>>> issue and especially on the technical side and not the concept itself. I
>>> understand that the effectiveness and success of Internet filtering that
>>> is
>>> a debate on its own.
>>>
>>> So simply, how does Internet filtering affect the speed of regular
>>> Internet
>>> browsing.
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards.
>>>
>>> Omar D. Al-Sahili
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> ISOC Palestine
>>> osahili at gmail.com
>>> osahili at hotmail.com
>>> osahili @ Skype
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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