The Static Page

What you see is not all you can get.

I mentioned a few weeks ago about how the commercial aspects of the web are a bit jury-rigged. How easily finding just the right sort of retailer requires reliance on traditional advertising or a radical re-design of the Internet (and the web) as a whole. Of course, every man and his dog has ideas about how the Internet should look if it was re-designed from scratch. Some of them are obvious technical improvements, like switching to IPv6, or reimplementing a number of the staple protocols (e.g. SMTP) for a less trusting environment. Others would be less technical, but no less obvious such as organising retail web sites. But some people would have ideas for redesigning the Internet which would be highly controversial.

Whether we like it or not, there is a lot of time-wasting possible out on the web. A lot of it is time-wasting to everyone except those who are making monmey from it. Some of it is only to some people or in some contexts. Spending time here, in this community, could be viewed as a waste of time to some people. Certainly, the time spent can be hard to quantify. I, at least, can easily say that I'm practising my writing skills. :-)

And that's the crux. "Time-wasting" is a very tame euphemism for what I really meant. To put it bluntly, there is a lot of crap on the 'net. Avoiding it voluntarily is not all that hard. However, in some cases someone else wants you to not get it even if you want to. Welcome to filtering.

We've all heard about mandatory net filtering. On the pretext of removing illegal material, Australia has dickered with the idea. Fortunately, we haven't implemented it nation-wide, nor has it been forced upon ISPs, but it is very close. Countries like Singapore and China are not so lucky. It is also a hot topic in the U.S. with some jurisdictions trying to force it on public net access such as in libraries. (Parents looking to control the impressional minds of their children are probably aware of products like NetNanny.)

But what about in the middle? A lot of employees across the world have web access from their desktops. This is often a mixed blessing as the Internet is undoubtedly a highly efficient way of obtaining software patches and providing fast communication between companies, and so on. What it also brings is access to the undesirable. Certainly in Australia there are laws about sexual harrassment, for instance, and I know people have been sacked for accessing "inappropriate" material via their employer's Internet connection. However, actively policing this is technically quite difficult and many corporations opt for a personnel approach whereby staff are advised about what is and is not appropriate to access on the web. Note that the boundary lines are very to define; people have been banned from reading Dilbert, for example.

Perhaps the solution is a bigger, uglier version of NetNanny on the corporate Internet connection. I discovered the other day a company here in Sydney that offers just that. It's called NetFilter. They boast a database of 17 million web sites and categories for arranging blocking them. They quoted one example of a client that had an average of 80Mb of download traffic a day that was cut to 20Mb once they moved to NetFilter. Furthermore, they don't try to compete on price, so unlike a lot of tiny ISPs, they are making money.

What do you think? Is your employer the sort who'd go for this? Or is this merely fixing a symptom of a bigger problem?

Wade Bowmer, aka Static.

Comments? Email me at static dash page at yceran dot org.