In what has got to be a huge embarrassment to the Australian Government, teen kid figures out a way to bypass the much hyped Australian internet filter system, you know the one that blocks things that the government deems offensive, so much for the 84 million dollars spent.

We figure that at 5 dollars a meal they could have fed 16.8 million people rather than waste their money on a filter that took 40 minutes to crack. Alternatively, if you are really snarky, they wasted 2.1 million dollars per minute that the kid took to bust the thing up.

A MELBOURNE schoolboy has cracked the Federal Government’s new $84 million internet porn filter in minutes. Tom Wood, 16, said it took him just over 30 minutes to bypass the Government’s filter, released on Tuesday. Tom, a year 10 student at a southeast Melbourne private school, showed the Herald Sun how to deactivate the filter in a handful of clicks. Source: News.AU

Other bloggers are laughing as hard as we are on this one; Tech Blorge, Teach 42, and Reason are the best ones to read in our opinion.

The often over looked issue that governments need to realize and these are things that happen every day, is that no matter what filtering system, no matter what kind of DRM, no matter how much money spent on trying to keep people from doing things, they eventually find a way to do it. It does not matter if it is a Game Console, or other kinds of technology. What we are seeing by the continuous bypass of all security measures and lock downs in place, people want to be unfettered, and there are people willing to put in the time to make it happen.

While we believe that the money would have been better spent, they could have done a lot better things with something that took 40 minutes to bypass. The Australian government needs to step up to the plate and ask themselves, was this political grandstanding in an effort to “protect people” from something, or was this just a way to absolutely waste Australian taxpayers money.