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Australian Senator Wants to Censor the Net
Paul writes "An Australian Senator wants Australians' internet connections to be automatically filtered by ISPs. Anyone who wants to view pornography or 'other adult material' (details not specified) must apply to their ISP to be given access to it. Another step towards becoming a nanny state."
This is a Tasmanian senator. Tasmania is an Island long associated with jokes about incest and redneck stupidity. For you Americans think West Virginia style jokes (except that Tasmania is a very cold place and it's population quite tiny).
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It appears that he's another person who believes in something with which most people would not disagree (filtering in public institutions, like public libraries) but takes it too far by extending it to make adult content 'opt-in' for homes.
If parents want to protect their children at home, they can get opt-in filters. No usable
As a term of reference for you delightful residents of the US of A, Tasmania is like the US 'south' (rednecks, interbreeding et al) and the 'Liberal' party isn't actually a liberal party, but a conservative party (similar to your Republican party).
... and the other three were lying about it.
However, this motion/proposal is unlikely to gain legs as Howard (current Australian Prime Minister) would almost certainly leave it as a 'conscience vote' and I sincerely doubt that it will have the popularity to get through the lower house, let alone the upper house.
And, as I understand it, this sort of 'filtering' would be quite difficult to do and the current upper echelons of politicians *and* public servants switched on enough to listen to those who would advise them on the viability of 'filtering'... so false alarm and ignore the political posturing. The guy is (most likely) in a marginal seat and is trying to buy some credit with the local religious conservatives.
"while two in five boys had deliberately used the net to see sexually explicit material"
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
Libraries worldwide have been contending (with varying degrees of failure) with this sort of proposal for years now. In the U.S., many states now require library Internet computers to be filtered; the federal government has also made it a requirement for most of the federal funding available to libraries.
... yeesh.
Because of these restrictions, the library where I work is filtered. We staff have to immediately disable the filter for any adult patron who requests unfiltered access (and we're supposed to, but often, er, forget to) restore the filter as soon as that particular patron's session is over.
You wouldn't believe the idiotic stuff that gets blocked -- innocuous, harmless, completely innocent stuff, right alongside the more questionable. One fellow from out of town couldn't log into his own business's web page with the filter on -- presumably because his first name, which appeared in the URL, began with a "D" and rhymed with "ick".
Meanwhile, the patrons blithely find all the porn and violence and four-letter-word-headphone-breaking rap music they like. They learn very quickly which sites the filter isn't catching, and openly share them with one another.
The staff terminals have the filtering turned off full-time (technically illegally, if I understand correctly). Although library policy says we are only to turn off the filter "as needed", it's dadblasted impossible to do our jobs with it on, so it stays off.
So now these Australian senators want to impose this state of affairs on an entire country
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Australian's need to write to Guy Barnett and tell him stop the moral grandstanding.
This guy has been mouthing off about this for some time. But unless he comes up with something new, he seems unlikely to sway his party. The anti-sedition laws have been rammed through, but they caused enough of a backbench backlash that I can't see Howard and co wanting to stir things up again. But please join Electronic Frontiers Australia and help us keep an eye on this kind of thing! Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I wholeheartedly agree that the only sensible course ofg action is to vote them out of office ASAP. If only!
Just yesterday, the Australian govt. passed two contentious laws - one that basically undoes hundreds of years of hard-won freedoms at a stroke in the name of "anti-terrorism" - you're not even allowed to makes jokes at the govt's expense now - in fact this posting breaks this new law. Free speech has gone. The other contentious law effectively removes hundreds of workers' rights in the name of 'streamlining the economy' and 'remaining competitive'. Basically it gives employers carte blanche to demand what the fuck they like of an employee, and if they don't like it, they can always leave. This is modern 'liberalism' though quite frankly it's a total abuse of that term that the current regime use it to describe themselves.
This situation has come about because the Australian people were duped into voting for a totally unevenly balanced parliament, railroaded into this vote by a series of lies and distortions and scare tactics at the last election. (Don't vote for the other lot, they'll take away your right to SHOP!) The resulting majority means that they can currently pass whatever they like and no-one can really fight it. This is NOT what the Australian people thought they were voting for, as neither of these new laws were part of the election manifesto. Just like the USA, who our Prime Minister appears to be in thrall to, we are sleepwalking into a nightmare of Orwellian proportions.
If they so choose, this porn bill (if it becomes one) could well pass, then they'll worry about implementation later, no matter howe impractical it might actually be. However, in the scheme of things, this is nothing compared to what they've ALREADY done.
Anyone who's desparate to surf pr0n will find a way around it.
I think you are missing the point. They are not trying to stop people in general from seeing porn. In fact, it says in the article that it is people's right to register for open access but the default will be restricted access. The point is about children unknowingly wondering into pornographic areas. For many parents, with myself included, this is a concern.
If a kid is intelligent enough to work away around the controls and bypassing them, which of course probably isn't difficult, then perhaps he is older enough to deal with what he finds. My 9 year old daughter though uses the Internet and I am happy for anything that will prevent her from walking into pornographic content by accident.
This would be inline with other content providers like television where there has to be some control over access to pornoghapic content.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
Freedom of Speech is very much an American concept, one that the rest of the world simply does not have.
In Australia, for example, the current is in the position to mandate what does and does not constitute "acceptable" speech, and is doing so with abandon.
Their main opponent is not HM Opposition as you might expect, but News Ltd. When the Government's main opponent on freedom of speech issues is Rupert Murdoch, you know things are bad.
In Australia, unfortunately, we do not have anything like your First Amendment speech protections. I wish it were otherwise, but here the government is able to restrict speech as it sees fit. Most Australian governments have left this wisely alone, but the current government seems to view the electorate as an anthill and they are poking us with stick after stick, just to see what happens.
The tactic of having a member of the government express his "private" views publicly in this way is their established method of testing the water on things they would like to introduce. The Health Minister made similar noises a while back about banning abortion. He was raised by monks.
This issue cropped up several years ago, just before our GST was introduced.
Senator Brian Haradine wanted the Internet Censored. There was a Budding Local Porn industry in Australia, producing lots of tasteful Erotica and lots more non-quite-so-tasteful porn.
The legistlation would prevent people publishing Erotica and Porn in Australia, and Australians from accessing Erotica or Porn.
When the legislation was introduced, it was left up to the ISP to either filter content, or provide Censorship programs to it's customers. If the ISP chose not to filter at their end, customers were not allowed to run any OS without Censorship Software; Linux, *BSD, BeOS and Mac's were theoretically not permitted on the Internet!
IIRC, The Legislation went through and the Independent Haradine voted in favour of the GST. The Local Porn/Erotica industry collapsed (since they couldn't host content locally), ISPs illegally left it to their customers to purchase Censorship Software (no-one did) and Australians had to get their fix of Erotica from Foreign Sites. It was all a big joke.
Ironically, the same existing ineffective legislation can be used in conjunction with the new Anti-Sedition laws (think of a cross between the PATRIOT Act and 1984) to fulfil what this Knob-Jockey is proposing.
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Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
That's why we have a representative republic in the U.S. and not a democracy. In a true democracy, everybody would vote on every bill, referendum, etc. Instead we vote for representatives who (theoretically) are not ignorant and make the votes for us. If we don't like the results we pick new representatives.
Finding other idiots on
I think there is a prevalent belief that it is impossible not to be negatively affected by looking at pornography...
x .asp?PID=606
p hy/prngrphy_ovrvw.html
. html
According to Harris Poll: "No Consensus Among American Public on the Effects of Pornography on Adults or Children or What Government Should Do About It" http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/inde
There was a study done at the University of Hawai`i concerning the effects of pornography: http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/online_artcls/pornogra
There was another study done at the University of Pennsylvania concerning the effects of pornography: http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/chunter/porn_effects
Blame Britain (for once it's not actually Canada! :)
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
If you've paid attention, even to Slashdot, you'd see that the liberal Democrats are the ones doing it here. Tipper Gore (yes, that Gore), as an example, was the one that was instrumental on getting those stupid "warning" stickers on albums.
A (near) historical reality check: Sales of porn mag's are heavily restricted in most countries (more than alcohol, in some). They certainly were when I was a teenager (which was way before games like GTA). Still I remember "reading" quite a few of them before i turned the proper age, despite the fear of being "grounded" for life, had my parents caught me reading them.
Point being: it didn't do any permanent damage - I grew up, graduated and married, just like "everybody else"...
...and I'm sure you will too.
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
You seem to be right - usually my internet skills don't fail me when looking for something but this time apparently this thing has disappeared from nearly all corners of the net. However, I found it on ebay for 10 GBP + 5 GBP shipping worldwide here. Apparently it's been involved in some sort of distribution conflict for a while and the only people selling it are "unofficial".
Hard work pays off tomorrow, but procrastination pays off NOW!
Before jumping on the government must be censoring us bandwagon, why don't you just email the film's distributor and ask them? They list the movie as Chavez - Inside the Coup. I found them easily on the film's official website. Not that it is impossible that the US Government would try to censor something, but Occam's Razor leads me to believe the more likely answer is one of economics.