Slashdot Mirror
Email (and Filters) for all Australian schools
Tom Davies writes: "Every student and teacher in the state of New South Wales will have an email address and web access by March. And porn filtering to go with it, according to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald."
Since when was it a right to receive what ever you want on a freely provided information channel. For example when you walk in to your public library you don't expect to go to the magazine section and pick up a copy of the lastest Swank. Prehaps i'm oversimplifing the matter, but I'm of the opinion that if you don't like it and its free go elsewhere.
T
It's probably also worth pointing out that
Queensland has had a related facility for
blocking unwanted sites for some time, although
it can be micromanaged at the school administrator
level if desired. From experience, one popular use
is simply to stop massive haemorrhaging of $$ due
to downloading from popular software archives(!)
Ian
As systems administrator of Bendigo Senior Secondary College, (Victoria, Australia) [Just below NSW, only better (jk)], I'd like to say all students have unfiltered net access, and have had such for >6 years now; and we have no intentions to start censoring what our students are able to see.
[For the record, systems are in place to track usage, and people are punished for looking up porn n stuff... but there's no censorship or filtering.]
... It's also very nice to see NSW giving students free email addresses... we've only done that for 2 years.
I wonder how much the NSW gov't is charging schools for this honor? Especially since Telstra (the beast of telco in au) has [basically] applied they're patented '3gb cap' to schools too.
Hey .. could they filter my internet connection too so I don't get anymore porn popup ads?
wil
"Realize your dreams NOW, life can be short"
It's the schools server, it's their email address, if they want to filter go right ahead.
Just like complaining about censorship in China, look at the property ownership. Since all "utilities" in China are owned by the government, they get to filter all they want.
The abuse is if you are not allowed to choose an alternative. If the school attempted to censor what the kids do/see when not on the schools dime, for instance.
...or the fact that private ISP service is "illegal" in China.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Note that Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) is not the same as, or even associated with, the US's very own well-known Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
And, sigh, my sig is so poignant these days :-(
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
I would think that requiring schools to censor content in order to receive funding pretty clearly infringes upon the first amendment rights of the site operators.
I have seen it argued that if the service is provided "free," you have no right to complain. However, the service is not free. Citizens and corporations pay taxes to the government and expect services in return. If the government provides one of those services at no charge, that doesn't make it free.
The real question, I think, is why these schemes aren't being challenged. I suspect the answer lies in one or more of the following:
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
When I finished high school in NSW, we had email addresses - but they all ended in hotmail.com We were actually graded on our ability to obtain a new hotmail account using an internet browser...
It's not a tiny network, and it's all publicly funded - wherever there can be a cent saved it will be, and stopping a few million children from all jumping online to check out the newest site-of-the-week from a school connection is one priority. The political motivations are obvious - no government is going to want to hear of children coming home to parents talking about the crap that can be found online - it is a school environment and isn't designed to accomodate checking out the newest recipes from manbeef.com. This doesn't mean everything "icky" is banned - having been a part of this banning process, it's rather moderate in practice.
Don't let the debate make you imagine this is the only method the department is focusing on to keep proper-use of school resources. More than anything else, schools have been urged to put in place their own systems for tracking the net use in their schools, and supervising their classes/resources properly.
I completed high school just over a year ago in Victoria, the other major Australian state.
This is nothing new in Victoria. New South Wales is just catching up.
The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail, and about the filters setup so anything with swearing would be blocked and redirected to her. High school age kids throw words like "shit" and "fuck" around like nothing, so this was a little unfair, especially considering it wasn't documented until a year later.
The web access was worse. They had this state-wide thing called EduCache. It was just a great big filter, allowing only officially checked websites in. It was at the school's discression to activate it; you can guess our school had it on. (I also won't mention how this made the web virtually useless for most students, and I spent half a year teaching people how to change their proxy settings to bypass it. But I digress.)
Students could submit sites to this cache. I requested many tech sites, from here at Slashdot, to Be Inc, to Enlightenment, just to name the ones I remember. I also tried to add The Sync, just for Geeks in Space. It was rejected. Probably something to do with JenniCam...
Look, these schools don't care about privacy. Eventually, they made students sign sheets saying they wouldn't do bad things. Bad things like look up porn or submit anything anonymously to the net. By this stage, I had 12 months left at the school, and refused to sign. Didn't use a school computer for a year (well, not with my own account at least...)
Oh, and before you think I was some rebel kid hacking the school network; I wasn't. I was one of 3 students that sat in on the IT committee meetings. They were all just too busy bickering about their different areas of education to do anything constructive.
Sorry, ranting. Probably bad grammar from the rush. I just don't seen this as a surprise.
(I'll leave the 'My IT teacher called a mouse a GUI' and the I got in trouble for opening a command prompt in NT, because I was "accessing DOS"' rants for another day.)
Cool... "porn filtering"...
This means that you will filter out all the boring news and weather reports and deliver me raw porn!... right?
:)