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Australia to Offer Widespread ISP-level Filtering
Phurge writes "According to a Sydney Morning Herald article, the Australia government has decided to take the controversial step of having internet service providers filter web content at the request of parents, in a crackdown on online bad language, pornography and child sex predators. 'The more efficient compulsory filtering of internet service providers (ISPs) was proposed in March last year by the then Labor leader, Kim Beazley. At the time, the Communications Minister, Helen Coonan, and ISPs criticised his idea as expensive. Three months later Senator Coonan announced the Government's Net Alert policy, which promised free filtering software for every home that wanted it. She also announced an ISP filtering trial to be conducted in Tasmania. That trial was scrapped. Today Mr Howard will hail the ISP filtering measure as a world first by any Government, and is expected to offer funding to help cover the cost. Parents will be able to request the ISP filter option when they sign up with an ISP. It will be compulsory to provide it. The measures will come into effect by the end of this month.'"
... implementing a government-controlled mandatory filtering infrastructure for the web in Australia. All it will take would be the change of a config file or two, and the government can censor whatever it pleases.
Today Mr Howard will hail the ISP filtering measure as a world first by any Government...
I don't think that's something I'd be proud to admit.
You know of course, that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions?
This sounds so nice and sweet on the surface: the government is going to protect your children by filtering the Internet content to which they have access. What could be wrong with that?
Of course, once you have an official filtering mechanism in place, it can be used to filter other "anti-social" content. And it will. It's just a matter of time. The next step will be the restriction of some universally loathed faction, like the Nazis. Neo-fascist sites will be banned as will sites from other "extremist" groups, terrorists, etc. Then illegal drug related sites will be banned, and later hard alcohol sites.
Eventually, you can be expect to be protected from Twinkies and Ding-dongs. But not the Ding-dongs that you voted into office. Somehow they will always be exempt from filtering.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
...between the ISPs doing the filtering and software doing the filtering? Wouldn't it ultimately end up being that the ISPs will use software to filter? Therefore won't it have the same pitfalls as individual filters (ie: blocking sites with info on 'breast cancer' etc.)? And won't people eventually find a way around it if they really wanted to? When I was younger, if I was restricted access to something, usually that only made me want it more and go to greater lengths to get it. When will people just trust kids. Tell them they shouldn't, but give them the choice to actually listen. If they get caught, make it known your disappointed in them. I find that if the kid was being raised properly with emphasis on integrity and responsibility, usually they'll feel guilty and enforce the restrictions on themselves. And I know this will be stately repeated... Why do ISPs have to fill in for parents anyway? Can't they just keep an eye on their own kids?
In modern society, we have a thing called "decency." Part of it is that we have enough self-respect so as not to debase ourselves with needless profanity. It's pretty much the same reason that we tend to use more formal language in formal writing - we similarly don't consider our everyday conversation so uncouth as to warrant whatever curses we can think of.
We choose not to profane our conversation.
I hate it enough when my ISP decides to filter e-mail at the source. I don't get spam regardless, and sometimes actual people sending me actual attachments don't make it through because it "could be a dangerous file". It's yet another one of those things that keep stupid people "safe" (and stupid forever).
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
The big deal is the step taken by the government to force ISPs to provide filtering. Unheard of so far in a western democracy.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
Australia only had one internet policy over the past 10 years:
How can we filter it?
Please join or donate to Electronic Frontiers Australia
http://www.efa.org.au/
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The web is not a uniform medium when it comes to discourse, and people should not expect it to be that way. Even a 6 year old surfing the web knows there is a difference between CNN.com and MySpace.com when it comes to community discourse. Unless you like to live in a walled garden, filtering profanity does nothing but shelter kids from the real world. Do these parents actually think their kids don't hear this kind of stuff every day at recess?
Well, we don't actually. We did sorta four decades ago. It had its pluses and minuses. It was nice to be able to let your kids watch network programming without too much risk of having to explain homosexuality to an eight year old or having your six year old inform you that her first grade teacher is a bitch.
But those days are gone and their demise is not the fault of the Internet in any way shape or form. IMO, the enemy is us, not our institutions.
===
It is kind of refreshing to see someplace other than the US experimenting with something that is probably a really bad idea.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Right now, my TV is "filtered" - even my cable TV. I can call the cable company and unblock the "filtering" (e.g. get access to channels that are not "filtered") - as long as I'm willing to pay $19.95 a month extra per unfiltered channel. ISP's are salivating over the prospect of applying this "business model" to their service. "Unfiltered" internet (that is, paying them to stop doing something you didn't ask or want them to do in the first place) will CERTAINLY end up being more expensive that "filtered" internet. I give it one year, tops.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
In modern society, we also have two things called "prudishness" and "abject terror of anything not spoon-fed to us." These are the reasons we give governments absolute power over us; we need someone to protect us at all times. Even if our protector is only watching over us like crops for the harvest, our fear of the unknown runs so deep that we'll gladly accept subservience to a known agent over the uncertainty of the alternatives.
We choose to subjugate and censor ourselves.
Thank God they have liberal gun laws and a lot of folks are armed, so as to defend their rights - oh, wait, the Austrailian gov't confiscated everyone's guns in a "think of the children" ploy. And the gun owners just gave them up with nary a whimper.
How many large scale (10+ people) shootings of school students have you heard in Australia ?
Gun control has its +/- points, but that is offtopic.
>>> ...without too much risk of having to explain homosexuality to an eight year old
Yes, the enemy is us. For those that think its a 'risk' to tell a child about same sex relationships the adult is the one with the issue. At what age do you tell a child they're adopted? At what age do you tell a child that in some families a man/woman and another man/woman can be together. If they grow up with it, there wont even be an issue. The wider generation behind us are going to grow up with it as acceptable, except for those homeschooled and only learn about it in college - along with a fear of many other things.... those of our generation who cannot get their heads around it will have to live with it.
In Samoa, they may raise a boy child as a girl (see here, where some might call that Transgendered and 'unnatural' it is actually normal in their society. So this boils back the the OP's comment: "In modern society, we have a thing called "decency." It depends who defines "society" and its usually the aristocracy that are calling things indecent, not the general public.
Aussies are well known for using bad language, and are pretty open about sex, un-married sex, wet t-shirt competitions, male strippers, Dame Edna and the guy who entered Australian Idol as a girl.
Come to think of it - knowing the number of Aussies I do, if wider society of Australia was setting the filter parameters of their entire internet they'd probably only ban Goatse and tubgirl.... or they'd only let it through if it had Johnny Howards, or Warwick Cappa's face on it..
Add to this the hypocrites who gives themselves a veneer of respectability all the while being total fuckwads who really fuck-up society and you have the explanation why some motherfucking assholes get all in their high horses when someone says something as benign as "shit" all the while driving a Hummer to the convenience store to pick some unethical cheap coffee.
What's wrong with letting him/her view the porn? What's so wrong with porn? This is the problem I have with this constant "think of the children" argument. It's not them we're trying to protect, it's the parents clinging on to the sanctity of their children as they become more and more adult each day. It's the parent's complex not the child; the child doesn't care.
I'm not a parent myself but I just feel that if you give children arbitrary rules with no logical consistency behind them then they may think all of them are suspect and rebel against the ones that really matter.
Perhaps the best way to approach this is to tell your child that the porn on the Internet isn't like real sex. There's no love, there's often no real passion. It's just about cheap gratification. I think if you approached it like this they'd be smart enough to see why some people disagree with it. Hell, they may even choose for themselves that this material isn't for them! Imagine that!
It is my view that if you teach your child to be a moral consequentialist then your job as a parent is basically done. You don't do this by setting arbitrary rules, you do this by teaching them to think.
Simon.
There.
unsigned int question = 0x2B | ~(0x2B)
Did any one else think of China when they read this claim?
Bullshit. There has never been anything like the tradition of gun ownership in Australia as in the US. In the last 20-30 years gun crime became more prevalent and the population generally supported tightening of restrictions on gun ownership. I've never, in my 50 years, met anyone who I knew owned a handgun. In rural areas, farmers had rifles and shotguns. I get terribly sick of NRA types, whose knowledge of Australia ia apparently based on Simpsons' cartoons, making up shit like this.
Australia is a fully functioning democracy and we don't need to assassinate our leaders to change governments, attractive as the idea is with the current leadership. Guns cause anarchy, not democracy. Take a trip to Baghdad or Somalia and tell me much good wide availability of guns has done there.
Insurance companies charge smokers or drunk drivers, or speeders more for coverage because they impose undue burden on the system. Why should smut users be any different? First, there's the possibility that they'll filter out more than porn. (See the already existing debates on other threads.)
Second, if they want to charge by the amount of data transfered, then they should just charge by the amount of data transfered. If I want unfiltered access to essays on dissident website X, why should I have to pay more than the guy who watches YouTube all day?
Even if they never filter out anything other than porn, are you going charge people who look at still image porn more than the YouTube guy on the grounds that he must be using more resources?
[sarcasm]Better lump the Linux geeks in there, always downloading packages instead of getting their software on CDs like "normal" people. Charge 'em double.[/sarcasm]
This is not a signature.
This really needs to be parsed in some detail, because it's a wonderful example of marketing techniques applied to social debate.
What It Says
This is a declaration that asserts three things: that there is a thing called "modern society"; that we are part of it; and that "decency" is a mandatory characteristic of "modern society".
What It Literally Means
Since it is written in the present tense, for any of it to be true "modern society" must mean the collection of all people in the modern age who are alive right now. It must be that generalized, because of the further assertion that "we" are part of it, and "we" could well be people from anywhere, living in any circumstance.
This group of people has a defining characteristic called decency.
Its Marketing Purpose
Modern marketing has a few crude tools that get used over and over again. One of them is what I like to call "The Boss". The Boss tells you things with presumed authority so they sound axiomatic while in reality they are no more than unsubstantiated statements. This is popular amongst amateur marketing enthusiasts who have read "How to Win Friends and Influence People", and various books on how to pick up women. Those types of books tell you to give people orders in such a way the targets don't realize they are being pushed around. For example, have you ever heard a person start a pitch to you like this..."Listen, I have something to tell you..." The word "listen" is a command. You are being ordered to listen to that person.
In this case we are presented with three declarations that, objectively, are various degrees of wrong. Any definition of "modern society" that is so general as to include anyone who might read this can only share the most basic of characteristics. Any property as nebulous as "decency" can't possibly be uniformly defined. But the Boss tells us it can.
What It Says
"We" are members of "modern society" who share a new property called "self respect". This property is responsible for making use feel like "needless profanity" reduces our self worth.
What It Literally Means
All members of modern society are now presumed to share two characteristics: decency and self respect. A further characteristic is implied, the ability to tell the difference between "needless profanity" and (presumably) "mandatory profanity".
What's more, we members of "modern society" agree that "needless profanity" is debasing.
Its Marketing Purpose
This is more Boss talk. The purpose here is to inject the words "self-respect", "debase" and "needless profanity" into the text. The implied meaning is that we must share these properties since we are necessarily part of modern society.
We start to see the emergence of a second age-old marketing bludgeon here: Exile. Don't be left out. Don't be left behind. Don't be a loser. This second use of the meme "we are part of modern society" starts to sound like a threat: if you don't act this way you won't be a member.
The problem with The Boss is that if you hit people over the head too hard for too long they start to notice. This second sentence starts to sound a little preachy, reducing the overall effect of the spot. The Boss is completely useless if the target catches on.
What It Says
Formal language is to formal communication as lack of profanity is to everyday conversation. We consider it uncouth to use profanity in e
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Being of Scottish descent, I take offense to your offense at plaid! I demand an apology! =P
On a more serious note, I have to agree it's my job to censor myself. If I want people to think I'm an asshole, that's my right to do so. But they then have the right to snub me for it.
I will admit I tend to censor myself around kids and around my own family (I'd never hear the end of it if I failed to to the latter). But if it's just me and a group of friends, I'll curse up a storm. For the most part none of us care.
And sure, I understand parents wanting to keep their kids away from the less pleasant aspects of the internet until they're able to handle it/have the sense not to do something stupid. But for one, you can only filter so much (in other words, it's not an excuse for not parenting - gasp! who knew?). For another, the fact that this is being mandated on a government level is what reeks to me. Unless you're out in the middle of nowhere like I am (in which case if I had kids and wanted filters, I could just buy some software myself instead of relying on my ISP), usually you can choose between companies. And if companies find that parents are flocking to places that offer those filters, guess what, the market's going to dictate that everybody else offer those filters too. No government action needed.
But then, I always thought internet filtering was silly to begin with. My parents never had filters. They just taught me not to be an idiot by giving out my personal info to some stranger, they generally knew where I was all the time (hey wow they paid attention if I wanted to leave the house for something) and, probably the thing that would make most kids groan but you learn to live with it - our computer was in the kitchen. None of this every kid having their own machine in their bedroom thing. But then, my folks and I got along pretty well anyway. It was only AFTER I turned 18 that they would have been horrified by some of the things I do online, and by then I was out of the house. And I'll tell you, I don't like the thought of my porn getting blocked. I mean, I'm glad for now the government has decided this is an opt-in thing, but once they have their fingers in something it doesn't take much more to tighten it. How long before they decide that the kids still aren't protected enough, and find some more intrusive step to move in? I've noticed that people have this lovely tendency to lose their ability to think independently when somebody starts crying "think of the children".
Not saying that protecting kids is a BAD thing, just that people have a tendency to go about it in the wrong way, and lean toward paranoia more than anything. I think a big part of the problem right now is that the older generation is still not used to this technology, they didn't grow up with it, so it freaks them out or something. I mean, I guess it has come a long way in a relatively short amount of time. So they hear about something happening to some kid on the news, assume that's the norm, and start calling for a ban on MySpace or YouTube or whatever the latest online scapegoat is (nevermind blaming the creeps that just happen to be there, or the parents who obviously were paying attention when little Jessie or Jennie or whatever the cool thing to name your kids is now decided to hop a plane to see her 35 year old boyfriend - we blame the site instead!).
But as far as protecting the kids goes... seems to me like they're pretty out there before they ever hit the net. Man, the amount of kids I've seen online cussing like sailors and talking about porn and movies my folks would NEVER have let me watch... it's amazing. Heck the half of them claim to have already HAD sex (we're talking like preteens even, which is kinda creepy to me somehow). Where's mom and dad's filter for THAT, eh? I've had frigging ten-year-olds tell me to go fuck myself for kicking him out of some adult-only chatroom (what he was even doing there is utterly beyond me). Sorry folks, but your kids are already about as "damaged" as they're g
Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil.
In the larger sense, I agree with you. But the problem is, the world isn't going to wait for your children to learn how to think, it's just going to go on being the way it is. Which means, for whatever period your child is incapable of dealing maturely with the world, it's your job to do it for him or her. While it's not fair to the child's development to assume all the responsibility (in which case, they'll never learn to be responsible for their own actions), it's equally unfair to dump the responsibility on them when they're not ready.
Figuring out the balance is the trick to being a good parent. While it's futile to try and pretend your children are innocent indefinitely, that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to try and protect that innocence for a time. Porn is a good example - children lack the contextual information necessary to process the information adequately. As a somewhat exaggerated case, consider BDSM. Without the experiential background that puts sexual desire and gratification in the proper context, it's going to be difficult to understand why it's ok for that guy to order around, slap, and spit on that woman. Trying to explain that it's ok for that guy to do it, but not the child, is going to be a difficult task if you can't also explain the reasons behind it. And you can't explain them adequately to someone who's prepubescent; they lack the emotional and physical context for it to make sense.
While I won't disagree that the national obsession with the simple fact of body parts is ridiculous, at the same time there's plenty of content that I don't want my children experiencing until they've got the background to put in its proper place, and it has nothing to do with nipples (after all, they're one of the first things most infants ever see!!).
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Do you decide when your child is ready to be exposed to quantum physics or the history of medieval Europe? More likely, you restrict your censorship to areas you want to lie your ass off about.
Not that either, It's just pure election year hypocracy. The *.cx domain is under the control of the Australian government since it is the domain for the the territory of Christmas Island.
What we are seeing here is an election stunt appealing mostly to a cult called the "Exclusive Bretheren" which has recently started putting a lot of money into Australian politics. There is also a mob called the Hillsong Church which is an almost purely commercial local copy of the worst of US tent evangalism - slime that take taxpayers money given to them to pass on to the homeless and instead spend it on parties for those at the top of their pyramid scheme - they like to pretend to do stuff for the kiddies too.
Enough venom from me - the worst thing of it all is the software does not have to work, unfortunately it is just so they can say they spent money for the kiddies and if it doesn't work they can say something about IT people being evil and obstructive people that want to spread child porn.
Where's the "-1, Wrong" mod option?
What you've quoted was the old election promise, from 1 or 2 elections ago. As well as dropping the trial, the filter software deal was later watered down to become "ISPs are encouraged to offer web-filtering software to customers at a reduced price" (which turned out to be "somewhere between $RRP and actual retail sale price").
The current one - as far as can be told from the announcements, which are as slippery as a bucketful of grass snakes in a lard factory - is ISP-based filtering. The idea is, as a "concerned parent", you'll be able to choose between an unfiltered feed or the "no sex please, we're Christian" version.
Note that this has also been a feature of the Opposition party's platform for quite a while now.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?