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Aussie Censors Won't Identify Blocked Sites
Paul Johnson writes "In this news story Wired says that the
Australian net censorship law
is about to come into effect, and give some details of how it will work. In particular it seems that the Australian Broadcasting Authority is 'unlikely to release the specific names or Web addresses of sites in order to avoid granting them unnecessary publicity.' So it would seem that Australians are not even allowed to know what is being censored."
That's the way it works: keeping us in the dark makes it harder to judge whether keeping us in the dark is fair. It doesn't make sense; even Sen.McCain urged
full disclosure
for censorware.
Something we keep on seeing here in the UK is a kind of unholy alliance between right wing religion and left wing feminism. Both want to censor porn, but have different reasons for doing so. The right wants to censor it because Sex Is Bad, while the left wants to censor it because Porn Exploits Women.
The way to break up this alliance is to ask about things that they disagree about. Abortion, sex education and gay rights are good places to start. Then point out to the Left that the Right has always used them and then ignored their particular goals. Then you can make the point that while almost everyone wants to censor something, there are very few things that almost everyone wants to censor.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Hey, what dose everyone think about solving the censorship problem by creating a means for people to find out what was censored and connect to it?
It would be like a banned book lists.. people would specifically go out and visit the censored sites. Now, I know there are encrypted proxies and things, but it seems to me that these sites might themselves become blocked. Plus, we want active notification of cool banned sites, i.e. people see new banneed sites everday as part of the news. Perhaps we could set up a banned site list mirror network. It would be a news service like slashdot or memepool, but would push banned sites. Anyone could DL the html and perl, put up a mirror, and get updates via the network. The only real technical problem is getting people to switch to new mirrors when the old ones are banned. There could also be a windows client which used an encrypted connection to obtain the IP address of a new miror for people who live in really repressive places. People would install the windows program out of curiosity and a banned site list would become there homepage.
I suspect people could run a pretty good memepool style site list by removing the porn from the lists of banned sites.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I agree with you that ALL speech must be protected (I'm a member of the ACLU), but most of the country dose not see it this way. My limited understanding of the law is that the courts do not protect porn under freedom of speech, but that they do protect art no matter how much it looks like porn.
/. posters who support censorware in school). We need to show them censorship is evil. This means we need to show people that views they agree with are being censored (then they will eventually begin to realize that there is no such thing as only censoringthe bad stuff).
Lucky for those of us who are concerened about any censorship the religious right has no interest in fighting porn.. or they would have crafted the CDA so that our concervative supream court would not have struck it down as quickly. What the right wing really wants to censor is women's rights and gay rights. This is why all the censorware programs censor these types of sites too.
We have a political advantage now because the religious right and censorware sellers are a bunch of liars. We should press this opertunity as an object lesson to show people that censorship really is fundamentally evil.
Now, regarding wether we should point to porn sites when we talk about censored sites: If you are actually tring to undo the damage they caused with censorship then yes you need to list the porn sites too, but if you are fighting the memethetic war over wether people think censorship is evil then you do not list porn sites, i.e. a mom may not want her daughter to see porn at school, but when faced with a choice between the small risk of porn and her daughter being told not to studdy women's rights, the mom will join us.
The polotics of the situation are: common people oppose censorship becuase something they like might get censored (just look at all the
Jeff
BTW> Atually, the religious right has this agenda (censoring gays and women) because it is basicaly a buisness which makes money by getting old ladies to give it their social security checks. This means it needs to have a cause to get attention and it needs to prevent ideas about freedom which premote tolerance.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
#/bin/sh /etc/crontab /etc/blocked.txt
echo "2 0 * * *" >
echo "/usr/ucb/mailx -r nobody@[jrandomsite] -s 'Am I blocked?' admin@censorship.au >/etc/crontab
echo "As the webmaster of [jrandomsite], I'd like to confirm that my site is not blocked from the Australian audience. I can't seem to find an official list of those sites you have chosen to block. Could you either point me to the list or just confirm that I am not blocked?" >>
.sig: Now legally binding!