I heard a conspiracy theory of sorts back when the censorship plan was first coming to light. Apparently Conroy isn't particularly popular even within his own party and the story went that the 'net censorship legislation was given to him in the hope that it would fail as catastrophically as it seems on track to do.

After it blows up in his face, his peers in the Labor party would have a good excuse to push him out. It does sound a bit far-fetched but hope springs eternal...

I'm elated to hear that Senator Xenophon has withdrawn his support and I agree that this is a major blow to the (dis)honourable Senator Conroy and his cronies. However this is still far from over, as the EFA point out: http://www.efa.org.au/2009/02/26/xenophon-opposes-mandatory-isp-filtering-but-fight-not-over-yet/

However doomed, this is still government policy and it's entirely possible that Xenophon's vote could be won back if the government agrees to back other causes close to his heart. There's also the possiblity of Liberal senators crossing the floor, (the Liberals were the ones to introduce the "Black List" after all) or of Labor winning more Senate seats in the future to give them a more powerful standing in the senate.

Having said all that this is definitely the best news we've had for a while on the Aussie net censorship issue. In your face Conroy!

I've been using Citrix' (formerly Orbital Data's) WANScaler appliances for this for over 12 months now and found them nothing short of excellent. Before taking the plunge I trialled the WANScaler and Riverbed's "Steelhead" units and I found that while the Steelhead did the caching side very well, initial transfers were barely accelerated, if at all. This was true of http, nfs, ftp and samba traffic.

The WANScalers on the other hand do an outstanding job of accelerating file transfers via TCP. We have a 50Mbit/sec private line between NY and London and with the WANScalers switched to pass-thru we're lucky to sustain 10Mbit/sec on a given individual transfer due to the chattiness of TCP and the protocols on top of it. Enable the WANScalers however and that single transfer maxes out that full 50Mbit instantly.

Of course the WANScalers also do the caching side perfectly well, (our units have 1TB of disk-based cache) so once somebody's pulled a file down for the first time it's as good as on a local server. But remember that someone always has to bring the file down that first time, and new/changed files at the remote site are going to have to go back up to the central servers as well. That's where the WANScalers' network acceleration won hands down for me.