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Google, Yahoo and Others Fight the Aussie Filter
TheFrunj writes "In the wake of an attack on Australian Government websites comes a statement from a joint group of companies banding together to oppose Senator Conroy's infamous Internet Filter. AtomicMPC has posted the statement up on their site: 'We, the Australian Library and Information Association, Google, Inspire Foundation and Yahoo! agree that Australia needs to take effective action to ensure that internet users, and particularly children, have a safe experience online.' Backed by the weight of the Inspire Foundation, Google and Yahoo, this is a good sign for the local and international community that will hopefully spark some positive reaction."
So Australia can't filter but China can?
How about people actually started parenting their children? I'm sure as hell not going to let the kids go online alone until they are old enough to do so responsibly. Just like I don't let them watch TV programs and movies out of their age group. Or how I actually spend time with them and talk to them about stuff. (Even a three-year-old can have a proper conversation if you actually listen and support with asking questions.)
So when will people get off their collective asses and stop trying to find ways to escape responsibility and offload it to whatever solution happens to be popular at the time?
I man can dream, can't he?
(And no, I can't control what they do at their friends etc. etc. But there are risks with crossing the street too.)
.: Max Romantschuk
The problem is that we all have a different definition of "safe."
When I was growing up, my parents had a definition that included things like: good nutrition, outdoor exercise, avoiding physical violence, good hygene, "look both ways before crossing the street," etc.
Today's parents seem to be almost monomaniacally focused on sex and terror.
I don't know what that means long-term, but I don't think the Australian government, Yahoo, or Google should be helping us find out..
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
And even though you can't control or watch the kids at friends or the teenagers out on the town, the best way to have responsible kids is to respect them, not to be too harsh, take interest in them and talking to them about everything.
They will grow up respecting you and they will want to tell you things and they will (statistically, though I'm not gonna pull out any link, so trust me or not) avoid doing stuff that they wouldn't want to tell you.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
You have to understand the politics. If they started their letter with "We think your idea is stupid and won't work and we won't support it" they would look like trouble causers and they would be dismissed from the discussion immediately. If they start the letter with "We understand why you are concerned, it's good to care about kids, we care about them too, let's work together to figure out the best way to do this correctly without trying to block the internet at the national level" they are going to get a lot more support and understanding. You can tell the letter was written by PR type folks, who spent a lot of time on it. It's a good sign, because it means Yahoo and Google are actually concerned at the corporate level, and are thinking seriously about the best way to address this filtering problem, and they're preparing for a long involved process.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
See, but now you're saying that because of the 2 you don't have ANY time. Is that true? The OP did NOT say anything about how much time would need devoted, simply mentioned that some time. Yes you have two children with additional needs but it sounds almost like you are trying to make an excuse for why the other two might not have proper parenting. Would such work if say one of those children injured themselves in the home and if questioned you said "I'm sorry but I was taking care of the other two children, I did not have time to make sure that one was safe." Parenting is one thing, being on the child's back constantly is a wholly different thing. For the more harsh argument, if you have issues managing the two children with disabilities then why do you have 4 children? (i'm not sure on the order of birth/twins/triplets/quadruplets in the situation)
I do what I must because of what I must do.
Umm, those are your babies. It's your job to raise them and yours alone. You are not a victim here so start parenting and stop sounding like one.
Let me throw a piece of reality back at you -
You either chose to have four children or you're an idiot. I'm going to assume that you're not an idiot for the sake of this discussion and assume that it was your choice.
If you chose to bring four lives into this world without the ability to deal with it, that is, to be blunt, your own fucking problem. You are the irresponsible one, and I don't see why any of the rest of us need to be forced by our government to live with censorship laws to "protect the children" just because you're an irresponsible nitwit who wanted to have four kids. Frankly you should probably be apologizing to the rest of the world for having four kids when you by your own admission seem to only have the ability to properly raise two.
I've got one of my own and I know kids can be a handful. That's why we have one. Uno. One kid. One kid that we can focus on and make damn sure we can handle it. We did not rush out to have four kids. We might have a second one once we know whether we can handle one or not. But to think that you might arrogantly go out and have four kids without bothering to figure out if you're going to be able to handle it just stuns me. Unless you're an idiot. In which case I apologize for the rant.
Here in Canada, we have a very simple system of keeping children safe in the real world. We make their parents legally responsible for watching their children.
Why can't we (Canada, Australia and everywhere else) make the parents legally responsible for watching their children online? This way the government wouldn't need to do internet censorship.
Parent poster's point still stands:
raise your fucking kids. If you don't wanna raise 'em and be responsible for 'em then don't fucking have 'em.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
I would go one step farther and say that if the poster is not an idiot, then they have committed premeditated child abuse.
First off, yay to the /b/tards - I had been watching this a few days before it started and am proud of them.
Second, this is from a long time ago and a view I whole-heartedly agree with.
Written by the Rotten.com Staff,
The definition of obscenity, according to the Supreme Court and known informally as the Miller test, is:
* must appeal to the prurient interest of the average person
* must describe sexual conduct in a way that is "patently offensive" to community standards, and
* when taken as a whole, it "must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value"
Certain people (including parents and schoolteachers) have complained to us and stated that rotten.com should not be "allowed" on the net, since children can view images on our site.
One US schoolteacher wrote us a very angry email that complained some of her students had bookmarked images on this site, that our site shouldn't be on the net, and other claptrap.
This is our respone. The net is not a babysitter! Children should not be roaming the Internet unsupervised any more than they should be roaming the streets of New York City unsupervised.
We cannot dumb the Internet down to the level of playground. Rotten dot com serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is impractical, unethical, and wrong. To censor this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts, evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries and other sources of information vital to functioning of free society.
Nearly all of the images we have online are not even prurient, and would thus not fall under any definition of obscenity. Any images which we have of a sexual nature are in a context which render them far from obscene, in any United States jurisdiction. Some of the images may be offensive, but that has never been a crime. Life is sometimes offensive. You have to expect that.
The images we find most obscene are those from book burnings.
Please remember that no child has access to the Internet without the active consent of an adult. And absolutely no child should be left on the Internet alone. Supervision of children remains the responsibility of parents and teachers, as it always has and always will.
The rotten staff, April 1997
Ah, the new Slashdot debating style.
The other poster said he had less time to spend with two of his children, focusing more time on the two with learning difficulties.
You heard that he spent no time on two of his children, and then used your failure to understand what was said to construct a fantasy world in which filibuste was responsible for serious injuries.
I love this style of debate. It's used by politicians, bad businesses and lawyers. It's only good for bolstering weak points and for polarising opinion - that is, it's everything we hate in politics. And now we see it in Slashdot, where it puts another nail into the coffin of the 'community.'
On top of all that, the accepted meme at Slashdot is that parents should watch their kids more frequently, and that people just don't take responsibility. Bad laws are attempted because of parental failure. When that's challenged, posters like filibuste are drowned in a deluge of invective from posters who just don't seem to like other points of view.
Lastly, most of the responses to filibuste's post have the assumption that the first two children had obvious learning difficulties. Even if it was the first two, I'm pretty sure such issues are impossible to spot for a while, and maybe, just maybe, they had some more kids because they love children and even if they did realise, thought they were fine to work through this. As indeed they seem to be based on the very short post - the kids who need more attention get it.
Shatteredstar, your post is not insightful. The mods got this very wrong. Moreover, you have no shred of understanding or compassion. You should think more before you post.
A number of factors are likely to keep Stephen Conroy in after the election this year.
In Australian election ballots for the senate we select one box above the line or number all the boxes below the line. To elaborate: below the line we number all of the possible candidates in order of preference (and we have to number all of them in order for that vote to be valid. Above the line we choose one political party who will be choosing the below the line preferences for those voters. Such preferences are selected based on the principles of the political party, on a reciprocal basis or for attempted political gain. This was how we ended up with Steve Fielding.
Due to the extreme number of senate candidates in Australian state and federal elections (last time I voted in the South Australian state election I think there was 46) most people elect to have their favoured political party choose their preferences for them. Based on the traditionalist attitudes of voters that revolve around biases, prejudices and/or traditionalism (my family has always voted for party X) the parties with the most senators tend to be Labor and Liberal, Conroy being a Labor senator who was elected even during the years that the Liberal/National Coalition had a majority in both houses of government.
As I now live in Victoria I'll certainly be voting in favour of candidates that are not him in the election some time this year. However I don't trust the preferences of other parties, nor do I want to re-elect members of the party of fear and xenophobia, so I'll be voting below the line.
But you can count on the majority voting above the line.
I think once a government, ostensibly from a liberal democracy or otherwise, decides that it is going to take an active role in censoring a medium, it's rather irrelevant whether they show people the black list or not. Whether your chains are visible or invisible, they are chains nonetheless, and by all appearances, the Australian people seem little concerned. What's the point of a list of blocked sites, when the populace doesn't seem to care that government has formulated a list of sites that the populace shall not see?
To some extent I do blame the media, which, intentionally or unintentionally, has primed a lot of citizens of supposedly free and liberal democracies with the underlying notion that the Internet is an inherently dangerous place, where molesters and terrorists lurk on every page waiting to pervert the young and where gangsters hide illicit transactions within innocent-seeming communications. To be sure, these do happen, but all these "news magazine" programs (largely hysteria-driven frothing-at-the-mouth sessions designed to produce ratings by invoking paranoid schizophrenic-like reactions in the viewers) are not interested in actually reporting the rates of Internet crime versus, say, mail crime or hell, Main Street crime. To listen to the 20/20-style programs the world over, you'd think pedophilia, terrorism and sophisticated crime in general didn't exist until the age of modern communication.
It isn't just the Internet, either. These irresponsible pseudo-journalists literally have most of the Western world terrified that every time they're children leave the front door there are a near-infinite supply of perverts and maniacs waiting to rape, murder or twist children. Every time some child is abducted anywhere in a 3,000 mile radius (and sometimes, if the circumstances are sufficiently lurid, much further afield than that) the 6 o'clock news is dominated by it, as breathless on-the-scene reporters recount every vile detail, followed by child safety experts explaining how children must be programmed to believe that every adult is out to touch their woo-woos or slit their throats, and probably both. The fact that most molestations are committed by people known to the child rarely, if ever gets mention, because, of course, telling parents that it's more likely Daddy or Uncle Billy are perpetrating a sexual crime against the kiddies won't sell a lot of advertising.
The Internet gets picked on because it's relatively new, still very poorly understood and much easier to whip parents and voters into frenzies. You can sell five minutes on the 6 o'clock news pretty easily and cheaply by throwing up a child-abuse expert whose qualifications in Internet crimes probably amounts to checking their email five times a day, along with some faded-out images of child porn sites, along with Sheriff Brown/Jones/Rogers/whatever, who is quite happy to get his mug on the news telling us how the Internet kills. Of course, it's just as cheap to do one of the "news magazine" programs where they lure a few pathetic sex freaks to a house to meet teenangel5 or whatever, only to find out its some failed would-be anchorman and some cops ready to lead him off to jail.
They say we get the government we deserve, and well, Australia, you must be a right stupid sheepish bunch to have deserved Rudd and his band of Super-christian liberty-hating political hooligans. Don't bitch now, just wait twenty years until the government has to clear newspaper articles. You'll wish you were living in Beijing by that point.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The government is not running on the assumption that a filter will save all the children, although it certainly is in their PR arsenal. What the government is doing, in their own eyes, is simply closing a loophole in the law. Australia has tough censorship laws *already*, the internet is just not filtered at this point. The government is simply seeking to apply its existing legal framework to the internet.
But this raises the far more important issue: Australia has a draconian censorship framework which needs to be brought into the modern age. The mere fact that the government applying their ratings rules is immediately seen as great wall of China style censorship is indicative of how out of touch the local censorship laws are with contemporary society. This sums up the far bigger problem that critics face: Conroy see this whole issue as applying the law in its intent, the way it is meant to be applied (closing a loophole), in order to get the government to view it any other way would require the government to be convinced it censorship framework needs to be loosened up, R18+ for games would be a nice start!!