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Telstra Fears LulzSec Attacks, Hesitates On Internet Filter
After the earlier report that some of Australia's largest telcos (and ISPs) were to start censoring internet traffic based on a blacklist, rdnetto writes with the news that "Telstra is now hesitating to deploy the internet filter it had previously promised to implement, fearing reprisals from online vigilantes." The linked article specifically names LulzSec as the source of such reprisals.
Never trust News Corp. Here's some real journalism: http://delimiter.com.au/2011/06/25/telstra-proposes-to-filter-interpol-blacklist/
Not that the real answer is any better than what the Australian said, but the truth is what matters.
Disagree != mod troll.
Step 1: Create a scary and unspecific enemy
Step 2: Give it some publicity
Step 3: Demand funding and protection based on speculation ('Maybe someone might attack us! Think of the children!')
Step 4: Profit! And power, too.
Looks like it still works.
You have already done more to protect the rights of common people than most governments in the world have in years.
This really makes you wonder how a shadowy group of people on the internet have more influence than elected officials and regulatory boards. Of course, I guess that's because they have completely different goals... we are possibly seeing the dawn of a new world here.
Great Intellect...
... a chilling effect on censorship
I know there are going to be lot of nay sayers calling this anarchy but they think we don't know are we forgot that defying the "law" was the only way so many countries got their freedom from the Brits (Didn't Aussies have a freedom fight?)
A note on Telstra's new filter. - and I suspect this has been done on purpose to make people think that the actual filter that labour is planning isnt all that bad in some kind of last ditch smooch attempt on Conroy - possibly due to Telstra and co getting left out of the NBN. If you look at what labour has proposed, it goes far beyond just the worst of the worst child abuse material and hence the public backlash. So I can't see any groups like Lulzsec getting all uperty about this filter since it is only blocking the very nasty stuff. Anyway nobody likes kiddy porn except the broken. So I can only imagine this is part of a FUD campaign by Telstra and Conroy to ease Ausies into his planned censorship regime and seed the idea that the whole filtering concept is infact just about blocking child abuse material - which is just not true.
Those who can, do. Those who cannot, sue.
Our local resource center for our less affluent residents provides free internet access. It is supposed to have a filter for porn, only porn. Someone asked me to help them find information on medical marijuana and it was blocked by the filter. It wasn't porn but it was blocked. I asked the manager what else is being blocked? They didn't know. They didn't know how to change it either. I just hope no one dies because of that filter. Filter's always filter out more than they are supposed to, including legitimate political dissent. How free is your country if the government can control what you see, hear and read?
And censorship never ends well either.
Too much "protection" and you have a totalitarian regime.
If you want to take out crime - do it at the source or check the cause for the crime first. Strangling the internet is like shooting the messenger.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Never understood this particular point of view. Government is there to function as your guardian and benefactor, with your elected representatives at helm. Corporation functions as a closed entity with no other goal then profit, even if that profit comes at expense of everything else (see: Bhopal).
Granted many modern governments in large countries became almost corporate in nature, almost as closet, corrupt and nepotistic as their megacorp counterparts. But at least they're still responsible for their actions to you, the voter, and you have, however small, power to change its course. It can be argued that government in Western countries does represent its average constituent - in all his/her greed, selfishness and ignorance and stupidity.
Not so with corporations, who in addition to all above vices tend to also be destructively greedy.
Lulzsec are on the side of Lulz. Their first objective is entertainment. But, if they can advance the cause of freedom in the process, they'll adopt that as a secondary objective.
Actually, I'd say you have more control over most corporations than people do over most governments.
At least with corporations you can vote against them if you don't like what they are doing (not give them cash).
Try that with a government and if you're "lucky" and live in the "free" countries they'll lock you up, unlucky and they'll shoot you.
I would argue that any decision made based in immediate fear is not really the right decision; even if the decision has a positive outcome, it was made it for the wrong reasons and is therefore not representative of any particular notion of "right." No lesson was learned, and any future decisions are unaffected. This is only effective if fear can be maintained indefinitely, which is nearly impossible. It's indistinguishable, in the long run, to a step backward.
Totally correct, one of the few English speaking, western democracies institutes one of the most restrictive, broad and opaque internet filtering schemes in the world. Who cares about a measly 22 Million people? After all, countries under 50 Mil. Pop. shouldn't even be recognized. Now give us more stories on bitcoins, dammit!
Sure, but that doesn't look like an overly hyperbolic statement. In a sense, it's the very definition of totalitarianism.
Not nearly all corporation rely on general populace for funding. In fact, many rely on government itself, while remaining almost totally independent of it (i.e. military-industrial complex).
How do you vote against corporations "with cash" if you don't mind me asking? Many if not most of them don't accept any cash from general populace - their business is with smaller corporations or governments, such as major oil companies, construction companies, chemical companies, energy companies, defense companies and so on.
Conformity is the objective in most places.. Critical thinking is an anathema.. The fact is that government is a creation of those with the most capital, so naturally they will set the agenda to suit their needs
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
You know what's really sad? When you talk about how much of government in USA and much of West functioned in 60s and 70s, you get called "young" by modern young adults like you with no grasp on history whatsoever.
Strongly opinionated, certain of one's own correctness and completely clueless. To quote Churchill, "the best argument against democracy is a 15-minute talk with an average voter".
When they hit Sony, over and over and over again... I thought, "Good, serves em right. Sony should stop being assholes."
When they knocked over public facing websites at cia.gov and senate.gov I thought, "Well, those sites should've been secured, and it's not like they got at anything important. Whatevs."
When they started taking phone call requests and DDoS'ing random game companies I thought, "Well that's stupid, but at least it's just ddos... it's only temporary and nothing should be broken."
When they started posting regular peoples credentials online in the clear, so that every talentless tween in the world could just look it over and start fucking with peoples stuff, I thought, "Ok, this is bullshit. That's not vigilantism, lulzy, impressive or temporary. Us regular working poor have enough real-world problems, we don't need to be thinking about the fallout from that, too."
So now I hear about these maybe-beneficial things, and it's hard to feel any better about it all.
And I have to imagine others feel the same way.
Shouldn't be too difficult to rearrange the worlds wealth equally, distribute the workload evenly to the populace, remove humans innate competitiveness, get rid of all people that are insane / have no self control, control the crazy teenagers and rewrite the rules of most societies. Lets get to work on that....
The people in the advanced countries now face a choice: we can express justified horror, or we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes. If we refuse to do the latter, we will be contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead. - Noam Chomsky
The issues you raise are solvable, and each one has been addressed at some point in some culture (except competitiveness but that would be foolish to remove), we just need to be willing to look at the cause.