Slashdot Mirror
Some Of Australia's Tubes Are About To Be Filtered
Slatterz writes "The first phase of
Australia's controversial Internet filters were put in place today, with the Australian government announcing that six ISPs will take part in a six-week pilot. The plan reportedly includes a filter blocking a list of Government-blacklisted sites, and an optional adult content filter, and the government has said it hasn't ruled out the possibility of filtering BitTorrent traffic. The filters have been widely criticized by privacy groups and Internet users, and people have previously even taken to the streets to protest. While Christian groups support the plan, others say filters could slow down Internet speeds, that they don't work, and that the plan amounts to censorship of the Internet. At this stage the filters are only a pilot, and Australia's largest ISP, Telstra, is not taking part. But if the $125.8 million being spent by the Australian Government on cyber-safety is any indication, it's a sign of things to come."
Please, if you use one of the ISPs in this program, send a very strong message and dump them as soon as the filters go live. Tell them that you are quite capable, thank you very much, of filtering your own content.
I guarantee that if this gains traction it will not stop at porn. Welcome back to the Middle Ages.
Everytime one of our friends or relatives asks us about a problem with their internet our response shall be,
"Oh that'd probably be the internet filter causing your drop-outs, thank Stephen Conroy"
Its people's fault. Plain and simple.
Because after this tragic act of censorship, the people in the next elections, while having the opportunity to vote down the current government, most probably will not. Even if they do, they will most probably vote for another party that has most probably done something equally bad when they were government.
It's called mass amnesia, and its the reason why our democracies are in fact ""democracies"".
I know a lot of Chinese nationals have been immigrating to your shores lately, Australia, but this is the wrong way to make them feel at home.
Well - I was wondering why the net's a bit slower today... Thought it was the random fluctuations I get from time to time but no... Sigh... Sad thing is, you mention this to people here and it's oh... Well, kinda bad, but meh..
I don't understand these alleged Christians' obsession with force and control. Forcing your own will upon someone else is the very antithesis of Christianity.
I'm going to venture a guess that tor is going to become very popular in Australia very soon...
Though, I'm sure some teenagers will figure out how to bypass those filters even more simplistically. Good on them. Say no to a censored Internet!
Why do complicated things with VPNs when you can simply dump the ISP? It's still possible, sends a clear signal, and if people start using VPNs en masse to get around the filtering, they'll simply filter that as well. And you want a clear signal that filtering isn't wanted before all choice is gone.
Christian Groups in HK are trying to push web filtering on ISP to 'protect their children'. Those groups are nuts. They even think David (Michelangelo) is porn and should be banned. We will protest against it on 15 Feb. Sorry for my poor English.
I blame the Americans, for their culture of inactivity they brought over here back in the war.
Oh, who am I kidding, we're all lazy. And our general populous is just as ignorant as the American general populous.
I have not read TFA, due to the aforementioned laziness, but I think the summary misses some of the biggest news in regard to the filter trials: every damn ISP on the list (with the exception of iPrimus) are tiny little no-name setups that likely have customers numbering in the hundreds. Two major ISPs with large customer bases, Optus and iiNet, were excluded because, I would assume, their data would reflect poorly on the filtering scheme.
These "real world" trials are a sham, and Conroy's a bastard.
Ezekiel 23:20
But the 3 largest in Australia -- Optus and iiNet as well as Telstra are not taking part in these trials. How the hell are they going to get any accurate data if they're simply using 6 small ISPs? What next, they just flick on the switch for all ISPs and it it should work fine?
Once a jolly swagman plugged into the internets,
Under the shade of a coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited as he torrented
"Don't go deploying your filters on me".
"Deploying your filters, deploying your filters
Don't go deploying your filters on me"
And he sang as he watched and waited as he torrented,
"Don't go deploying your filters on me".
Down came the content speeding through the internets,
Up jumped the swagman and viewed it with glee,
And he sang as he shoved that content on his backup disk,
"You'll be a-wasting your filters on me".
"Wasting your filters, wasting your filters
Don't go a-wasting your filters on me"
And he sang as he shoved that content on his backup disk,
"Don't go a-wasting your filters on me".
Up rode the Conroy, mounted on his ISP,
Down came the troopers, one, two, three,
"Where's that jolly content you downloaded so illicitly?
You've been evading the filters from me."
"Evading the filters, evading the filters
You've been evading the filters from me."
"Where's that jolly content you downloaded so illicitly?
You've been evading the filters from me."
Up jumped the swagman and handed them his backup disk,
"You'll never crack my encryption", said he,
And his packets are tunneled and proxied through the internets,
"You'll never get your bloody filters on me".
"Your bloody filters, your bloody filters
You'll never get your bloody filters on me".
And his packets are tunneled and proxied through the internets,
"You'll never get your bloody filters on me".
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
David from South Australia I would like to say that; I am so happy using Webshield because I don't have to worry about what the children are doing, passwords or anything. I was constantly keeping tabs on things before, but now I know Webshield is doing it for me.
Angie from South Australia Before I used Webshield, I would constantly be checking my children on the internet, worried and anxious about what they might 'accidently' find. But now with Webshield, I can leave them to their homework, etc and not stress."
Julie from Queensland With 2 boys approaching teenage years and a husband who works late into the night at times, we (and I say âweâ(TM) on behalf of my husband as well) are glad for the peace of mind webshield provides. With pornography and all that it leads too, sweeping through families â" even strong families â" as it is channelled right into our houses, wreaking absolute heartache and havoc, we can only be glad for protection.
Those three quotes are quite probably the most disturbing potential outcomes from such a system.
The brutal truth of the matter is that what ever you can _easily_ find on the web via http is far less dangerous than Predators lurking on Friend face or Instant Messaging, which cannot be filtered. (You could block them entirely, but could you imagine the uproar of Millions of people then!). And wanting to block "Unwanted Material" this screams scope creep in a big way.
I am an Australian, and the B/S the Dis-Honourable Senator Conroy continues to feed us is quite alarming. I have met the man in person and witnessed first hand his obvious technical ineptness.
I for one will be fighting tooth and nail to inform everyone I know and I am already geared up at home to "circumvent" any filter.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
There must be some way to bypass the tube tying that these folks in the governments around the world are doing. Yes, sure there are snoop blockers and other web sites that enable encrypted bypassing of restrictions but State based Freedom Limiting Terrorists have figured out that firewalls exist. I'm wondering about legal means to assault these State Based Terrorists who continue to assault our freedoms including our freedoms of communication.
Sure it's likely different in each country due to the differences in laws but there must be strategies that will work across the entire planet to protect the masses Natural rights to free communications.
One idea is the open project to monitor ALL GOVERNMENT AGENTS, EMPLOYEES, STAFF and POLITICIANS and publish their movements, their activities, their lives. Millions of Little Brothers watching the members of the Big Brother control freak cult (aka members of any group that considers itself a State or Government at any level).
The purpose in part is to expose the hypocracy of these members of the governments but it's also to let them know that they are being watched.
Who watches the watchers? The population must be the ones who watch the watchers. This is why all public business must be in the public domain for it to be valid public business, otherwise it's just the work of "terrorists pretending to be the State"!
ps. If I vanish you'll know why.
Don't like content filtering / tampering / snooping?
So what's YOUR excuse for...
Not having a PGP key of your own so people can send you secure emails / files?
Sending emails without digitally signing them (anyone can do it) and by default encrypting them to any/all recipients who will provide their keys for that purpose?
Complaining about "internet filtering" yet not even running the software to check and see whether YOUR internet / ISP is filtering / port blocking / et. al.? Last time I checked there were pretty pervasive problems with wholesale port blocking for both incoming and outgoing traffic on many ISPs. That's wholesale blocking / censoring / filtering of communications too. A "network neutral" internet provider should allow ANY protocol, on ANY port, IN or OUT without tampering with the connection (throttling, blocking, et. al.). Anything less is just accepting the encroachment of such filtering.
Willingly USING an ISP that does any kind of connection filtering / tampering?
Willingly USING webmail systems and similar ones where your private communications are left out on some 3rd party server, especially ones where they don't facilitate end to end message signing / encryption / access purely over HTTPS, et. al.? Sites like yahoo, hotmail insert ads into every message you send by modifying YOUR content / message. Sites like google/gmail snoop on the contents of all your email and basically sell that information to advertisers to profile you and intrude on you with ads. If you don't want your content to be modified, filtered, sold, snooped then make sure they cannot either understand or alter your communications and the problems will be mostly solved!
Willingly using software like SKYPE or MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger all of which go to great efforts to be able to be able to route your communications through THEIR servers and not offer any meaningful true verifiable end-to-end content encryption such that not even the service provider can intercept / filter your communications.
Most of the IM software that is "popular" indeed does all sorts of content filtering based on keywords, blocking URLs it doesn't want you to share, et. al. Content tampering / filtering of a private communication should be the end user's option, not the service provider's! There are alternatives out there that use open source software, publically documented protocols, and which offer true encryption / privacy support like SIP, JABBER, et. al.
Running a site that doesn't use HTTPS as its PRIMARY mode of communication, i.e. don't even ALLOW HTTP except as a deprecated option to satisfy very old cell phone browsers or such that aren't capable of SSL?
Using HTTPS, although they could block sites based only on the domain name, they couldn't easily look at or filter / tamper with the content of the communications themselves -- NebuAd insertion or whatever simply wouldn't be possible. Also one wouldn't reveal anything more than the domain name / IP address being contacted for HTTP, so even the rest of the accessed URL would be secure. Enabling HTTPS is a trivial change to almost any web site, and compatible with most any browser platform. Why don't we provide this as sysadmins and demand it as users. Why
am I not on https://slashdot.org/ now? In the old days the CPU performance cost for the crypto was somewhat of a factor for fairly high traffic sites, but now that CPUs/Network processors are much more capable, I very much doubt it would be a significant impediment for ANY site to offer. Is the privacy and security of your users not worth another 3% of your CPU load or whatever? Certificate cost? Ok, self sign (it's better than plain HTTP!), or use a public / free CA or whatever.
As others have said, it more customers demanded full open unmodified internet access from their ISP, it would be offered by more ISPs and ones that want to tamper with your data (NebuAd, DNS hijacking, content snooping / altering) or whatever either wo
Fuck that is one of the most idiotic things I've read today (I won't go 'ever'). Are you that much of an opportunist? You've never alluded to this in earlier posts.
It is so dumb that you sound like one of those people who watch and believe 'Today Tonight'
Kevin caused the financial crises, eh? The coalition never had plans for filtering? This is Australia ... nobody else gives a fuck ... and I like it that way.
C'mon, you're smarter than this.
.
And I thought that censoring what my 7 year watches would be MY responsibility as a parent. Turns out you can just get the government to do it for free. Who'da thunk it ?
Just turn OFF the damn TV, parent your OWN kids, and stop spoiling the fun for the rest of us who ARE old enough and mature enough to decide what we watch.
And one of the ISP's, Webshield, is only known because it's business model is based on already offering a "clean-feed" connection.
For this to come into force properly, the Government will need to pass legislation through Parliament. While they can get it through the lower house easily, the Senate will be much harder. In the Senate the Government will need the support of either the Coalition or all the cross-benchers (Greens, Family First and Xenophon) in order to gain the majority. I know the Coalition intends to vote no and I can't see Greens supporting it, so it will fail to pass.
when all of you geeks become parents, either you will spend 95% of your time manually filtering your child's on-line access, buy closed-source software from some "very dependable" company or be a very bad parent.
I can tell you first-hand (as a parent and someone from a "very dependable company") that Internet filtering is not all it's cracked up to be. The filters are simply not accurate enough to rely on for home use; there are sites out there which deliberately try and remain unfiltered. There are a LOT of ways to get around them, depending on the tech. I can tell you that none of the companies that I know of are perfect. The government's expensive testing even proved that. The only reason Internet filtering works in schools and businesses is group mentality. Students and employees start to think they're being watched and tend to avoid doing things that are inappropriate lest they be found out and others find out what they're doing.
Porn is not a problem. If you're letting a young child out onto the Internet unsupervised you're a fucking moron. You are the problem in that case. Plain and simple. Are you so fucking stupid you let them swim in a pool without watching them too? I bet it'll be the government's fault for not when they drown! Do you take them to large events (sporting ones perhaps) and let them run around where you can't see them? Oh, Uncle Sam should have protected them there too because you were too fucking lazy to!
Being a parent is not the job of the gumbiment. Being a parent is your job, and I've got some news for you shit-stick; it's a full time job. I know this because I am a parent and it never ends. It may be hard work, but it's also great fun and a real rush, knowing you're molding and shaping them into responsible little versions of you.
*end rant*
I make no apologies for flying off the rails. It sickens me to the very core that some people actually think they shouldn't have to look after their own children.
I drink to make other people interesting!
like it or not, when all of you geeks become parents, either you will spend 95% of your time manually filtering your child's on-line access, buy closed-source software from some "very dependable" company or be a very bad parent.
Why does no one ever demand actual evidence of harm from people like you? You claim that all of these dire consequences will arise from allowing your children unfettered access to information, and that we, as a society, will have to accommodate your beliefs. We've heard it before, over and over, for a large part of a generation now.
If you actually had to cite concrete, peer-reviewed, reproducible studies demonstrating the societal benefits of draconian ISP-level censorship before your position was taken seriously, it'd be amusing. Because such a requirement would leave you gasping and sputtering and waving your hands, unable to point to any evidence that children are actually harmed by media content. Yet, for some reason, people with your opinion are exempt from such requirements.
So... let's see that evidence, shall we?
Dear Senator Conroy,
I am a member of the Western Australian Labor Party and a long time supporter of the ideals and values the Australian Labor Party and Trade Union movement promote in our country. I am writing to express my extreme concern on the mandatory Internet filtering you and your office are trialling over the next six weeks.
I understand that the decision is being considered as an option to assist parents, schools and public resources (such as libraries) to keep children away from unwanted Internet content. However, I do not believe that the planned solution will ever be appropriate for the Australian cultural climate. As a teacher, uncle and future parent I cannot stress enough the complete apathy and ignorance this policy encourages in parents of young and adolescent children in relation to the Internet. It should be the absolute responsibility of the authority figures of each household to understand, take action on and maintain any steps taken to remove perceived inappropriate content entering the household through a connection to the Internet. This policy is the antithesis of promoting an open caring relationship between parents and children in relation to online content.
Your policy discourages education and accountability because it takes the responsibility of filtering away from the parents of the household. It also discourages communication between the parent and child, not only stifling the need for dialogue but also, as shown through the lack of information given to the public by your office, the idea that information can be withheld by those "who know better" (in this case those who think they know better). Furthermore, the technical, financial and freedom of expression (as upheld through our constitution) issues are well documented and those in themselves should be more than enough to kill any further life in this poorly planned, poorly executed and poorly though-out plan.
Please understand that I do not advocate nor do I support the idea that the government cannot assist parents, schools and other public institutions from helping them with filtering their access to online content. However this policy which will continuously block any number of unnamed web sites is not aimed at targeting an individual's right to choose what they view, instead generalises values for the entire Australian population. I cannot think of anything more "un-Australian" than that.
As a Labor member and supporter of both a Labor government at both a state and federal level it is with great disappointment that if this policy is to be enacted I will do everything in my power to ensure that only members of parliament who oppose this policy will represent me in my electorate in the future. I understand that this may well end up in me needing to leave the Labor party but this issue is too important and your policy to narrow sited for me to ethically be able to support any Labor party member encouraging this policy.
I am looking forward to your response.
Yours sincerely,
All those filters are usually erected in an attempt to 'protect the children' but so far I haven't seen any kind of hard evidence showing the children are 'damaged' from looking at porn or similar.
Actually I've seen a study showing quite clearly that porn has no negative effect on children at all. Back in 1968 porn was legalized in Denmark and porn shops popped up everywhere, especially in a section of Copenhagen called Vesterbro. About 1/3 of all shops there were porn or porn-related shops in those days. This meant that almost no matter where children looked they saw porn (dildos, explicit magazines, books, movies) and there was a lot of prostitutes in the area as well. All this happened when the children was mostly unsupervised by adults (on the way to school etc.). Now the study compared the children that grew up in this area with similar children from similar backgrounds growing up elsewhere, and looked at deviations from 'normal' when it came to crime (especially sex offenses), sexual preferences and orientation, attitude towards sexual deviations and so on. The result was quite clear: The 'porn-exposed' children had a similar life to the 'normal' children but had a more tolerant attitude towards everything sex-related, and often had more friends from the 'deviant' groups like homosexuals, transsexuals or so on.
The conclusion was therefore clear: Porn does not hurt children emotionally or sexually and it even seems to create more tolerant adults that is less likely to be ignorant of sexual themes. This is a good thing in my book.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
He's not sending us into debt, we're already in debt! It's amazing how the coalition fed us the bullshit of historical consecutive surpluses and 'fiscal conservatism' but managed to DOUBLE the national debt to a trillion dollars in ten years.
This is after record taxation rates on the population (remember that the GST was meant to get rid of various taxes ... no wonder he promised never to move the GST to 11% ... Costello never needed to. How much after PAYG tax do you then end up paying on more taxes? Petrol? Milk? Bought a house in the last ten years? How much tax do you pay?) and a mining industry that brought in such huge amounts of cash from China and other developing nations but somehow the tax gained from that never found its way towards infrastructure or reducing the national debt.
They are all the masters of spin. Feed with one hand and rob with the other.
The filtering software was a first step that was deemed to be inadequate. They just got booted out before they could initiate secondary protocol.
Apologies for getting an Insightful mod on my previous post. It never should have.
.
i'm not buying that without some kind of credible link. to my knowledge Costello paid off 100 billion in debt after the last labour government,and it took 10 years to do it. as for petrol, you were paying excise which is levied by STATE governments, which were all labour most of howards term. The same goes for stamp duty on houses - state government levied (and yes i have purchased a house). you never paid GST on milk, it was exempt as an essential food item just like fresh fruit,veg and preventative items like condoms http://www.ato.gov.au/businesses/content.asp?doc=/content/13287.htm
as for PAYG, or income tax, we are all paying less tax than ever before thanks to the previous government. Costello lowered the top tax bracket from 68% at 50,000 to 48% at 127,000. the lower brackets had even larger cuts.
yes things like hospitals were left up to private enterprise to expand, i used to work in the medical industry and i can say both private AND government run hospitals are a shit fight. i don't really think more money from the government is going to fix it, it's going to take a reversal of peoples attitudes.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
And one of the ISP's, Webshield, is only known because it's business model is based on already offering a "clean-feed" connection.
Which is a fine business model---it's selling something that people want. And by participating in this trial, they might demonstrate that they've got a product that works. (Maybe. For some value of "works.") Or get some free publicity.
What's not OK is imposing a filter on people who don't want it.
What gives is that modern Australians aren't the same hardass cons that built the country. Life's so good and easy and comfortable here that people have nothing to really worry about, so they make shit up and worry about that.
Half the equation is that Australia's population is aging badly, and most old people think that everything is too fast, too loud, too dangerous and too untidy. This is a problem when a sizable portion of the voting public makes up this group.
The other half of the equation is, as I said first up, that life's too good here. We don't worry about getting shot at or knifed. The worst we generally have to contend with is bushfires (just had a doozy but it's been a few years since the last big one before that) and poisonous native animals. Out of work? No problems, Centerlink will pay for your cask wine and internets.
When people spend too long without serious threats to life and limb, their brain adjusts to see trivial things as big and important. Humans do that, our brains are great at adapting to their circumstances... but in this case, people rate their top 3-4 concerns as "life threatening" even when they are things like "my neighbour plays music after 7pm" and "my kid might see a digital nipple if he plays this M-rated game".
Another exacerbating effect of the general pantywaistness of the proletariat is that our political system is, for want of a better word, pan-partisan. Campaigns are based either on smearing the opposition (the last couple of federal elections have done this) or making a stand on the traditional party differences (unions and workers rights vs. tax breaks for businesses, for instance). Any remotely controversial issue is swept under the carpet and then laws about it are ninja-passed at 3am. As an Australian citizen I feel about as far removed from the running of this country as I am from the running of Uzbekistan.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Filters seem to be either fall on false positives or ineffective. Working for Ed Queensland, and sites that are definitely safe are blocked. I've been to sites that (IT research) that had inappropriate (for children) ads.
The balance required is too fine to be practical for anything other than the one in your head.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Who said ANYTHING about mollycoddling children? I certainly didn't. I merely pointed out that expecting the Government's Internet filter to protect them from the evil 1nt4rw3bs is madness. In my own very pissed off way I pointed out other things that you wouldn't expect the government to protect your kids from.
I drink to make other people interesting!
I'm hoping that all these attempts will fail in the test phase. Because the last thing I want is to be denied information because someone else is not capable of protecting themselves due to their stupidity.
They spoke out against it, do you really think the government are going to pick them. This "trial" is all about finding people to support Conroy's "findings".
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
So you're just saying:
Harden the fuck up Australia!
These so-called Christian and Parent groups who advocate such nanny state intervention are only doing so because they are too lazy.
You want to protect the children? You supervise them. You don't give them a computer with internet access that they can use privately in their bedroom in the dead of night: You put the computer in some family location where a responsible adult is available.
Or... Lock the router in a cabinet with a simple timer switch on the power brick.
The phrase which sums up our modern era : "Can't someone else do it?"
Bah!
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
I would think they would be against the filter, since if it becomes widespread, there is no need for their business model anymore. They will go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers.
Dude, you live on an island with the most poisonous animals on earth. Ridiculously poisonous spiders that snuggle up in the toes of slippers and are native to your capital city.
I live right outside of Washington, D.C., and if I couldn't walk around at night in my apartment for fear of poisonous, deadly varmints holing up in my Nikes the last thing I would be is complacent.
Re: governance, I would like to point you towards a recent statement by our new president in which he said something along the lines of, "Debate's nice and all, but you've had your fun and now it's time to pass the legislation I want you to pass." Translation: "Democracy, shemocracy, blah blah blah!"
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
I can't say anything at all about Webshield, but most commercial filtering software also blocks things like game sites and employment resources(job search sites, as well as sites with information about how much people in specific jobs get paid) .
They wouldn't have to pay for an anti-porn blacklist, so that saves them a little money and they probably offer services(or at least could) above and beyond just porn and IP filtering.
Our prime minister is a communist.
I wish.
That would at least be interesting. Instead we have a narrow-minded, suburban, mealy-mouthed motherfucker who is content to run around screaming ohmygodohmygodwhataboutchechildren rather than actually do anything valuable or useful with his office.
All his blathering about "rolling up our sleeves" has no meaning other than that he doesn't want his cuff-links to bruise his butt.
Although I heartily despise the asswipe he replaced, Kevin Rudd is a serious disappointment.
ANSWER HER QUESTION. And TELL THE TRUTH. Damn, how hard is that? Coward.
I'm a software engineer. I write software, both closed source and open. I write it at work and I write it at home on my own time. I think that qualifies me as a geek. I'm also raising a 10 year old girl. Last week she wanted to know what a phallus is. Her mother and I were sitting on the couch together. "It's a man's penis," we said, after a second. "Oh," she says. That was all. Yes, she knows what a penis is. She's 10. She doesn't care.
This is the great truth that adults somehow forget. Pre-pubescent children do not have the hormones that make sex and sexual things of such raging importance to adults. Before the testosterone kicks in (yes, girls have it too), they literally do not care. Except for abstract curiosity, which is very quickly sated, sexual material is boring to children. They self-censor to an amazing degree. I've watched it.
Yes, we watch her web surf on her laptop. We don't lean over her shoulder or anything, but she uses her computer in the living room, like we do, and we generally know what she's looking at. If she clicks on a video on Youtube that turns out to be full of obscenities, she immediately clicks the back button. If she follows a link that ends up at a porn advertising site (something that happens only extremely rarely), again, she pounds the back button. Most of the time she's very careful to stick to sites that won't ever have porn links on them in the first place. She knows what naked people look like, and she doesn't want to see them. She just wants her web games and her music videos and her funny videos and her lolcats.
Anybody who pays attention to an actual child should know all these things. Lunatics who propound global censorship so they don't have to answer a question that is only awkward to them not the child are busy foisting their own prejudices and parochialism onto that child. "Think of the children" is rightly ridiculed on this site for the worthless cantrip that it is. Another poster in this thread said it best: censorship is radioactive. It contaminates everything it touches.
No, I won't spend 95% of my time manually censoring her internet. No, I won't spend a dime on a commercial closed source product that will censor her internet. Yes, a 7 year old (or a 10 year old) CAN filter their own content. They do it successfully and well, and being a parent that can stand aside and LET them makes me a GOOD parent, not a bad one. The content exists because the world exists. Parenting a child means teaching them ways to live in the world and deal with it successfully. The example we set as parents influences how they will treat it. We don't get excited about it when she encounters a naked person. We don't rant and rave and censor. We answer her questions honestly, and don't make a big deal out of it. It's not a big deal to her and she moves on with her life with nary a bobble.
All of this to an anonymous coward. Hopefully somebody who isn't a coward will read it...