"It's a horrible waste of money," said Tom, a student at a private school in Melbourne.

"They could get a much better filter for a few million dollars made here rather than paying overseas companies for an ineffective one."

The filtering software was distributed as part of the NetAlert programme launched by John Howard's right-wing goverment as part of their campaign against what they see as obscene content.

"Sadly, just as a seatbelt will never prevent every fatal car crash, as the government has always maintained, no filter is foolproof," responded Helen Coonan, Australia's Communications Minister.

Wood found that circumventing the software was a relatively trivial process.

"I downloaded it on Tuesday to see how good it was, because for AUS$84 million, I would have expected a pretty unbreakable filter," he said.

"Tried a few things, it took about half an hour and it was completely useless."

After Wood's exploits became public, a different filter was released for download -- it took him around half an hour to bypass it and render it useless.

He believes that even when anti-porn filters work, they don't offer a solution to the problems that net users face.

"Filters aren't addressing the bigger issues anyway," Wood said.

"Cyber bullying, educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I'd fix.

"They really need to develop a youth-involved forum to discuss some of these problems and ideas for fixing them."