Slashdot Mirror
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."
In stopping P2P, Australia would stop Linux distribution, Microsoft would be able to crush all other operating systems as their more efficient P2P distribution model is cut off. Thus Australia prove they are anti-choice in the market place. The message is clear, pay Bill Gates or else!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I was in Australia about three years ago, and I was struck by a sense that it really does appear to be a nanny state. As for examples, unless I gave them all it would seem they were individually petty, but as a whole I got that impression and it has stuck with me since (this is no reflection on the people or the place itself) - I'm sure I didn't imagine it. For years we have been fed the image that Australians are laid back and chilled out but it really didn't seem the case to me, and this seems to be a further example.
It's people like you that make it hard for people like the parent to change laws. It's kind of sad, really.
How dare they interfere with my right to steal copyrighted material? How dare they interfere with my right to enjoy watching children raped? How dare they interfere with my right to send 5 million unsolicited pieces of E-mails an hour? How dare they interfere with my right to vandalize networks and computers? How dare they deny me $50 worth of bandwidth to save myself the $10 cost to purchase something legally. How dare they cut back on money spent to produce movies,pay bands or programmers? If they keep this up their won't be anything worth stealing. How dare the government interfere with my right to steal, vandalize and abuse, simply to prevent terrorist attacks, my right to privacy trumps other peoples right to not be killed by a car bomb.