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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
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.
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.
Sure, but that doesn't look like an overly hyperbolic statement. In a sense, it's the very definition of totalitarianism.
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
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.