Teen cracks AU$84 million porn filter in 30 minutes

By Jo Best on 27 August 2007

A Melbourne schoolboy claims to have cracked the AU$84 million Internet filtering software which the government is giving away to schools, libraries and families across the country.

Tom Wood, 16, claims to have broken the filters, which were released as part of the government's Net Alert scheme earlier this month, within half an hour.

The ease with which the filter can be broken came as a surprise to Wood, he told Channel Seven. "For that money, I thought it must have been unbreakable." After circumventing the filter in half an hour, Wood claims to have broken a second version of the porn-blocking software released on Friday, within 40 minutes.

Under Watts' workaround, the filtering software will, to a parent's untrained eye, appear fully functional, with the software status bar untouched.

"AU$84 million is a horrible waste of money," he told the Sunrise show. "I'm willing to work with the government if they like." Watts denied he disabled the software so he could look at porn.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan said the government had anticipated children would find ways to get around the NetAlert filters. Suppliers were contracted to provide updates, Senator Coonan said.

"The vendor is investigating the matter as a priority.

"Unfortunately, no single measure can protect children from online harm and ... traditional parenting skills have never been more important," said Coonan.

The government has already piloted Web filtering technology three times in the past. Following the most recent trial, in 2005, Coonan acknowledged problems with the concept saying: "Each report has found significant problems with content filter products operating at the ISP-level ... The Australian trials have also found the effect on performance of the Internet by ISP filtering to be substantial and a lack of scalability of the filters to larger ISPs."

The Internet filtering scheme comes as part of a wider AU$189 million package of measures announced by the government earlier this month. The NetAlert -- Protecting Australian Families Online program will also see publicity campaigns stepped up, including a AU$22 million awareness scheme to "inform parents and carers of children about online safety issues and provide information about where they can go to receive support and assistance", and 10 new ACMA Internet safety officers who will visit schools to talk about online dangers.

AAP contributed to this story.

Topics: porn, internet, filter, coonan, security, software

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Comments (8)

  • nobody commented on 26/01/2009 05:25

    change the router with a zywall with content filter and put sites in whitelist which ever you got and rest is blacklisted

    let him try again

  • bigboss commented on 03/11/2008 12:55

    How did you do it? i've been trying for years!!! please tell me how u did it at stompy2008@hotmail.com

  • Boost-juice commented on 09/10/2007 16:31

    Whatonearth, I think what torm3nt is saying is that its healthy. I beleive it hasn't done anything but help me. Maybe if more kids watched it we'd have less of these trans gender poofs running around at the moment, boys looking like girls and girls looking like boys.
    But your probably already into that.
    As for the porn profession, it is a way of life for some, thats sometimes choice or otherwise, like everyone, has a choice.

  • Onyx commented on 28/09/2007 14:05

    making the subject of Porn more taboo than it already is, is going to only encourage teenager to seek it out.

    therefore making these kinds of filters is just a waste of tax payers money. This government play does fall in line with the home drug education sent to everyone around the country. Its so stupid. talk about repeating mistakes from the past.

    Its high time the next generation get some control off these babyboomers. they have no idea.

  • whatonearth commented on 27/09/2007 22:20

    torm3nt, so u'r saying porn is not a bad thing?

  • iFap2porn commented on 19/01/2010 03:37

    Quite the contrary, it's a good thing.

  • torm3nt commented on 29/08/2007 11:06

    I don't understand why it comes down to government that needs to watch over our kids. How about people take responsibility for their own actions and have the teachers/parents reprimand the children for watching content that is deemed "inappropriate". I watched a lot of porn at that age and all it did was educate me - something the sex education failed to do well.

  • caswell1515 commented on 27/08/2007 16:27

    legend

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