The NetAlert booklet has landed in my letterbox. So the Government has decided (strange, just before an election…) that it’s about time we started protecting our children. Clearly they don’t feel that parents are doing an adequate job, and have invested a measly $84 million in an internet p-rn filter to help families avoid unwanted downloads and content.

Unfortunately for the government, within days of the program’s release an uppity 16-year-old had bypassed the filter in less than half an hour, leaving the government and the teen boy red-faced, though for different reasons.

It does upset me that the 16-year-old chose to go to the media with this knowledge of avoiding the filter, as I’m sure his mates would have preferred this knowledge first. Though, in his defence, a 16-year-old boy that can crack a computer program in thirty minutes probably has no mates.

Initially, the p-rn filter seems like a great idea; what parent wouldn’t want to protect the kids? That is, until you put it in the context of a water filter. For what does a water filter do? It gets rid of all impurities, leaving you with 100% good quality, unadulterated, purified water. The p-rn filter is getting rid of all the useless p-rn, leaving you with only the pure stuff. With that knowledge, I imagine teenage boys will be begging for their parents to put the filter on their computers.

I’m not a parent, though if I was, I would definitely install a filter on the family computer, because we can’t be with our children all the time, and there really are some sick, depraved things available on the World Wide Web. Like John Howard on YouTube. No child should see that.