Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Nope. The Australians are afraid of breasts (Ref: Conservatives MPs... want topless... bathing banned on NSW beaches). The world is has gone mad.
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.
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!
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