Australian Government and Parental Controls

It is interesting that the Australian Government is getting into the act on releasing a free web filter for use with windows, I wonder if they are connecting up to the Vista parental controls settings built into vista. I have to wonder if they provide any better coverage than Vista already does. It is curious they didn't just try and do a deal with Microsoft (or something like that) who give away their parental control software for XP and it is included with Vista.

The more worrying part of the article is labours claim that when elected it will require all ISPs to implement filtering. This is not a realistic expectation and is also problematic, how do you define filtering? Who defines what is what and if it should be filtered? No filters are perfect, new sites come up all the time with new content and they may not be filtered by the system yet. Vista does try and do some automatic detection of the page but it is definitely not 100% accurate and doesn't look inside images. If labour does implement this once they get into office it will create a lot of problems for Australia's ISP industry, although a better idea of how it is going to implemented would be needed for a more indepth comment.