The news item Student cracks Government's $84m porn filter would be funny if it wasn't tragic. The Australian government spent $84 million on an internet porn filter that could be downloaded and used in schools, libraries and so on. A 16 year old schoolboy promptly broke it in 30 minutes, so they added an upgrade to the system and he broke that in 40 minutes. Needless to say there is quite a lot of 'wasting our Australian tax dollars' chat at the moment, as you'll see if you read the article from news.com.au. iTWire showed how to crack it rather less elegantly in 5 mouse clicks though this was done by the chap who installed it, so it's slightly less impressive.
If you're interested in this, you might want to take a look at 'Should Google filter its image database?' which gives good reasons why some authorities don't want them to. (There is of course another argument around the subject of why should Google be responsible for policing the world, but lets not go there in this post.) You might also want to take a peek at how it's possible to use the Google cache to view sites (which is a great resource, but open to porn surfing as well).
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