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Australia To Block BitTorrent
Kevin 7Kbps writes "Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy announced today that the Australian Internet Filters will be extended to block peer-to-peer traffic, saying, 'Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.' This dashes hopes that Conroy's Labor party had realised filtering could be politically costly at the next election and were about to back down. The filters were supposed to begin live trials on Christmas Eve, but two ISPs who volunteered have still not been contacted by Conroy's office, who advised, 'The department is still evaluating applications that were put forward for participation in that pilot.' Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."
When will this thing finally die? Every man and his dog acknowledges that it is a steaming pile of political rhetoric, yet it still goes on and on and on.
From the article I linked to:
Australia's largest ISP, Telstra, and Internode have said they will not participate in the trials. The second largest ISP, Optus, will run only a scaled- back trial of just the first tier while iiNet, the third biggest provider, has said it will participate simply to show the Government that its scheme will not work.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'm in the UK so we have no senators, but your point stands.
And I have written to my MP about this. Stating clearly my concerns about the massive back end database that will contain masses of information about individuals, be a security nightmare, be abused etc etc. I also mentioned that I had no faith it would be delivered to time or budget, would not solve any of the problems it's supposed to etc etc.
Three months later I got a form reply starting -
"We've listened to your concerns but would like to reassure you that the ID card scheme isn't just about ID cards, it'll be backed by a national database..."
i.e. Making it unequivocally clear that they had not read a damn word I said and didn't care at all about my opinion. This has happened with other issues too.
Look at the Iraq war - Between 1 and 2 million people took to the streets of London, which is a lot in a country with a population of 60M, and to get that many protesting takes some serious feeling amongst the population as a whole. What happened? We went to war.
The politicians in this country are in the business of overriding and ignoring public opinion at every turn. the public are in the business of voting for the best looking, most eloquent, best funded or smartest dressed guy, so long as he's in the same party their family always vote for.
It's useless to try and get anything done this way.