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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.
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.
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.
Um, isn't the issue that:
a) the children who are the subject of child-porn are the main victims.
b) banning such content from viewing in Australia does nothing for the poor children photographed oversees in the first place (the proposal was to filter out kid porn from outside Aust).
c) "what about the children viewing the porn?" Yes indeed. And what about the other offensive things they view, like adult porn, or bestiality, or planes flying into tall buildings, or.... where is the line drawn?
Filtering is not an answer. Education, while only reaching those who's mind-share you already have, is probably the only sensible solution, and it only addresses item c. Unforturnately nothing can be done about a or b. Directly. In fact by filtering it out, you lose the opportunity to catch the adult consumers of the content, and hense lose a lead back to the perpetrators of a...
I think that lead is worth keeping.
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
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.
We've go a saying for this : a child who tumble inadvertantly over porn is not enough overlooked by the adult in charge of him, and that's the adult responsability ; a child who finds porn after looking for it is not a child anymore.
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.
"One can't solve a sociological problem with a technological solution." - Edwards Law