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Largest Aussie ISP Agrees To "Ridiculous" Net-Filter Trial
Klootzak writes "Michael Malone, head of Australia's largest ISP iiNet announced today that his company would sign up to the Government's live trials of the Great Firewall of Australia. In an article published by The Age, Mr Malone is quoted calling Stephen Conroy 'The worst Communications Minister we've had in the 15 years since the [internet] industry has existed.' Despite at first giving the impression that iiNet is rolling over like a good Government puppy the article quotes Mr Malone saying that the reasons for participating in this trial is to show how unfeasible and stupid it is — Quoted from the article: 'Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we'll be publicizing it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we'll be publicizing it.' Let's hope that in typical fashion of government-instigated Internet-filtering that this stupid idea is just as useless, inefficient and ineffectual as the last one, and that the Australian Government realizes this before wasting more taxpayer dollars on it (seeing as the first attempt only cost taxpayers $84,000,000)."
I know it's popular on slashdot to look at things based on its technical proficiency, but this isn't about whether or not it works. It's based on satisfying certain luddites that think that free access to information is evil because free access to information means free access to things that they disagree with. Things like abortion, religion, sexuality, human rights, protest, recipes for unhealthy food, and government/corporate oversight. And it doesn't matter whether it can be bypassed or not, what matters is whether the majority of the population cares enough to.
It's like peer to peer filesharing. Geeks like us will always be able to make it work because we know enough about the network to make a connection from any one point to another point. It's a decentralized communications network and by design and very nature it cannot be fully compromised. You can't stop the signal. But very few of us that use the internet are geeks and they use common tools like Google and Shareaza and if they don't work then they just give up. They don't have the proficiency to make it work. And so the luddites win, because the literacy is so low.
They don't care if it works... They just want to stop enough people that they don't lose their political clout. It's not a firewall, it's a dam; And while there's always water flowing through a dam, it's not all the water and that's what makes a dam useful.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Because this isn't, and never has been, actually about protecting the children.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
if they have a list of all the kiddie porn sites on the web, why don't they just go after the site owners? even if the sites are hosted overseas, there are very few countries in the world that tolerate that sorta thing, and with a little international pressure it shouldn't be too hard to get their own governments to shut them down.
If you're talking about shutting down sites with 5 year olds, you're probably right - Not many countries would refuse to cooperate. But if you're talking about sites featuring 13-18 year olds, the lines get a little blurry from one country to the next (I think IANAL nor a pedophile). So, like the TPB shutdown, the "best" they could do is illegally shut down the sites temporarily before they returned as strong as ever (along with some extra publicity) and possibly try and convict the site owners in absentia so that you can arrest them if they ever decide to visit your country.
And, like the other posters point out, this isn't really about shutting down kiddie porn. It's about giving the government the ability to filter the Internet as they see fit. The kids are just a convenient launching point because, as everyone knows, opposing censorship == supporting child abuse.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Let us stipulate, then, that iiNet's aboveboard and that agreeing to this trial is, essentially, a demonstration of the futility of the government's proposal. Even with iiNet's principled and participatory opposition (i.e., not just sitting there pouting, but doing something about it), this may have unintended consequences.
[Comms Ministry]: The trial was a smash success; iiNet's endorsement guarantees we have good PR and can steamroll this out. All we have to do is invoke the name of our ally in the industry.
[iiNet]: "Endorsement"? WTF are you talking about! We signed up to prove just how stupid the idea was.
[Comms Ministry]: You signed up. That's endorsement. Your participation gives us all the credibility we need, and the rollout will proceed on schedule.
Trying to change stupidity from the inside has risks, one of which is that you get stupidity all over yourself.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. "As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation." (sorry, pinched from an earlier thread)