It was bound to happen. It didn’t work in Third World countries, attempts to do it in Western civilization failed one by one, and now it is proven again that you can’t really prohibit people by law from viewing certain content on the internet. What I’m talking about is this: The Supreme Court rejected child anti-porn law that was going on for more than 10 years. Basically, the interesting tidbits from this piece of news is that filtering can only be applied on businesses , where a company has control over what it is allowing people to view, and certain educational facilities (although that is proving to be more difficult as the article suggests). Don’t even think about enforcing service provider mandated filtering!

Another thing to note is how the rules and legislation are facing the harsh reality that technology changes over time, and laws really can’t catch up. Until we’ll see more cooperation happening on the cross-border legislative front (from law enforcement working more closely with each other, to more synchronized legislation across countries), the difficulty of defining jurisdiction and borders over the internet is not going to go away. In a hope that 2009 will make some headway on these issues, since we have seen that 2008 proved to be heaven for eCrime because of these difficulties (see our annual threat report for more info).