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No Clean Feed!

I spent today, pretty much by accident, at a forum-style discussion of the issues surrounding the Australian government’s proposal to filter the Internet access of all Australian citizens.  I say “by accident” because the invitation to attend an “Internet Filtering and Censorship Forum” appeared in my email a couple of weeks ago, and without reading it too carefully, I thought it was going to be an educationally focused discussion about the filtering issues that schools face.  That would have been useful and interesting, but I didn’t realise that the discussion would actually be centred on the bigger issue of the Australian government’s proposed Internet filtering scheme.  I’m glad I went.
Look, there is no argument from me that we need to keep our children safe online.  We absolutely need to protect them from the things that are clearly inappropriate, obscene or undesirable.  I remember the first time I realised my son had seen things online that I didn’t think he should see, and it’s a horrible feeling.  But this proposal by Senator Stephen Conroy (the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) is unrealistic, unworkable, naive and just plan stupid.

Let me put you in the picture.  In the leadup to the last Australian federal election, the Australian Labor Party (then in opposition) made a series of promises to try and get elected (as they do).  One of those promises revolved around a deal done with the powerful Christian Right, in which the Christian Right essentially said “we will give you our preference votes in exchange for you promising to put ISP-level Internet filtering in place”.  The Labor party, in a desperate attempt to get elected, said “yes of course we will do that!”.  Well, they went on to win the election and now they are in the unenviable position of having to meet an election promise that is just plain stupid.  The minister in charge of all things digital, Stephen Conroy, is either the most honorable politician at keeping his promises or the most ignorant, pigheaded, obstinate politician I’ve come across.  I suspect a bit of both.

The plan is to legislate for all Australian Internet Service Providers to supply mandatory content filtering for their customers, at the ISP level.  This would mean that every Australian ISP would have to maintain whitelists and blacklists of prohibited content, and then filter that content before it gets to their customers.  It means that every Australian internet user would have a filtered, censored, internet feed, removing any content that the government deems inappropriate.  Many comparisons have been made to the filtering that currently takes place in China, where the Chinese government controls what their people see.  I don’t think it’s quite that bad (yet), since the Australian proposal is only only really talking about blocking content that is actually illegal (child pornography, etc) but the fact is that filtering is a non-exact science, and there is little doubt that there will be many, many webpages that get either overfiltered of underfiltered.  Those of us in the education sector who have been dealing with filters for years, know exactly how frustrating this can be.

The forum today, which was held at the Sydney offices of web-savvy law firm Baker and Mackenzie, raised many important issues surrounding the filtering proposal.  There were many experts in the room from organisation such as the Electronic Frontiers Australia, the Internet Industry Association, the Law School of the University of NSW, the Brooklyn Law School, the Australian Classification Board, the Inspire Foundation, and many others.   Many of these organisations had a chance to make a short presentation about their perspective on the government’s proposal, and there was a chance for some discussion from the larger group.  It was a great discussion all round.

This is a big issue.  Much bigger than I realised.  I’d read a bit about it in the news, but hadn’t given it that much thought.  On the surface, a proposal to keep children safe and to block illegal content seems like a reasonable idea.  In practice, it is a legal, political and logistical nightmare.

Here are just a few of the contentious issues that the Conroy proposal raises…

What are we actually trying to achieve? What do we really want to block? Stopping kids getting to a few naughty titty pictures is quite a different proposition from preventing all Internet users from accessing pornographic content. Are we trying to just protect children, or are we trying to prevent adults from seeing things that they ought to be able to have the right to choose whether they see or not?  The approaches for achieving each of these goals are probably quite different.

Who will make the decisions about what is appropriate or not? There are many inconsistencies in the way the Classification Board rates content.  There have been numerous examples where something that is rated as obscene is later reviewed and found to be only moderately offensive.  Who decides?  Why should a government be allowed to make decisions about what people are allowed to see or not see.  In Australia, unlike the US, we do not have a constitution that guarantees a right to free speech, so we cannot even use the argument that our government has no right to control what we see.  They can, and they are trying to enforce it.

Won’t somebody think of the children! Sure, filters are designed to keep children safe.  We all want that.  But what if I’m a childless couple?  If I have no children in my household, why should I have to be filtered and restricted for content that is aimed at adults?  As an adult, I should be able to access whatever content I like, including the titty pictures if that’s what floats my boat.  As an adult, I don’t need the government telling me what I can and can’t access online, especially if it has nothing to do with children.

How do you filter non-http traffic? Traffic moves around the internet using all sorts of protocols… ftp, p2p, https, email, usenet, bit torrent, skype, etc.  I was told by a reliable source today that there are hundreds of different internet protocols, and many new ones are being created all the time.  Filters generally only look at regular http traffic (webpages) and will therefore have little chance of catching content that uses other protocols.  Usenet News Groups are a huge source of pornographic material, yet they will be unaffected by the proposed filters.  There is nothing to stop child pornographers exchanging content over peer-to-peer networks, bit torrent, skype or even as email attachments…  and these would all go undetected by the filters.

Do we bend the trust model until it breaks? Although the http protocol is pretty easy to inspect for its contents, the https protocol is not. The https protocol, otherwise known as Secure http, is the same one used by banks, online merchandisers and so on to facilitate secure online ecommerce transactions.  Sending traffic via https instead of regular old http is trivial to do, so one would expect that if the filters eventually happen, then the child pornographers will just start to transmit their stuff using https instead.  This will lead to one of two possible situations…  either the filters will continue to ignore http traffic (as they do now) and the pornographers carry on with business as usual making the whole filter thing pointless; or instead, the people who create the filters get smart enough to come up with a way to inspect https traffic as well.  As clever as this might be, the whole idea of https traffic is that it is encrypted to the point where the packet contents cannot be seen.  To design filters that were smart enough to inspect encrypted packets, would, if it happened, also break the entire trust model for online ecommerce.  If https packets could be inspected for their contents there would be a major breakdown in trust for other transactions such as Internet banking, ecommerce and so on.  Would you give your credit card details if you knew that https packets were being inspected by filters?

Computers are not very good at being smart. There is no way that all Internet content can be inspected by human beings.  It’s just too big, and growing too fast.  There are about 5000 photos a minute being added to Flickr.  About 60,000 videos a day being added to YouTube.  There are thousands of new blogs being started every month.  Content is growing faster than Moore’s Law, and there is no way that content can be inspected and classified by humans at a rate fast enough to keep up with the growth.  So we turn to computers to do the analysis for us.  Using techniques like heuristic analysis, computers try to make intelligent decisions about what constitutes inappropriate content.  They scan text for inappropriate phrases.  They inspect images for a certain percentage of pixels that match skin tones.  They try to filter out pictures of nudity, but in the process they block you from seeing pictures of your own kids at the beach.  Computers are stupid.

The Internet is a moving target. The Internet is still growing much too fast to keep up with it.  There are new protocols being invented all the time.  Content is dynamic.  Things change.  If I have a website that is whitelisted as being “safe” and ok, what’s to stop me from replacing the content with images that are inappropriate?  If just the URL is being blocked (and not the content) then that makes the assumption that the content will not change after the URL is approved.  A website could easily have its content replaced after its URL is deemed to be safe.

The technical issues are enormous. The internet was designed originally to be a network without a single point of failure.  When the US military built the Internet back in the late 60s, its approach was to build a network that could route around any potential breakdowns or blockages.  Yet when the filtering proposal is mapped out, the Internet is seen as a nice linear diagram that flows nicely from left to right, with the Cloud on one side, the end user on the other and the ISP in the middle.  The assumption is that if you simply place a filter at the ISP then all network traffic will be filtered through it.  Wrong!  The network of even a modest sized ISP is extremely complex, with many nodes and pathways.  In a complex network, where do you put the filter?  If there is a pathway around the filter (as there almost certainly will be in a network designed to not have a single point of failure) then how many filters do you need to put in?  It could be hundreds!  The technical issues facing the filtering proposal are enormous, and probably insurmountable to do effectively.

Filters don’t work. The last time the government issued an “approved” filter (at the user end) it was cracked by a 13 year old kid in minutes.  We were told the inside story of this today and some say that this was an unfair claim since the kid was given instructions by someone online, but the point remains that the filter was easily cracked.  Over 90% of all home computers run in administrator mode by default, so cracking a local filter is just not that hard.  Schools that filter will tell you that students who really want to get around the filters do so.  They use offshore proxies and other techniques, but filters rarely stop someone who really wants to get past them.  All they do is hurt the honest people, not stop the bad ones.

Australia, wake up!  Conroy’s plan is a joke.  It’s an insult.  It’s nothing but political maneuvering to save face and look like the government is doing something to address a problem that can’t be effectively addressed.  Conroy is doing all this to keep the Christian right happy in exchange for votes. He won’t listen to reason, and he won’t engage in discussion about it. He is taking a black and white view of a situation that contains many shades of grey.  The problem of keeping our kids safe online is important and needs to be addressed, but not like this.  Please take the time to write to him and tell him what you think. Don’t use email, it counts for nothing (even if he is the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy!)  Write to him the old fashioned way… it’s the only format that politicians take any notice of.

The irony of the underlying politics and the involvement of the Christian Right is the disgraceful history of child abuse by the Church… Catholic, Anglican, you name it.  There is case after case after case of children being abused and taken advantage of by priests and other religious clergy.  If Senator Conroy is serious about “evidence based research” and wants to legislate against the most likely places that children get molested and abused, maybe he should be doing something about putting “filters” on the catholic church.  Or what about banning the contact of small children with older family members… because statistically that’s where most child molestation takes place.  Stupid idea?  Of course it is, but it makes more sense than trying to impose a mandatory “clean feed” of Internet access for all Australians.

It’s a complete joke and a bloody disgrace.

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Computers in Their Pockets

Feel like letting your imagination run wild for a moment?

Imagine what sort of class projects you could attempt if every student in your class had access to their very own digital camera that they carried with them at all times? Or what about if every student in your class had their own personal video camera? Or perhaps a Global Positioning System? Or a podcast player? Or voice recorder? Or mobile Internet device? Or messaging system? Or classroom voting system?  What if, instead of having to wait their turn to use these tools, students had access to their very own device which could do all of these things?

What sort of interesting projects could you come up with if each student had a small, lightweight device that did all (or even some) of these things? A device that fit into a pocket and could be carried anywhere, ready to whip out to snap a photo or record a video or audio grab? Something that could identify the coordinates of their global position, or allow them to quickly check a fact in Wikipedia? Imagine the sorts of multimedia extravaganzas your students could produce if they carried such a device with them on an excursion or field trip, enabling them to record their experiences for later use in a class report? Imagine how much more interesting their lab reports would be if students could make videos of their science experiments. Or record their voice as they summarised the novel they were reading, ready for inclusion in a podcast. Or collect survey data from their family and friends by setting up real-time surveys to gather opinions. Some interesting possibilities?

Of course, the cost of providing such a device to every student would be outrageously expensive. There is no way that most schools could afford to give every student a camera, a voice recorder, or a GPS, much less provide them with a single device that did all of these things.

Here’s the surprise. Schools don’t need to supply such devices. The fact is, there are rapidly growing numbers of students at your school right now that already own such a device.

It’s called a mobile phone.

The modern mobile phone is a remarkable piece of technology. Even a fairly run-of-the-mill mobile phone can now do most, if not all of the things mentioned above. Many mobile phone providers will provide one of these highly sophisticated handsets, even on their most basic plans. The upshot of all this is that there are many, many students in your schools right now that carry these amazing little multimedia devices in their pockets, and their numbers are growing. They could be used for the scenarios suggested above, and many more as well. They could empower students to gather multimedia clips, document their work and have on-demand access to a plethora of digital resources. They could engage student interest and help reinvent the way we approach learning.

And what do most schools do? We ban them of course.

What is it about mobile devices that seems to strike fear into the hearts of so many school administrators? Perhaps it is the logistical nightmare of dealing with issues like potential theft or damage? Perhaps it is the lack of control over what students might access online as they use their 3G phones to completely bypass school internet filters and go directly to the content that interests them. Perhaps it is paranoia about the potential problems that could occur if students were able to capture school events on video. A quick browse through YouTube can certainly find all sorts of embarrassing teacher behaviours, captured on a phone in class and posted online for all the world to see. Certainly, there are issues to deal with, but to turn a blind eye to the possibilities that these powerful little tools bring to student learning would be to miss some wonderful opportunities.

Even the most basic mobile phone can be used for something as useful as voting via SMS text messaging. Using a free service such as SMS Poll, teachers or students can set up a multiple option survey question that users then vote on by sending a single text message to a nominated number. The site automatically gathers and collates the responses and the results appear on a webpage immediately, nicely graphed to display a summary of voter responses. Powerful tool for learning? You bet.

Who makes the most digital cameras? Nikon? Canon? Kodak? In fact, none of these leading camera makers are the world’s largest producer of digital cameras… that title now goes to Swedish cellphone manufacturer Nokia. It’s virtually impossible now to buy a mobile phone that does not contain a digital camera, and the quality of the images produced by these devices might surprise you. Some quite basic phones shoot at resolutions up to 8 Megapixels, and some even have flashes for shooting in semi-dark locations. And, even a modest mobile phone can snap hundreds of images, ready for transferring to a computer via cable or Bluetooth, with some 3G phones even able to upload them directly to online services such as Flickr. The time between taking a shot and sharing it with the world can quite literally be seconds. What if every student on that excursion to the zoo took dozens of photos as they wandered around, ready to remix them into a digital presentation back at school using tools like Photostory, iMovie or Voicethread?

The ability to capture video is also built into many phones these days, and although the quality can be a bit ordinary on some of the cheaper phones, there are more and more hansdets being released with some pretty impressive video capabilities. Some can now shoot footage that rivals the quality of standard DV camcorders, that can be easily transferred to a computer for editing in iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. Whip your phone out during that science experiment and you have a neat clip ready to drop into your lab report. Rather that submit a word processed report, what if students used a free tool like Shozu (www.shozu.com) to send that footage directly to an online video hosting service, where it could then be embedded into a wiki and shared with the world. Imagine how much more authentic these tasks would be if student projects were published to the world rather than handed-in to a teacher. Having a mobile phone in your students’ pockets can be the starting point for many such opportunities.

While not every mobile phone has the ability to operate as a Global Positioning System, a surprising number do. Even if only a handful of your students had a GPS-enabled phone, what if they worked in teams to participate in geocaching projects, like the many thousands of such projects available for free on websites like www.geocaching.com. Beyond that, what if they used their phone’s GPS capabilities to create their own geocaching projects? Think of the learning that would take place as they mapped coordinates, created clever clues and published their challenges to the rest of the world.

Even fairly basic phones come with a built-in voice recorder. Some can only record in short bursts, say 60 seconds at a time, and others can record for hours, but the ability to make an audio recording is an incredibly useful capability. Using the built in microphone to conduct interviews, students can then transfer those audio grabs to a computer and the recordings can then be assembled into a podcast using free software such as Audacity. Most phones can also be used to play back audio files, so these finished podcasts can then be loaded back onto the phone to be listened to. Students could produce a podcast about, say, the novel they are studying, the music piece they are learning, the speech they are planning to give next week or the study notes for next week’s exam, and listen to it on the bus going home from school, enabling real anywhere, anytime learning.

The way that mobile service providers currently charge for data plans, it’s true that not every student is likely to have access to the mobile web via a 3G service right now. However, a surprising number do, and with the price of 3G access dropping all the time, don’t be too surprised if the ability to connect to the mobile web becomes a standard feature of all mobiles within the next couple of years. Thanks to revolutionary advancements such as the iPhone, being able to to connect to the web with a handheld device is quickly becoming an expected feature of all mobile phones. Good luck with those school filters!

There is lots more that can be done with even a moderately capable mobile handset, and the ability to download and install small phone-based applications to your phone is becoming commonplace. Because a modern mobile phone is really a computer in a small package, installing additional software onto it can transform your phone into almost anything you want it to be… a live streaming web cam, a planetarium, a drum machine, a library of guitar chord charts, a mobile client for Second Life or Google Earth, a barcode reader, a tool to navigate Wikipedia, or a way to maintain your Facebook. All in your pocket.  This is not science fiction… all this and more is available right now, providing a powerful platform for your students to do some amazing things.

All of this might require us to rethink a few things. As teachers, what sort of questions do we ask a generation of students who now carry Google around in their pocket?  What sort of future will we face if we continue to pretend that these powerful devices have no place in our schools?  Powerful, portable, personal. Mobile technology is not going away, and the full force of this technological wave has not really hit the shore yet.

Are you ready for it?

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The Stupidity of Selling the Farm

My son Alex, who is 16 years old and just starting year 11, attends Hurlstone Agricultural School.  It’s a school that’s been around for over 100 years, and has a couple of features that make it a fairly unique place to go to school.

For a start, it’s a state-run government school, but it also happen to be a boarding school.  There are, to the best of my knowledge, only two government boarding schools in all of NSW.  Secondly, it’s an academically selective school.  This means that for most students to attend the school they have to have a proven track record of academic achievement and some evidence that they are relatively bright.  Thirdly, and perhaps the thing that makes it most unique, is that it is an agricultural school. As such, it offers mandatory (up to year 10) courses in agriculture, and the school is located on 276 acres of beautiful rolling farmland.  It is, in fact, a fully working farm, complete with a commercial dairy, as well as raising cattle, chickens, sheep, pigs and other assorted animals.

The boarding school exists because, as an ag school, it provides study options for country kids who live on farms in remote areas of the state.  They come to the big city, live in the boarding house and learn all about agriculture and farming at the school, so they can take this knowledge back to the family farm.

As you might imagine, this mix of city kids and country kids, along with the fact that it is academically selective, makes it a pretty special place to go to school.

It seems the state government wants to change all that.  Late last year, under the leadership of Premier Nathan Rees, the government announced that it plans to sell off the farm land for housing in 2011.  The school community is obviously not too happy about the idea, and there is a lot of political noise being made at at the moment to try and convince the government that this is a bad idea.  Angry parents are mobilising themselves with letter-writing campaigns, complaining to local politicians, trying to make enough noise about it that the decision will be rescinded.  We can only hope that common sense will prevail in the end and the stupidity of the decision to lose the school’s greatest asset will be revoked, although what with politicians being politicians, it might be difficult to beat the lure of the almighty dollar.

It’s ironic that the term “selling the farm” is often used as a metaphor for failing to value your most essential assets, but in this case the government is quite literally “selling the farm”, dairy and all.  It is land that will never be able to be replaced, greedily sold to make a profit at the expense of providing a unique and important educational facility.

Without the farm, the school will be nothing. It needs to be saved.  I’ve written a number of letters to politicians about this, but their response has been less than impressive.  If you are reading this and want to assist, I’d encourage you to write to one of our NSW politicians. Tell them, politely but strongly, what a stupid idea this is and how it will ruin the character of a truly unique school. (Remember that when you write to politicians that email counts for very little, and a real letter on real paper with a real stamp is taken notice of far more than electronic correspondence.)  There is also a Save Hurlstone Facebook group you can join if you’d like to do that.

The other thing that took me by surprise yesterday was finding out that Alex had worked with some of his friends at school to produce a short video about why the farm needs to be saved, which was then posted to YouTube.  I’m surprised because he never mentioned it to me at all and I found out quite by accident.  The film, titled Pro Patria (the school motto, meaning “For my country”) is about 8 minutes long and does a great job of explaining, from a students’ perspective, why the farm is so important and why it should be saved.  It’s a wonderful example of how students can use social media tools like YouTube to have a voice.  I’d encourage you to watch it, and spread it around to people you know.  The more times it gets watched, the better, if for no other reason than letting our politicians know that people are taking an interest in this issue.  If you can, leave a comment on the YouTube page as well.

I know that YouTube is a contentious issue in many schools, often banned because of the potential problems it might cause.  But this is a great example of how students have used YouTube for good rather than evil, using it to have a real voice and to express an opinion about an issue they obviously care deeply about.