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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."
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...
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.
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 )