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EFA: Censorship In Oz Wastes Taxpayers' Money
antic writes: "In a report by AustralianIT (Net censorship a $2.5m 'waste'), EFA says that after all the fuss about the Australian government censoring the Internet for Australians, and the government spending a substantial amount of money on the effort, only six complaints about local sites were made in the second 6 months of operation. It suggests that the majority of money spent, and investigations carried out, only helps the largely U.S.-based content filtering industry."
Feed someone a mental diet of nothing but violence and pornography and you're likely to cause some problems.
Exactly. Violence & porn are like, I dunno, hamburgers or something. If you eat hamburgers for dinner every day, it won't do your health any good. Especially if they're McDonalds hamburgers. But eating one greasy, fatty hamburger every now and then isn't going to kill you. The worst it'll do it make you feel a bit queasy.
Much like violence and pr0n.
hawk
My own site has some details of takedown notices and classifications.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I will be glad when the paternalistic bastards are gone.
Andrew van der Stock
In Canada we have a GST as well. To be honest, I did not notice a major shift in pricing after its introduction. The GST is just bringing out in the open what has been hidden for so long. The only annoying thing is that it got applied to a lot more.
What's funny is that ever since its introduction, the GST has been hated by the people, but all election promises to get rid of it have faltered for the simple reason that it brings in lots of cash for the government.
Just a side note, I guess, to give more insight into the GST idea...
Woz
True. The nanny impulse exists across the Australian political spectrum, I'm afraid. However, when it comes to Net censorship, Labor has at least recognized the technical impossibility of doing so and has advocated education as a better solution.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The current Australian government is a (highly steady) coalition of two conservative parties, which has been in power since 1996. The other major party is the Labor Party, roughly analogous to the British Labor party, but still retaining tighter links to its labor union history.
Our parliamentary and party system, again, most closely resembles Britain, in that party discipline is very strong, and votes in the lower house are purely a formality. However, the upper house of parliament is not controlled by a single party, and two small left-wing parties (the Democrats and Greens), a religious right-wing annoyance, and a member of the lunar-nutball right hold the balance of power in that house, meaning that the government has to reach agreement with either the opposition, or some or all of the others, to get legislation through.
The current Prime Minister is one John Howard, who was aptly described by American travel writer Bill Bryson as "the world's most boring individual". By Australian standards, he is a economic conservative (though due to his current electoral unpopularity he has swung towards popular pork-barelling), and an utter social reactionary.
For some time, he has tried to play off the unpopularity with rural voters on economic issues (the government has imposed a universal sales tax, which has resulted in higher prices and a great deal of extra accounting overhead for small businesses, who are not happy about it) by, in essence, appealing to their prejudice against drug users, asylum-seekers, homosexuals, the primarily city-based and relatively wealthy advocates of removing the symbolic link to the British monarchy, Aboriginals, and so on. Unfortunately for Mr Howard, the rural and outer-urban constituency appears to be sufficiently annoyed by the economic issues that they will vote Labour or (in relatively small proportions, thankfully) lunar-right regardless, and the inner-urban "elite" are going to also desert his party because of disgust at his social policies as well as economic.
I think I will join most Australians in welcoming Mr Howard's fairly imminent and fairly certain departure (the election must be held by November or so). Unfortunately, the alternative, Labor, doesn't appear particularly inspiring - if a little more clueful on some aspects of IT policy, which is nice.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Either they decided to show how well the filter worked on that website or we slashdotted it.
That's what you would like to believe, and if that were really the case maybe I wouldn't have so much of a problem with it either. But in fact most people who are in favor of censorship don't care who they are preventing from accessing information - it would be fine with them if no one could get to it. Think about it - if you think pornography is obscene, why would you want your fellow citizens viewing it any more than your children? If you think alternative religions are the work of the devil, why shouldn't you try to protect everyone and not just children from it?
I agree that the exposure of children to some things must be handled very carefully in an age-appropriate manner, and I would say that a parent is the appropriate person to do that. Whenever citizens get the government to enforce censorship, it always ends up infringing on the rights of adults. I don't think the goal of saving the children is worth the cost of censoring adult access to certain things, especially since we already have parents who are responsible for censoring their children anyway.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The problem with a full democracy is that it doesn't scale very well beyond the size of a small city-state. When you have the affairs of a whole nation to attend to, you can't poll every citizen on every single issue or we'd never get any real work done. Not to mention the amount of education which would be necessary in order for citizens to objectively assess contentious issues in medicine, law, and technology. Until we have a truly educated and involved citizenry, real democracy isn't going to be an option.
Representative government is like Linux. It sucks, but everything else sucks worse. What we need are representatives who are more accountable to the citizenry they supposedly serve.
Caution: contents may be quarrelsome and meticulous!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
As a matter of fact I do.
Like I said, I've never seen anything that I'd consider inherently harmful to anyone in and of itself. Feed someone a mental diet of nothing but violence and pornography and you're likely to cause some problems. But violence and pornography within a diet of other things that are positive rather than negative are of little consequence.
People are afraid of their kids seeing violence and porn because they themselves are disturbed by it, not because it is inherently harmful. Also they have the inaccurate belief that children are "impressionable." A two year old is impressionable because someone that age does not have any real experience to evaluate what they see and hear with. That soon changes. The older a person gets the more what they see is evaluated against a growing bank of past experiences. Because young people think and evaluate what they see, there is nothing that is going to warp someone unless that is the only thing they see. If on the other hand their experiences in life are balanced then a little porn or violence isn't going to do anything at all to their psyche.
I'm living proof of this. When I was a child and a teenager I worked hard to undermine the censorhip imposed on me by my parents. In fact by the time I was 13 my parents had essentially given up on controlling what I saw or read.
Today I'm a college graduate working for a major university. There are no bodies in my closet, I have no criminal record, and my sexual tastes are less risque than most. If my sex life was an ice cream flavor it would be vanilla. This dispite having seen plenty of XXX porn on satellite by the time I was 16. As for violence I've seen about as much as anyone else.
What a kid sees on tv or reads in a book is nowhere near as important as the situation in his or her family. If the father is abusive then worrying about seeing violence on tv is about like worrying about a bruised elbow on someone with a compound fracture of their femur.
I don't see much point in saying anything more. Ultimately the difference in our views comes down to how we see children. I see them as thinking human beings capable of discerning things. What you see them as I can't say for sure of course, but I know that some people see them as something like walking tape recorders whose every experience is indelibly marked upon their minds. Why people so easily forget what they were like as children I'll never understand. I know I wasn't a tape recorder and I doubt you were either.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
As I stated in another post, I believe the 13 year old who killed himself did so in large part because he was sheltered and raised within a context that was at odds with the world he lived in. I've known quite a few people whose parents came here from other countries and all of them were raised as if they were still living in those countries. I think this is what was happening with that poor kid. His world collapsed when he disappointed his parents because he was taught from a young age to always honor and obey his parents, etc. etc. Chances are he really did believe he was going to jail since he wasn't street smart enough to know better. He wasn't street smart because his parents sheltered him from anything that might teach him to be. Thus he ended his life over something that the rest of us would never dream of.
As for people who didn't turn alright, it wasn't because of anything they saw on TV or on the internet, it was because of the choices they made. There is much senseless debate of environment verses genetics in determining how a person is going to come out and what their life will be like. The truth is that we are not a product of our genes, nor are we a product of our environment. Rather we are a product of how we choose to deal with our genes and our environment. If I am execptional in any way it is in that I know and understand this.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Only if you mean regular as in metamucil
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
"In fact if you think about it enough, you might realise that our choices are defined and limited by our genes and environment which means that our genes and environment do partially define who we are."
If you thought about it enough, you'd realize that while the range of choices we have are rarely limitless, what is not limited is our ability to make a good choice. This is true for anyone who is responsible for their own actions.
There are three kinds of problems in life. The first are things that nothing can be done about. Genetics falls into this catagory. The second are problems that you yourself have created. The choices we make fall into this catagory. The third are problems which we either self-perpetuate or otherwise refuse to deal with. The environment falls into the third catagory.
There are people of course who will disagree with this. Who will claim that basically we are all victims and who will in fact encourage us to be so. They're called liberals.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
My point exactly.
We should be worrying about providing a balanced mental diet for our children so that the occassional greaseburger isn't going to do anything to them overall.
On the other hand if someone eats nothing but bean sprouts then they're going to turn out pretty messed up as well.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I've never been able to understand how it is that anyone would WANT censorship of anything.
There is no such thing as an idea or a fact that needs to be hidden away from view. If something is a fact then hiding it is not going to change it. If it is an idea then it will stand or fall based upon its merits.
Therefore the only people who are in favor of censorship are those who fear the truth, or whose own ideas do not stand up to cross examination.
Most of the censor happy types will drag out the old argument that there are things in this world that are harmful for children to see. Bullshit. I've never seen anything in my life, and I'm about to turn 30, that I ever thought would be inherently harmful for someone of any age to see. Now if you take something, say violence, and feed someone a died of nothing but violence, then yes I can see how that might be harmful to anyone of any age. But seeing violence or sex or you name it within the context of other things so that an overall balance is created is no more harmful to a 14 year old than it is to a 40 year old. The "save the children" argument is a weak argument that the censorship types fall back on because they don't have anything else to stand on.
Think about it, if censorship was a good idea, would anyone have to resort to a gut-level fear based argument to convince anyone that it was?
This is why I say that censorhip is a crime. It is a crime because it is a lie that is not just told, it is a lie that is perpetrated upon other people. It is an act of violence against the mind of another.
The best way to fight censorhip is to refuse to be silenced and to refuse to be censored. There isn't anything anyone can do to you that would be worse than allowing your sources of information to be controlled. Information control is mind control, don't let your mind be controlled.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
This is why we need a democracy. Not that sh*tty excuse involving elected representatives. I mean full-blown, everybody votes, democracy. As was done in Athens.
If you think about it Slashdot is a lot like Ancient Greece. The powerful say their opinions loudly up front. Then everybody argues about it in the audience the same points being made many times over by different people, drowning out any differing opinions. They come to no consensus whatsoever and then they go ahead with what the powerful guy at the front said, 'cos they were too busy talking to hear the points others made.
I dare say that that the US has the only content filtering industry - I can not think of a single non-US software company making filtering software (unless you count firewalls and such that is).
Problem is that rather a lot of US centric stuff makes it out. Catagories related to religion and politics are self evidently junk. (Even in Canada and Mexico, where there isn't an ocean in the way.)
More to the point how is any US company going to know what is offensive in Australia, slang terms tend to be those which vary most between different language dialects.
There's one here in Hong Kong. It has a genuine design to block your access to any site referenced to restricted words like 'sex'.
Could be difficult to read various languages derived from Latin or for that matter assembly language. (e.g. opcodes for setting index registers.)
The problem with a full democracy is that it doesn't scale very well beyond the size of a small city-state. When you have the affairs of a whole nation to attend to, you can't poll every citizen on every single issue or we'd never get any real work done.
You have exactly the same problem with elected representatives. Either you have too large an assembly or it's impossible for these people to actually do their job in the first place.
Its only money....
:-)
And its a goverment that uses every option to create a new set of standards to promote jobs. Too bad the jobs all end up overseas and the locals pay for it.
Oz has its very own TV standard that isn't quite like anywhere else in the world. TVs cost 4x what they do in the US, Tiwan, Japan... Its part of the reason why you can count the digital TV's on one hand. At least the US has nearly 100k of them
The power here is the highest voltage in the world. Its 240V measured the old way. Europe is working on 230V the new way. The new way, I get 280V true RMS here.
Phones need Austel approval. FCC & CE approval won't cut it here. We need extra protection.
How about radio devices. A 5 watt device here is not going to interfeer in a different country. But there's special testing that has to be done thats extra over standard FCC and CE testing. The frequency spectrum seems to be a mix of almost UK and almost US stuff but offten swaped. 800mhz vs 900mhz for analog phones 900mhz vs 800mhz for police bands. This was to protect the local radio market but Motorola is still an American company.
Smoke detectors need special approval. Thats why they were only required last year. They were too expensive for landlords before that.
The SE freeway in Melbourne looks like it was designed in the US or Germany. Great design except the accleration lanes are where the exit ramps should be. Opps. Good thing thouse are almost symetrical. The Island road rule (if you live on an island you drive on the wrong side of the road) bites again. Australia is the largest market for large right hand drive cars in the world with total new car sales typical of a small US city means every body gets to pay more in money, emmisions and safety.
See what you get when your politions try to help?
<devil's advocate>
Maybe the limit of 6 complaints suggests instead that the blocking software is accomplishing it's tasks... ?? If you're a government agency working on this, and you do this because you're getting complaints from your constituents, wouldn't you consider 6 complaints in the 2nd 6 mos of operations to be a grand success...?
</devil's advocate>
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Whether or not the censorship is working is irrelevant if you look at the history behind it. Put simply, the current Oz government needed the support of an independent Senator in the Upper House to pass its policies. In exchange for passing the censorship bill, they got his vote.
Okay, so it cost $2.5M - what's the going rate for "encouraging" politicians in other countries?
Internet censorship software: $50
Yearly ISP dial-in account fees: $360
Buying a Senator's vote: $2.5M
Pissing off thousands of voters: Priceless
Timothy's writeup does not make the facts clear regarding the number of complaints made, he states:
only six complaints about local sites were made in the second 6 months of operation.It should be made clear that there were 290 complaints made but only six were found to be hosted locally. The relevant paragraph states:
"Although 290 complaints were received during the six months, only 139 were found to relate to prohibited content and, of these, only six were found to be hosted locally."There should be a clear distinction between complaints made and those acted upon.
It wasn't my intention to "get in the middle" of this ugly dispute, nor did I intend to re-ignite a flame war... I just read Seth's rant and wondered two things:
- Is the story true? It was obviously written with the passion of a flame-war and it seems unlikely that Mike Sims (or anyone) would intentionally take down a website like that. The overall tone of Seth's writing is so strongly antagonistic that it almost automatically discredits itself, or alternately anyone reading it would at least wonder if Seth or others did something to really offend Mike. I disagree that a sysadmin should never take a site down, but refusing to provide an archive of the materials seems pretty bad in my mind.
- Are all slashdot comments about Michael Sims's involvment with censorware.org automatically moderated to -1, which is effectively censorship? At first this seems almost unbelievable... but this thread has changed my view of slashdot's moderation system. I'm still not ready to leap to the conclusing that Mike is censoring unfavorable posts about himself, but my overall opinion of the likelyhood of censorship right here on slashdot has gone from "impossible" to "hmmm...."
Dear moderator (assuming you're not actually a slashdot editor), if you're about to click off-topic or troll, please take a moment to ask yourself if it might actually be a good idea to let some questions about the integrity of slashdot's moderation system to be allowed to see the light of day, instead of grouped together with the likes of first post, goat-whatever, name calling, etc.Likewise, dear reader, if this comment reaches -1, take a moment to ask yourself how likely that is, being posted a full four days after the article was on slashdot's main page. I post to slashdot maybe 2-3 times a week, and my earlier post was the second time I have ever been moderated down (the other was intended as a joke that I thought might be funny at the time, but it wasn't). I've been at the karma cap for a long time, and this post will start at +2, so it you see it at -1, that means it was three times moderated down, four days after the article was on the main page.
This thread has certainly raised some questions in my mind about slashdot's moderation and the possibility of abuse by slashdot staff. There's certainly not nearly enough evidence to reach a well reasoned conclusion the speech is being supressed/censored here, but I think asking the question is a valuable expression of free speech.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
but only about stuff that is either (a) not prohibited content or (b) not hosted locally. Preferably the former. C'mon, you can completely trash this farce, with just a little effort! The censors have to investigate everything. The more time they spend investigating bogus complaints, the less time they'll have to find anything real. Get those statistics up to ~3000 complaints, ~100 of which are prohibited content and 3are hosted locally, and then maybe you'll see some action.
I dare say that that the US has the only content filtering industry - I can not think of a single non-US software company making filtering software (unless you count firewalls and such that is). I may be wrong. In fact, I usually am, but it's amazing how far you can get with ignorance and prejudice. Nuff said.
Couple that with US also having the worlds largest porn industry, and you more or less sum up americans: perfect little conservative christians on the outside, sleazy pr0n-surfing degenerates like the rest of us when they think noone's looking.
Bearing that in mind, I'm not at all surprised that grassroots response to the aussie pr0n filters weren't all they'd hoped for. Heck, If I found this huge pr0n site that'd slipped through the filters, I'd start downloading like hell - not report it to the government. I mean, come on!
Then again, It could be just me. Usually is.
Sigh.
^]:wq!^M
Well, I guess some people just need to find things out the hard way.
Duh, don't they realize that Slashdot is always right?
Kurdt
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
They must be doing a really great job, having only 6 complaints to field. The censorship agency is able to keep things pretty tightly controlled, it seems.
It's a little like my elephant repellent. There ain't no elephants around here, are there? Heh heh heh.
Dancin Santa
Actually that's not the point. It shouldn't be abolished because it's not working, it should be abolished because it's a threat to civil rights and liberties.
It may be laughed at because it's not working, though. However, if you think about it a bit longer, laughing at it seems quite a stupid thing to do. So fine, version 1.0 didn't work. What do you think "they" will do while we're busy laughing our butts off? Right, prepare for version 1.1 or 2.0, and then they will be the ones laughing at us. Or rather at you, since I'm in Europe and still uncensored, who knows for how long.