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Australian Labor Party Proposes ISP Level Filter
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Labor Party (much the same as the Democrats in the US) are claiming they will force ISPs to block violent and pornographic content if elected. From the article: 'Mr Beazley said all households would be included in the policy unless there was a specific request for access to such material. It was "too hard" for many parents to install internet blockers on their computers to prevent offensive material being downloaded.'"
I wonder if anyone who "opts-out" of the ISP filter will be more likely to have their internet usage monitored and their home raided?
How would adults contact their ISPs to re-enable the content? Also, if adults did request to have the conent put through, they could be descriminated against. This sounds like a bad idea!
Mark Twain once said that "Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it". Evidently, people have been using children as a means of taking things away from adults for a long time now.
Welcome to Australian politics, everyone. *rolls eyes*
For those not familiar with Australian politics, let me help out a little. In Australia, we have a healthy disrespect for our politicos. Your average Australian will happily diss both major parties, even if they actually voted them in. Occasionally, one of our politicos will say something that is so out there, so backwards, so poorly thought-out that it causes many of us to hang or heads in shame.
And when it comes to IT, our politicos are famous for coming up with poorly thought-out schemes that can make people from even the most backwater of country towns sadly shake their heads, thinking "luddites". So please, don't judge us based on our "representatives". Please look at us as the designated driver who is ashamed of their drunken friend who is making a fool out of himself but still needs someone to drive them home at the end of the evening. This is a shameless attempt at grabbing support from the "think of the children" voter demographic by a party that has been getting spanked in the federal elections for many years by a party that isn't that much better. Hopefully this attempt (not the first) will die the death it deserves and we won't have to hear about it again. Fear not, there isn't any significant grassroots desire for this sort of censorship. Not that I know about anyway! I'd say that the bulk of informed people find the whole proposal to be ridiculous.
Im an australian and i am Outraged... I dont want to have to try and get around filters like this, i dont want to have to apply for filters to be removed from my internet connection This is australia THIS IS NOT FUCKING CHINA!
"almost two-thirds of parents don't have internet filters on their family computers," Mr Beazley said. did he stop to think that maybe two-thirds decided that they didnt want their internet access restricted or were already filtering their connection using a method which wasnt included in their "statistics".
The current opt-in system works well and should be LEFT ALONE!
"research suggests that the exposure of children and others in the community to this sickening content can lead to aggression towards women and child abuse."
In fact a quick google returns many opposing views eg
"Research by Goldstein et al. shows that sex offenders generally had less contact with erotica in their formative years than did non-offenders and typically had a sexually repressed childhood and sexually repressive parents"
Anyway, Im very upset to even read this and [Insert insults and offensive comment directed at Kim Beazley Here].
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage
This was the legal basis for the old USSR to criminalize Bible smugglers. It is often helpful to remind Christians of this when debating ill conceived government censorship programs. I am a Christian, and I despise pornography. It destroys the viewers sex life, and in cases of violent addiction those of many others around him (it is usually a male). I have read heart wrenching letters from women, one of them I know personally, who have no sex life because their husband would rather do himself in front of a picture. Nevertheless, what words or images act as pornography varies with the culture and individual.
Machines might be able to recognize images containing bare skin, but bare skin is not pornography. It might be possible to create a bayesian like filter that could be trained to block text and images offensive to an individual. Or an individual can hire a service that shares his/her values to do the filtering. The government (US or AU) does *not* share my values.
For my own family, I check authentication and do bayesian content filtering using pymilter for email. I use squid with a "safesites" list for kids and a "bannedsites" list (obtained from the browsing habits of porn addicted employees of my clients who couldn't stop on their own during working hours) for adults. I use pine to screen my personal email (no images) and lynx to screen websites before adding to safesites.
Some of the students in a beginning programming class I teach were unable to browse web pages on group theory, klein bottles, and other topics which I really doubt acted as porn for anyone alive now or throughout history. They were blocked by a porn filter installed by the parents. I guess those 3D projections of 4 dimensional surfaces do have a rather sensuous look to them. Third party filters are very frustrating. I sympathize with those advocate them in their desire to fight porn. However, they simply do not understand computer technology (and those I know personally invariably run Windows on their PC).