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Australia Chooses Education Over Filtering
riprjak writes "The Australian federal government has rejected a call for Internet filtering to 'protect' Australians from child pornography and has opted instead to undertake an education and information campaign to teach parents about the perils of the Internet."
A government made a sensible, non-kneejerk decision with regard to the Internet?
:)
I want to to move there!
Oh, wait... I already did.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Oi oi oi
[HERO]
i am a soviet space shuttle
The Internet at schooles (or at least the ones I worked at) already had an internet filtration in place which was controlled at a state level. Bear in mind this was Queensland, I wouldn't know about other states.
...the Howard government doing something intelligent?!
::looks outside to see if the sky is falling::
Really, it's laudable that the response by the Aussies is not the cyber-equivalent of smart-bombing (*cough*ChineseEmbassy*cough*Kosovo) but it's still part of the whole growing-pains thing that we'll experience for many years.
I'm not sure any government (save, maybe, South Korea's, which is its current form as a direct result of the internet) realizes just how much the internet is changing the world. Protecting your citizens' bodies is one thing--hunt those child-kidnappers down!--but it's too late for their minds...
and that's a good thing.
Unless you consider that kids still have access to the pornography and no amount of "education" is really going to block them or persuade them from accessing it.
It's like those billboards that tell you that "God is Protecting You". It only reaches those who want to be reached.
The article quotes
including a British-style national internet filtering system but rejected it.
I wasn't aware that the UK has a national internet filtering system. Can anyone elaborate?
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I recently cleaned a friend-of-the-family's PC of a major spy ware infestation, brought on by their 7 yo son going on a porn site, egged on by his mates (as mates do). when the subsequent torrent of pop ups occurred a few days later, he was petrified that the cops were going to come and lock him up, as has happened to all the other people we have been hearing about on the radio/TV/papers.
Although it wont have a lasting effect (IMHO, if pron is there, it will get assessed), but not for a while he will stay away. the poor kid was so terrified, so conscious of what he had done, he will need some serious hormones to get up the courage.
Oi! Oi! Oi!
;)
If you're not Australian, and don't know, then don't even try to understand
I wrote a metric shit tonne of emails to various people in positions of power about this.
I doubt very much at the end of the day my words directly had much to do with it, but some part of me really hopes it did. If only one minister sat and thought twice about what I'd written to them and it somehow swayed them to the more sensible course of action, I think I can be a little bit prouder of my country.
I'm sure I wasn't the only person making their voices heard over this issue, thanks to everybody else who stood up and let them know what we thought. We've done well this time.
[WHAT]
I've always believed, even as a child, that the biggest threat to children are their elders.
I know I for one never appreciated being lied to and manipulated, both of which largely define the relationship between the young and old.
One of the questions we commonly hear asked is what advice we would give to someone younger than us, what do we know now that we wished we'd known growing up.
Well my advice for the children of the world is this: Don't believe what people tell you, especially your parents. Keep your own counsel and take everything with a grain of salt. Just because someone loves you don't mean they won't lie to you, and it most definitely doesn't preclude their being crazy, stupid, ignorant, or some combination of all three.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Completely Darwinian?
I'd think it is much more about religiously beleifs of the early American settlers. Plenty of cultlures, both ancient and modern, have been much more relaxed about portraying sex than the USA. Plenty are still around, so it doesn't seem to be a trait promoting survival/reproduction which would make it Darwinian.
That doesn't mean that adultary or the like is more socially accepted there.
"One can't solve a sociological problem with a technological solution." - Edwards Law
This is not just commonsense, it will also free up for resources for fighting the TRUE dangers to our children here in sunny Oz:
If the dingoes don't get our babies, Steve Irwin will feed them to a crocodile!
I'll give up my modpoints in this article, and post a network admin's view from Victoria.
I used to (well, still do on a part-time basis) work as a network admin for a secondary school in Victoria. Previously, until about 2 years ago, all government schools were mandated to use a state-government-selected ISP (Fuck you, Edunet!) which had a DEET-approved filtering system (N2H2). Given that they were working within the constraints of the VicOne WAN, they did an acceptable job, but outsourcing the filtering was one of the worse moves possible. Many educational and open-source-related sites were blocked, and it took upto 24 hours to get a site unblocked - the central filters were updated via a daily cronjob.
Things have improved slightly with regards to filtering - they have now allowed schools to filter by category, and turn off filtering for users (network admins/staff), but there's still the problem of inappropriate content being blocked.
I, personally, would like to see an instant unblocking option available for staff in schools, once they have reviewed the site in question. Yes, many within the system say that staff should check this when developing their lesson plans, but given the time constraints, the current filtering system is less than workable. I should say that, for the record, we have moved to the private (non-Telstra) incarnation of Edunet - Schoolsnet. Different name, same low SLA.