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Email (and Filters) for all Australian schools

Posted by timothy on from the it-taketh-and-it-giveth-away dept.

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."

6 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Show me the... by Phibz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Show me the... by ender81b · · Score: 5, Informative

      Amen on that. I work in a university library and people believe that it is their god-given right to look at all the goatse.cx they can fit on their screens.

      Of course, telling them that the computers where bought with student funds and not gov't funds, meaning we can censor them, usually gets an annoyed response. Just like what is happening with this topic.

      People like this boggle my mind. I am a member of the ACLU allright? It's not like I don't believe in free speech and all the men's gaping a**holes you can see, but not in a student-funded library intended for academic use only OR in schools where kids should be learning - not masturbating to the latest photoshopped Britney Spears pr0n.

      People should be HAPPY that they decided to blacklist the stuff and not simply filter it (shudder, filtering software is horrid, horrid stuff) which would honestly hurt kids freedom of speach. Really, this isn't very much of an issue. You are in school to learn, not to loook at all the porn you can handle.

  2. filtering.. by wilbrod · · Score: 4, Funny

    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"

  3. Property rights. It's the schools server. by Bob_Robertson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. NSW just playing 'catch up'... by Xenex · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.)

  5. porn filtering by burtonator · · Score: 4, Funny

    Cool... "porn filtering"...

    This means that you will filter out all the boring news and weather reports and deliver me raw porn!... right?

    :)