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Aussie Censorship "Live Trials" Won't Be Live
Xiroth writes "In what could be the first step to backing down on the plans to censor the Australian Internet, Communication Minister Stephen Conroy has made it known that the live trials of the Government filter will not, in fact, be live, instead being downgraded to a closed network test. Given that this would provide no further information than what Government tests have already provided, this may prove to be a face-saving measure before the plan is quietly scrapped. Nonetheless, concerned Australians are encouraged to attend protests planned for this weekend to ensure that the Government gets the message."
Who is willing to bet that the testing is done over "carefully controlled" conditions designed to hide all the faults of the system?
No sig for the moment.
I'm certainly attending, though my efforts to rally my friends have been hampered by their SHE-DEVILS of girlfriends who all have plans for that day. Damn their icy hearts!
Seeing as these filters are so ridiculously easy to bypass, a major concern for me lately is how they'll be handling people who use these methods, especially since they have perfectly legitimate applications *besides* bypassing the filter.
Ezekiel 23:20
If the plan were only to block specified illegal content, then aside from technical issues, I would agree.
The problem is they plan to block "unwanted" content, with no definition of "unwanted" being offered. They can legally block anything they don't want. That is incredibly dangerous.
...My Sig Sucks...
Finally there seems to be some resistance to this stupid plan from people other than from nerds & libertarians. Major newspapers are against the filter (the scope of which the Governement altered after they were elected) and Telstra, the most corporate of corporations, are even telling them to take a running jump. The Communications Minister isn't doing his little scheme any favours by refusing to discuss it in Parliament. Maybe Australia can stop being the laughing stock of the internet, if only for a little while.
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
Why bother to implement a system that will only affect the people that it is least aimed at?
Child pornography (and the other psuedo legitimate targets of this filtering) is already illegal, this should be an enforcement issue, not a censorship one.
Whilst ISP's may be reluctant to cooperate with the MPAA/RIAA to catch "pirates", I can't imagine any of them shielding a child predator for a single second.
As an aside, yes I am Australian, yes I've lodged an official protest and YES if implemented, I intend to bypass these retarded filters.
It's a good thing you don't get to speak for the rest of us.
Honestly, I am quite able to make up my own mind as to what I can read or look at. I don't need anyone making that determination for me.
As the great Frank Zappa once said, "There is no sound that you can make with your mouth, or word that will come out of your mouth, that is so powerful that it will make you go to hell", and in the same vein there is no image or word you can see or read that will 'sabotage your mind' against women and children. What you decide as content that 'leads to a depraved mind' might be classified by others as just simple harmless garbage which most people will just ignore and never seek out anyway.
It doesn't matter what kind of censorship they do, nobody can ever do a thorough job. There is simply too much garbage out there that would need to be filtered, and stuff will always slip through. Even the tests that showed they were blocking large amounts of legitimate content also showed that they were letting through some content that should have been blocked. So much of the truly abhorrent shit that they're wanting to block, child pornography, isn't even traded out in the open via the web anyway; it's traded via DCC on efnet or other IRC networks, or on private SSL secured boards that change IPs regularly.
One of the many stupid things about this is that given the above being true, the amount of money required to implement the government's plan will end up increasing our connectivity costs even more than they are today, for no discernible benefit.
So, in summary, whether or not you think censorship of the internet is a good idea or not, it's pointless because no matter what you do, you'll fail in your objectives, and end up just costing the public more money trying to force your morality on them.
If you want to censor something, having a list of censored things only makes people more curious. It's much better (for the censors) to keep the censored list secret.
This reminds me of the anecdote of the old lady who went to compliment Samuel Johnson for not putting any "bad words" on his dictionary.
-- "Why, did you look up all of them"? was the answer.
Or, as this site so admirably puts it,
There has been a recent court decision in New South Wales (a state in Australia), where images of Bart and Lisa Simpson engaged in sex acts are considered child porn and a citizen has been fined for having such images on computer he owned. If the national filter is to prevent child porn the scale of filtering is just mind boggling. (There are various references to the court decision... here is one example http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24771973-16947,00.html )
"In what could be the first step to backing down on the plans to censor the Australian Internet
You really believe that? Surely more likely is that this is being done to further remove the possiblity of yet more criticism of what is universally regarded to be a stupid idea so they can go ahead with it regardless.
Not that it really matters because we all know, as Senator Conroy has already revealed, that anyone that against this idea is in support of child porn anyway. I wish I could find the article to quote.
Just a small point to consider. Supposing you have access to this list of blocked sites. Supposing it also contains a reason why each site is blocked. Unless the URL is very descriptive, how can you be sure that the reason for blocking it is accurate? After all, you can't access the site to perform an independant check, can you? Unless you are one of the pirates using illegal methods to get round the filter....
I'm just here to regulate Funkyness