It feels like each week the government comes up with some new plan to ‘protect us’ from the boogie men of the internet. This is a new week, so yep, its another crazy scheme that yet again proves that Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd have no idea how the Internet works.

This week it is the story about how there is a proposal for ALL Internet users in Australia to have mandatory Virus scanning and firewalls in place before they are allowed Internet connections.

Now here we go with the flaws.

1. How are the ISP’s going to verify that the users have Virus software and Firewalls installed?

2. I run Linux and Mac computers at home. Virus scanners are generally useless for Linux and Mac users. Sure
there are small possibilities for viruses and trojans. But for the most part they are not a serious issues at this stage. Also as far as I know there are limited or no resident memory virus scanning software available for the two systems, especially Linux. There is ClamAV for Linux but this is usually used on mail servers to protect the destination Windows computers from getting infected.
Will I be banned from using the Internet because I don’t run an operating system that needs a virus scanner?

3. Most people in Australia now use ADSL to connect to the Internet. This means most people use an ADSL Router for their connection. A firewall is pointless for protecting computers if there is a NAT router. A router effectively prevents connections from outside reaching a internal network computer which is what a firewall does. The difference is a firewall explicitly blocks the connections, where as a router basically ignores it unless the router is told to allow the connection through.

The last part of the government report mentions

“address the merits of an industry specific regulation under the Australian Consumer Law, including a scheme for the compulsory independent testing and evaluation of IT products and a product labelling scheme.”

This is very broad and very dangerous. What are they actually proposing here? Every bit of software released needs to be tested by an independent company before its allowed to be sold? or what?

Who does the testing? This will take a LOT of resources.

Under what guidelines?

Is the testing just on security, or other defects?

How much testing is done before its considered safe?

Does this cover Open Source Software?

Does it cover websites?

What about something someone releases for free?

Who covers the cost of the testing because it won’t be cheap?

What about freelancers? This would surely be the end of them.

Is this how the Government wants to drive the final nail into the coffin of the Australian IT industry?

I am almost speechless at the arrogance and ignorance of the Labor government. We need to get these idiots out of power!

Read more at: 
- http://www.itwire.com/it-policy-news/regulation/39894
- http://www.newworldliberty.com/newsarticle/australian-government-force-internet-users-install-state-approved-software

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.