How to Spot a Psychopath

Remember those lame Internet filters which my faithful readers helped the smut-hungry youth of Australia to dismantle, last year?

Well, the whole taxpayer-funded content-control software handout program has now officially been declared (by Australia's new Federal Labor government) to be a miserable failure.

Apart from the fact that the NetAlert packages were quite easy to get around, it turned out that nobody actually very much wanted them.

The Government predicted that 2.5 million households, about 31% of the whole country, would want their free copy of one or another of the packages (which they'd paid for with their taxes already, of course).

As it turns out, they got a grand total of 144,088 CD orders and downloads.

And not all of the people who got the filter software bothered to use it. The ridiculously-named government department responsible says only about 29,000 of the packages were actually installed.

That's 1.2% of the target, for those of you keeping score at home.

The total price of the software filter scheme was 85 million Australian dollars. That's about $US78 million, at current exchange rates.

So this software ended up costing the taxpayer about $AU2930 ($US2685) per installed unit.

A copy of Net Nanny will cost you $US27 from Amazon. That's almost exactly one per cent of the effective price of the "free" software.

All that, to stop red-blooded Aussie kids from seeing boobies and doodles.

But have no fear - the new Federal government is much more sensible! They enthusiastically explain that their own very expensive scheme to implement "mandatory ISP-based filtering to deliver a filtered feed to all homes, schools and public internet points" will work far better. You know, just as it has in the other countries that've implemented secret Internet blacklists which, in effect, accuse lots of random innocent people of being child pornographers.

Never mind that, despite more than $15 million worth of advertising (including a booklet sent to every household in the country), it is now demonstrable that approximately three-fifths of bugger-all Australians have any interest in filtering their own Internet connection.

No, never mind that. We must be protected from filthy filthy porn, whether we want to be or not!

This is all more evidence that, as I've said before, it doesn't matter whether censorware works. Which is good, because it generally doesn't.

The purpose of censorware is not to Protect The Children, but to get some people elected and keep other people employed.