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Australian Web Filter To Censor Downloaded Games
Xiroth writes "The Australian Federal Communications Ministry has confirmed that they intend to use the planned filter to block the download of games that have been refused by Australia's classification authority, the OFLC. As an Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman noted, 'This is confirmation that the scope of the mandatory censorship scheme will keep on creeping.'"
Who decides what games even get looked at for classification? What if they just haven't gotten to the game you want yet? Is there a backlog of games to classify? So many 'gotchas', so little logic/common sense/ways to appeal. My heart goes out to you Australian gamers.
My understanding is a LOT of games don't get classifications out there.
Filtering them out so you can't get them at all is horrible as the content isn't necessarily bad (and if it is they shouldn't be the ones judging if someone of age should be able to play them).
What's that? It's just a file so it could be *gasp* encrypted and bypass said filter?
OFLC: Yeah, good luck with that.
I will say this slowly for you politicians. The Internet sees censorship as damage, it will route around you.
I guess that means no more updates for BZflag and Tux Racer.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
It's genuinely disappointing to see happening in other free countries because I guarantee one of the first arguments that will be made for implementing a similar scheme in Canada will start with "This system is already in place in many other countries such as Australia, etc.", then again I suppose it's equally disappointing that our country is so easily influenced by some of the precedents set by US et al.
Will they be blocking violent movies too? What about violent books and song lyrics?
I don't doubt this will have an effect. Instead of 15-20 year olds playing violent games occasionally, they will now find them incredibly cool, and go to great lengths to play them. They won't have much trouble unless Australia figures out how to block torrents and eBay too. Even that wouldn't stop anyone.
Someone could try and open a sneakernet to hand out downloaded games on flashies... if only it wasn't on an island.
The sad truth in all this is that once you say that it is all right to censor anything, you have already lost the war. Now each item that the Australian government (not the public, but those in control) finds objectionable will come under review and may be censored. This is the slippery slope we all scream about until we are hoarse.
Each step down this path will have the same excuse, "It's for the children".
I wonder how long it will be until the Australian government censors news articles for the "fear effect" such uncensored information might have on the children.
I will say it again, once you accept that censorship is acceptable, then it is only a matter of how much will be censored.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
I'm just a bit curious here, can someone in-the-know highlight the internet policy differences between Iran, China and Australia? I'd think a side-by-side comparison of policy features would be really neat.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is an attempt by the government to increase the numbers and improve the skills of hackers in Australia. "You want to play those cool games, you have to hack your way past our Internet filters." People here on Slashdot are so paranoid. This is an attempt by the Australian government to provide a training environment for those computer skills that are needed in the 21st Century.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Gnometris isn't rated, I'll never be able to update it...
Sheldon
This makes my soul cry a little bit. My thoughts and prayers go out to the Aus gamers out there. Also makes me glad that America is'nt doing this.
Nope. The Australians are afraid of breasts (Ref: Conservatives MPs... want topless... bathing banned on NSW beaches). The world is has gone mad.
This is just fucking ridiculous.
I'm glad I'm leaving Australia.
Supposedly this means WoW will be banned, too.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Someone needs to make a source mod where the objective is to go around violently killing alien monsters that censor the internet.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
could just use this to block Ads!! No more horribly pixelated girls dancing in repetitive motion with some message about President Obama wanting you to refinance your mortgage!!!
It's not so bad, think of all the virii and malware you won't have to contend with!
I'm a bit confused on how this would actually WORK. Blocking sites is one thing, just have a url blacklist. But say one game on steam is rated but another is not, how can it know which one youre downloading?
Can packet sniffing tell that much about whats going through the tubes? I thought it was mostly: "Thats P2P, thats http, thats some more http..." Even if it could, what kind of overhead are we talking about?
6.22 was kinda good. If you replaced the command.com file with something like 4dos.com
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
This is great news, if the scope creeps far enough the whole thing will fall to pieces.
Does this somehow extend to Steam games? Steam uses some different TCP/IP port to funnel its content, I believe, so the old trusty Aussie web filter censoring software might not be able to catch those. (haha)
Using a blacklist to enforce a whitelist? Somehow this seems logically flawed..
So does this mean all MMORPGs clients will be blocked so you can't download them? A little while back someone mentioned that games like WoW or any other MMO couldn't meet a specific rating because of online content updates/players/etc, so they wanted to ban all MMOs but decided that they didn't fit under the same rules because MMOs didn't exist when the law was made. So I guess this may just happen now?
Lunix is the crappiest OS since the days of Dos 6.2
Little Johnny: Mommy! Mommy! Can I feed the troll? Pleassssse???
Mom: No dear, he'd just keep on coming back for more. Come on, sweetheart, get into the car.
...blocking encrypted downloads. Lol. Even a ROT128 would circumvent that.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
So...... when are we starting the bonfires and begin throwing books?
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
This is why you don't want any filters in place. Once they're there they will get used to filter pretty much anything you can imagine. It may start with child porn, but it'll undergo successive stages of scope creep until it filters anything the government doesn't explicitly approve of.
Of course, without filters the police will have to actually to some police work and rescue child porn victims. We can't have that, can we?
Since I am silly and want to handle my own parenting duties, is there another internet I can start to utilize? I prefer to protect my children, as much as possible, from the evil and stupid of the world and thus don't want the average politician interacting with ANY of their upbringing. On the upside, I think we finally found a country (Australia) that would be happy to take Utah off our hands. Hell, maybe we can trade Utah, Idaho, and Nebraska for that giant fricking rock of theirs.
He said Lunix. L, get this, U (wow, I guess this word is not going to turn out Linux), N, I, X. Can you read? Or are you just a RABIDLY REACTING Linux fanboi piss-flap* who can't read?
We need to submit to them *every single* game on the internet whether it be OSS, Flash, MMOG, Steam / Impulse, Forum based (MySpace & Facebook games) or play by email. Everything. Let them choke on their own stupidity.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Repeating this mantra is not going to make the growing censorship of the internet go away. back in the days when the internet was solely the province of the technically minded, this may have been true. But in the days of a global, universal internet, this mantra is slowly but surely becoming hollow.
Governments of the world are not, NOT, going to put up with a medium in which anyone whatsoever can read or publish anything they wish, at any time, on a global scale, without any government control. More importantly, the public is not going to put up with it. This simply isn't the way human societies work. People want censorship.
If you doubt this, poll your friends and neighbors. Ask the plain question; "Do you think their should be government supervision of the internet?". The overwhelming majority of people will answer, "Yes". And they will not mean supervision over "extreme" material like child pornography and snuff sites. They will mean supervision over anorexia boards, neo-nazi sites, "obscene materials", fringe persons and political groups, atheists/creationists, and in general censorship of anyone that they do not like.
This increasing government interest in internet censorship is not coming out of nowhere. It's a natural progression of the general will of human society; to repress views they disagree with. If you can find enough people who dislike a thing, you can get it banned. That's what's happening to the internet, and that's why its getting so much support.
In the future, the current internet era (or more appropriately the one ten years ago), will be looked back on as we now look back on the late nineteenth century drug era, in which cocaine, cannabis and even heroin could be bought, sold and taken quite legally. People had rights to drugs in those days, but, slowly but surely, disapproval of those liberties lead to their restriction. The same thing is going to happen to the internet.
Eventually, you will need a license to publish material on the web, or at least to host a site, and all sites will be fully regulated by vast, probably international, government offices created for the purpose. This is coming and there is going to be no way to route around such a mortal wound to the free web.
May the Maths Be with you!
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OMG!
You just downloaded a game! You didn't pay the tic-tac-toe inventors royalties, or the governement taxes!
My comment will be censored one day if this really works. Australian Internet Censorship ftw.
In response, STEAM announced that users can opt-in to SSL for their protocols for an extra $1 per 10GB (to cover buying a few SSL accelerator cards). Australia briefly responded by blocking port 443 until the outcry of a million Aussies unable to get their email, buy porn or surf ebay.au with pitchforks made them "reconsider" the idea.
i don't like this one any more
Please Mr.Government Sir. Protect the Children! I am an incompetent parent that doesn't want to discipline or observe what my children are doing online. So please Mr.Government protect my children for me. It will be so much better.
Oh yeah and while yer at it, Protect me too. I might go hyena-ass crazy if I'm allowed to see an unRated GAME.
"Lunix is the crappiest OS since the days of Dos 6.2"
Honestly, what did you expect from a small Unix for the Commodore 64 microcomputer? Frankly, I think its features list is pretty damned impressive considering the hardware they're targeting.
Last I heard the Great Firewall of Australia was being dumped by the biggest ISP and they were backing away from it.
Everyone seems to have touched on the obvious issues here, but what about Free and Open Source games? The project I work on, a First Person Shooter, looked into the OFLC process only a few months ago, and there are strict rules in place; one of them being that you require a publisher. FOSS games not only have no publisher, but they're not even physically distributed in most cases. Not only can they not get classified, if they're deemed to exceed this arbitrary MA15+ rating they'll be outright blocked without any avenue of appeal because they don't fit "inside the neat little box" that still exist due to arcane laws (something that deeply concerns me as an Australian FOSS Developer).
From: Guidelines for the Classification of Films and Computer Games http://www.comlaw.gov.au/ComLaw/Legislation/LegislativeInstrumentCompilation1.nsf/framelodgmentattachments/6C888688A3BBD40ACA2574120004F72A
Films that get refused classification involve bestiality, paedophilia, direct instruction in drug use etc. I expect that most reasonable people have no issue with this. Anything less than this gets an X18+ or R18+ rating and is legally for sale subject to conditions excluding minors. This includes every pointlessly violent slasher flick. A game that contains graphic violence that is "not justified by context" gets an RC rating and is banned from sale. Why the difference?
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
So if what Conroy has announced here goes ahead, a whole pile of product pages at Amazon (among others) are going to have to go on the blacklist. (Leisure Suit Larry is among the games banned in Australia.
The problem is that many of the proposed filtering solutions work by routing traffic to IP addresses that host prohibited pages to a proxy server. As we saw with the Internet Watch/BT/Wikipedia debacle, this approach is likely to cause problems with high traffic sites (and may well overload the proxy server).
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
It feels like the people making these laws haven't looked around their own country lately. They refuse to have an 18+ classification for games but most cities are littered with legal hoar houses. I can remember when they made a big deal about GTA letting you pickup prostitutes..... wtf? These people are severely confused about what morals are. Governments should stick with providing roads, hospitals, etc and let us make our own decisions. God knows Australia has bigger problems then peoples heads exploding in video games.
"The world has gone mad."
When was it ever sane?
Not picking on you personally but this whole filter thing is a beat up and always has been. The filter is NOT mandatory except for government computers (eg schools, librarys, etc). It will never be mandatory for private computers because the little game our two major parties play with this topic is far too valuable a tool for manipulating independent senators and distracting competing special interest groups, neither side wants to stop playing it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Seriously - what are you going to do? block legitimate download sites/servers where we legitimately pay and download the game?
What about the likes of steam? going to block the whole service? yeh right... I'd love to be in Canberra when the winy little tards come out of their house and go after the people that permbanned them from all their favourite games.
You know... the very first thing that I'm going to do when I go to buy a game and it says "denied" is hit usenet or torrent (In fact, I've usually hit one of these first to try the game, and I'm going to buy it because I like it - the way we did things back in the doom/wolf3d days)
It is DNS filtering.
Time to point my NICs to OpenDNS or similar.
I thought this stupid fucking thing was being swept under the carpet. Conroy should collect his internet villain award once pages start being blocked on computers across the nation.
Maybe the debate shouldn't be about censorship but rather having a controlled internet, censorship seems to be the cover for using Australia as a testbed for finally getting rid of free speech on the web.
So what happens if a game gets released on Steam which is "refused classification"? What are they going to do... block every Steam content server? The big name ISPs in Australia all have their own content servers, usually unmetered.
Defective by design indeed.
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve.
I don't blame the apparatchiks in government down under, I blame the citizens who voted them into power and who are standing idly by while their rights are being trampled.
There has never been and never will be a shortage of would be tyrants in this world who desire the power to control the private lives of other people.
Holding the line against them is a constant struggle and a battle that each person who cherishes their liberty must fight personally.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I think he meant this
If you read through enough literature on the subject of breast feeding, you will eventually find references to the feelings which the mother experiences while nursing. Some find themselves aroused by the experience, and there are stories of some achieving orgasm.
Now what are we to do? Ban breast feeding because of the risk that the mother might get aroused?
And what about the child. What pleasure does the child experience while breast feeding. Where is the research on that? Surely we don't want the little blighter enjoying it... with his mother! It couldn't get more perverted, surely.
All this enjoyment in the world cannot be good for us. No! We need more Nazis to put us straight, and Stephen Conroy is the man for the job.
You can't say you haven't been informed. You know how to vote at the next election.
Massacres, slaughtering death and destruction... All things that are easy to find in movies, games etc. and some of them are even rated for youger viewers aswell, but people making love or stuff that has something to do with reproduction and the likes... OH NO! Think of the children!
This is only for downloaded games but where will it end?