Well, if you're one of Australia's six million internet subscribers, you could soon have some new ammunition against online pornography. The federal government is reportedly preparing to launch tough, new controls. Users would be given free filtering software. But how does it work? Well, Jeremy Howard is an internet and computer expert from Fastmail.

Good morning, Jeremy. Good morning. Can you explain to us the basis for how you use this software? How does it work? Sure. There's actually been two proposals that have appeared in the last week. The first one came from the ALP in Beasley's Budget Apply. And his proposal was that internet service providers, the people that you dial up to or who provide your broadband connection, would be forced to install filters, which then you could optionally choose to use.

And then the response from the government has been slightly different. It's been to provide optional free software for you to install on your own computer at home. Both of these two systems work essentially the same way, which is that the company that runs the system has a list of websites, which they consider inappropriate for young people, and a list of words, which if they appear on a website, they consider could be inappropriate.

And in each of those cases, the website would be blocked from viewing. Okay. The problem we parents have these days, of course, is that our kids, once they go into school, they start working on computers from day one virtually. So they're all very computer savvy. So kids know how to get around a lot of things that we, you know, slightly less technologically minded parents don't have.

How easy is it going to be for kids to beat these types of software? Look, Lesa, I think there's two target markets here. The first is for the very young children it is possible to accidentally stumble across content, which you may not want them to see. A great example was a couple of years ago after Casey Donovan won Australian Idol, and Telstra Big Pond put up these big advertisements in the paper saying come and visit caseydonovan.com.

They forgot the .au and directed all of these people to a gay pornography site by mistake. So if these people were running internet filters, then they would be, their kids wouldn't be accidentally coming across this content. Now, on the other hand, of course, there's the older children who aren't just stumbling across this stuff, but would love to find it.

Now, I had a little look, and I found that there's a paper widely disseminated on the internet which talks about how to get over internet filtering, and they describe 47 different ways to do it. I took a look at just one of those 47 ways, which listed 277 places that you can get that particular method.

So there are many ways to get around it, and yes, they do work. Apart from the question of whether it's effective or not, and I guess this is a question as much for you as well as Jeremy, Les, I mean, do we need this kind of measure? Is it really the government's responsibility to be playing this role, or should it be a question of more stringent and active parenting?

Well, Andrew, I'm not an expert in this area, but I'll tell you who is, and that's a group called NetAlert, which was set up by the government a few years ago, when they would be actually responsible for administering this new scheme as well. On their website, they actually list a number of things they suggest parents do.

Towards the top of that list is make sure that the computer is in a public part of it, such as the family room, not at the back. Right, absolutely. And that you should be discussing these things with your children. And one interesting point they make, which I thought was really important, is that, okay, your children don't only use a computer at home, but friends house, library, school.

The only way they can make informed decisions about what they view is if you give them the trust and the discussion when they're at home. Yeah, indeed. It's a very interesting point. Yeah, and very good advice. Jeremy Howard, thanks so much for your time this morning. You're welcome. We've actually got NetNanny on all our computers at home, which we put in very early on.

Does it work? Look, it does, but sometimes it's overzealous. For example, when my information was coming through late last night for doing this story, the word "porn" appeared, so I couldn't downline the brain for it. But my eldest son, who's in high school, and of course they all have laptops, he's just gone into high school, he actually can't download his maths homework.

Really? Because there's something in the maths homework. Great excuse. It's a brilliant, better-than-dog-ate-my homework. Yeah, that's right. The NetNanny ate my homework. I reckon even an email that said, "I'm now seeing this to your laptop" would probably get filtered out. Yeah, very impossibly, very impossibly. But that is great advice, making sure that you've got the computer in a public area, somewhere in the family room.

Because, as we know, kids can disappear into their rooms for hours on end when they've got that sort of access. Yeah, that's right. And it's not just porn, but it breaks up the sort of family dynamic Absolutely. This room all night, doesn't it?