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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."
Anyone who's desparate to surf pr0n will find a way around it.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
The article talks about the Internet but my bet is that they are talking about content filtering on http traffic.
Peer to peer is much harder to filter and readily available to the porn industry.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
"Keeping kids from nasties on the net"
Here, I have a much better suggestion - supervision your children while they use the internet!
The privacy issues of such a rule are staggering. Suppose the police want to find out who all the pervs are on a city block. They just subpoena the local ISPs to find out who's applied for pr0n access. Not to mention what happens if the ISP gets hacked (electronically or socially) and someone manages to get a copy of the pr0n access list. I suspect a lot of legislators will eventually be exposed for their hairy palms if such a law ever got passed.
From TFA:
Does someone have a list of names of these idiots, so our Australian friends know who to rail against and vote out of office ASAP?
This is just the opinion of one right-wing senator. It's not going to happen. You have a lot more neo-con nut jobs in your senate or lobbying it who propose the same or worse.
Jesus. This has been discussed so many times under so many different permutations and yet this type of opinion still exists.
Ok. So you want the ISP to filter for you to keep the "baddies" of the internet away from your children.
Great. Who decides what sites the ISP should filter? What is the criteria? Who develops the criteria? Who oversees that the ISP are filtering only to the criteria mandated? And so on...and so on...
Yes, ISPs can filter. It won't work. Some "bad" sites will get through the filter and many perfectly legitimate sites will get blocked. The current market of PC-based filtering software clearly proves this.
Here's an idea. Supervise your children when they are on the internet instead of relying on your ISP or (god forbid) the government to do it for you.
AFAIK, Australia is still reeling from the effects of gun control laws. Clearly, they have not learned the lesson that unrealistic attempts at regulation only cause the problem to become worse. I have no sympathy for the politicians that think this will solve anything, even in the remote condition that it manages to work properly. However, I do have sympathy for the people of Australia that will have to deal with this, as well as whatever federal institutions and causes are robbed of money that the Australian government redirects to this misguided endeavor.
Those filters will not be effective by any stretch of the imagination. It's unlikely that pornography can be statistically "filtered out" the way spam is. Also, those who actually have a vested interest in the Australian market for pornography will just start signing up for hosting that's based in another country, like the United States. So the Australian government gets weepy and blows through a large supply of tax money EVERY YEAR on a solution with barely any chance of success and no redeemable returns even if it is a success.
Do these people even stop to think before they open their mouths to speak?
It used to be ozzies had the reputation for being self made, independant, and relatively free thinking individualists. I can sort of understand this stuff here in the US since we screwed up three hundred years ago by not putting those puritans back on the boat from which they came - but lately you people "down under" often make our own fascist government look like sodom in comparison.
Far be it from me to tell the people of another country how to run their own show... I'm just grateful for the contrast. Every time I see another "we must filter porn to protect the children from carnal knowledge" or "me must outlaw cameras at school sports events to protect kids from the evil paedophiles" stories it reminds me just how much more fucked up things really could be here in the US.
I believe the system should default automatically in favor of protecting our rights as adults before we start considering the children.
Big difference...
The adults who wish to protect the children in their custody can then opt-in (and pay for) whatever safe haven/playpen schemes they wish to create.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I'm going to say this very clearly... because I am getting so very tired of "solutions" based on the "won't someone please think of the children" excuse (followed closely by the terrorism excuse) for every perceived I'll in our world. BE A FUCKING PARENT TO YOUR CHILDREN AND STOP TRYING TO BLAME EVERYONE ELSE! IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. It's that simple. Spend time with them, listen to them and stop the mindless quest for wealth and possessions.
They can filter all the porn they want -- as soon as they can define it: http://www.spectacle.org/296/opt.html (Safe For Work)
... porn?
(Or, even better, tell me why it's immoral.)
More seriously:
There are some fine lines between art and porn...stuff like: http://konzababy.tripod.com/photography.htm
(?Not?Safe?For?work?) Click the tiny image to enlarge. -- Is this art or porn? (I say art 100%)
Even closer still are things like http://www.domai.com (Not Safe For Work)
See this interview (Not Safe For Work) on domai.com for an interesting dialog about nudes/art/porn. -- Is Domai Porn? Difficult to say (I lean more toward yes, but I have reservations)
Any thoughts? What makes porn
Required reading for internet skeptics
I always thought of Australians as being a pretty loose bunch. Then "mate" becomes a no-no in parliament, there have been a bunch of nanny laws coming into effect, and all in all, it looks like the nuts that have made such a mockery of what the US Republican party used to pretend to stand for (small government, individual over the state) have been at work down under.
What the heck is going on down there?
Infuriate left and right
Be very, very, very watchful when you hear someone saying "we need to protect the children". Those people are using an argument that can be used to defend almost anything. And it makes it hard to say "No".
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
You are attributing far too much intelligence to them. Anyone who would seriously think of filtering the internet obviously has no idea of what it is.
Infuriate left and right
I work in a public school in Aus, the net connection is very heavily filtered, even for staff, to the point that trying to do work is a fight.
The system is slow, useless, stupid, retarded, limited, programmed by monkies and those are it's good points!
List of stupid thinks these filters do
Breast Cancer research = fail, students might see some tits, oh noes!
Any reasearch relation to sex = fail, can't let our kids know about sex!
Image searches = fail, sorry we can't filter out just the porn so we'll just block it all!
Yep, just what I want for my kids if I had any, a internet connect that couldn't be used for legit research!
Is this any different from hotels or cable companies blocking adult channels by default?
Are they required to do so by law? Or do they choose to?
Call it what it actually is: totalitarianism
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You know, I'm tired of seeing comments like this in stories of this sort:
You know what? Every democracy on the planet will have some representative somewhere who decides to take up some kooky cause. One of the strengths of a democracy is that the majority can prevent such idiotic ideas from becoming a reality.
Should we be educated about when some moronic public representative decides to take up such a cause? Yes. But do we have to assume that just because one elected/appointed representative professes a bad idea that the entire state is about to go downhill?
Last I checked, Austraila is a democracy, and there is a process that must be followed to go from an idea to a legislative act. The idea, however, is not the act.
If and when an idea gets past the first step of legislation, then is when you have to worry, as it usually means that other elected representatives support the idea. But one bad idea hardly means the downfall of society -- chances are very good that this effort will go into the dustbin of history, like a variety of bad ideas elected officials have professed and later dropped due to lack of support.
Yaz.
I'm anti-porn, I think it damages peoples minds, but I don't like this either.
Interesting, as I've always felt that porn helps people relax and release tension. Like anything else, it can be addictive and too much can probably hurt you (though, like most things, too mcuh is dependant on the indivdual). It's also certainly good for couples when it's watched together (and is something both enjoy watching).
There is also the old reality/VR argument. Like video games, there is a significant difference between porn and reality. The problem comes when people can't differentiate between the two. In porn's case I'd argue that the lack of sex ed in schools probably contributes to that, as people develope their ideas about sex from pornos without having been taught anything about the reality of it (the "you mean all gals arent completely shaven, enjoy teh buttsecks, and like facials and giving blowjobs?!?!?!?" type mentality).
Porn is at its basic sense fantasy, and can actually sometimes be really funny if you understand that. Hell, my girlfriend and I spent a couple hours laughing at/critiquing some rather unrealistic and amusing porn this past weekend.
To bring this back on topic, regardless of one's views towards porn, filtering it is both impossible and a dangerous move to attempt. This is an area of parental responsibility, it should not be censored by the govt for us.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
No, it's not even good in theory! It's extremely bad in theory! It's opressive and totalitarian, and is a policy better suited for those "towel-head" theocracies that the US and Australian government are -- allegedly -- enemies of. In fact, it's the kind of idea that in a sane world would get this senator kicked out off office almost immediately, because it's dangerously close to treason for any allegedly "free" society.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The only, repeat only way to police what kids see on the net is to have a human in the loop in real time, for every kid. And we could be waiting a while for that to happen.
Well, I guess the developers of Freenet, I2P and other anonymising networks will be grateful, as support, userbase and donations surge.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
> Wildly unpopular, impossible to implement and very, very expensive to even attempt.
If it appeals to the voters in his district, the rest is irrelevant.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Could one assume then, that 93% of parents are therefore using some form of filtering currently available to achieve that goal?
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
Just contact the ISP and sign up. Who cares if you look at porn, what's the big deal? It's naked women, how is it "wrong" for us to want to look at it?
People care way to much about what others think of them. If you enjoy something, fuck what others think.
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"
--Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
More interesting is the article fails completely in explaining why children should be protected from sexual explicit materials. If they are not interested they will just skip it as some rubbish. I have never seen any research proving children are harmed in any way when they are accidentally exposed to sexual explicit materials. However, children will be harmed if they won't be educated about sex and it's sexual consequences.
Nyh
That part is not an issue really. Just ban non-backdoored encryption.
Then the content doesnt matter.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The question is not whether she broke the law or not; the question is, whether such law is even compatible with the very definition of a free state governed by and in the interests of its people.
Puritan: Someone who is concerned that somebody, somewhere, is enjoying himself.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You're saying the head of the "National Socialists" was not a Socialist, eh?
no, he wasn't socialist. the Nazis were fascist (the exact opposite end of the political spectrum) if anything, he was anti-socialist/anti-communist. communists were basically one of the other things on his list of "things to eliminate to make a perfect world" in addition to jews and the physically/mentally disabled.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time