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Can Linux be banned in .au?
cpt kangarooski writes "Well, an enterrising reporter over at Salon has found that certain blue comments in some Linux source code may make it eligible to be censored in Australia. Take a look here " Mmm...fun with censorship. Congrats go to Jamais Cascio (known as cynical around here), Slashdot reader, and author of the Salon article.
> "reasonable effort" is undefined I believe
It is extremely well defined, "reasonable" being
a precise legal term, much like hackers regard
"word" as a precise CPU term. Three clauses of
the legilsation deal with "reasonable".
Essentially, reasonable effort is the blocking of
access to the site using the best available,
commercially viable technology within 6pm of
the next business day after the ABA notifies
you that an overseas site is to be blocked.
More worrying is that the same deadline is
attached to an ABA direction to prevent
access to "all similar material"!
You miss the point with the Linux source. It
will be rated M if it contains the word
"fuck". The guidelines of the Office of
Film and Literature Classificaton are clear
(and on the web at www.oflc.gov.au).
Linux distributors are currently breaching the
law: (1) they are selling M-rated software
on CD without a classification appearing on
the CD and (2) they are selling M-rated
material to people under 16.
When the Broadcast Service Act amendments
pass the House of Reps then major Linux
sites such as mirror.aarnet.edu.au will
also be M-rated. This isn't of much
concern, as the age-verification steps are
only required for R-rated material.
None of the above means that I agree with
the govt's stupidity (and I have been interviewed
on AU TV and radio saying as much). But it is
important to get the facts right, especially
in a forum like slashdot that seems to contain
more emotion than the considered logical
thought that programmers are notorious for.
People sprouting the wrong facts simply undermine
the case for those of us arguing with the
correct facts.
Cheers,
glen.turner@adelaide.edu.au
According to the article, the filtering software favored by the Ausie censors bans things with "names such as Pamela". Are they completely out of their head?!?
I guess they don't want to hear about the international space station project (one of the Astronauts is Lt. Col. Pamela Ann Melroy).
There goes Australian Women's Lib history, where Pamela Denoon was apparently a major player.
I wonder if it will also filter out info on the PAMELA Magnetic Spectrometer, scheduled for launch two years from now.
Do these censors have any idea how stupid they look when they suggest things like this.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Try this link for a list of words that did not pass the filter.
Scary shit, huh?
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
I'm sure my post will be moderated down for the use of such language..
Most of the people here are intelligent and have a meaningful job and are not spineless polititions trying to cover up their own lack of morals under the heat of religious nuts.
Sometimes colorful language is a form of expression and conveys meaning that would otherwise be difficult. From the engineers I have known, the words "fuck" and "shit" and anything else you can imagine usually describes something out of the ordinary. As George Carlin would say about several bad words, "they must be outrageous to be seperated from a group that large"
I might say that censorship is fucked. I'm expressing a strong viewpoint, not an act or depicting procreation in any evil or good form.
Ha ha! That basically prevents people in Australia from studying
As usual, the pols royally fuck up anything they do. (If I was then, I would ban any discussion of that law - just to make sure) mAx
--> Any fool can criticize - and many do --
There is nothing more effective in disabling the restraint I usually exercise in my use of language than fucking political morons trying to regulate what their tiny minds cannot comprehend, and thus fear.
it can be found here. they threw a dictionary through the filter... let me list a few of the more stunning ones...
adult
alcohol
amaretto
amateur
anarchy
anus
aryan
available
babe
banging
bangle
bare
bastard
beaver
beer
bikini
binaries
blonde
bloody
bomb
bottom
bra
bud
buxom
chat
cherry
chicks
cigar
circumcise
conception
condom
destined
doom
dynamite
enema
eros
escort
explosive
fantasies
fist
flesh
fondle
free
frigid
geisha
gin
girlie
girls
glamour
gothic
grenade
gun
hack
hacker
heroine [no more female heros?]
hole
homo
incest
intercourse
jenny [???]
kill
killer
kissing
klan
klux
knights [???]
knives
ku
latex
leather
lesbian
lingerie
liquor
lover
well, you get the picture... it's f***ing outrageous.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
Check out Richard Stallman's response to the USA's Communications Decency Act of 1996:
Censoring My Software
He found himself in the same situation. The gist is that the GNU Emacs package includes a copy of Weizenbaum's Eliza program, which has a feature to detect profane and obscene words and admonish the user to "watch your language, please". Of course, in order for this to work, the code has to contain a list of such words, which makes it obscene.
So, RMS distributed a special CDA-compliant version, whose Doctor program had that feature removed. Ironically, this means that if you swear at the new version, it will swear back at you, where the "obscene" version would not.
I suppose this would have applied to Linux source as well, but GNU Emacs is the example that he chose to focus on at the time, and it works for the Australian situation now, as well. In a way, it is an even better example than the Linux source, because in Eliza, the obscenities are actually integral parts of the program's function, and especially because of the irony of the fact that removing them actually makes it possible for the program to output obscenities.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
That's me fscked then :
http://www.incubation.demon.co.uk/
... should show why.
But anyway, what about gothic architecture?
Literature? I know some Ann Radcliffe (18th
century novelist) is a bit arse, but this is
plain daft.
Chris Wareham
Meanwhile, I am an amateur musician. The cables running around my keyboards and synths look like anarchy itself. I don't play that much anymore. We have a friend living with us who has a babe of 10 months who just loves banging on things. She crawls around in her bare feet and likes watching leave it to beaver.
I'm afraid I have a bit of a beer belly, so I don't wear the bikini style swimsuits I did in high school. I guess that's what happens when you sit around compiling source code into binaries instead of throwing a long bomb on the football field. Oh well, I haven't hit bottom yet, while my wife is no blonde bombshell, she's pretty good looking.
My bud and I were chatting the other day about how he should get one of those bra things for the front of his cherry red corvette. Then his twin girls came out to show us pictures of the the baby chicks they had hatched at school.
I'm kinda glad I don't live in Oz -- I'd never be able to put out the San Francisco Free List.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Oh great, now the cat is out of the bag. Soon they will discover that the entire source of Linux is actually a heavily encrypted MPEG featuring bill Clinton in compromising positions with various Little Rock secretaries.
-josh
I remember using a commercial software package (microMPX, I believe) that spawned a process called "pukeserver" and installed a directory appropriately named "sh*t", among other unsavory things. These were later modified to less colorful names, a process they even thought to document in the change notes.
There's been several comments about how Australia needs to change its laws concerning profanity. As I doubt that the hordes of Slashdot readers will fly down under, register, and vote in new laws to sanction profanity in source code, the only other option I see is to remove the off-color comments.
"Blasphemy!" and "That's censorship!" you may say. But what's more important to you? To get source code out into more hands, or your right to cuss? I like cussing too, but one day when your kids ask you what you did when you were young, do you want to tell them that you got source code out into the hands of programmers worldwide, or that you fought for your rights to put cusswords in source code?
Don't believe everything you read :)
:)
From what I've read over here in Aus the legislation isn't exactly well put together. An ISP only has to make a "reasonable effort" to block a site when requested. "reasonable effort" is undefined I believe.
Also, for a site to be blocked/taken down (depending if it's overseas or australian), the Australian Broadcasting Authority has to receive a few complaints about the content on a site. It will then ask the Classification Board to give the site a classification - same as used for films. If the site is given R (18+), then some form of adult verification must be installed.. again, undefined. If the site is rated X, or RC (banned), then the site is to be taken down if Australian, or blocked if overseas.
It's fairly obvious that this is unworkable, and I think it will die fairly quickly. All you'd need to do is send the output of an Altavista search on "free XXX" to the ABA and claim it offends you, and the ABA now has a few years of work ahead of them. I don't exactly think they'll appreciate it either..
The filter software mentioned in the article is what was presented to govt to show them that it was all possible.. No one actually has to use that software afaik.
Oh and I don't think the linux sources are in much danger. The ABA is pretty tolerant of swearing in film and tv in Australia - much more than in the US. It would take a fair bit of language alone to get given an R rating here
This Salon article has a bit more info..
Glyn.
total change of subject here people but, in reference to:
> This whole bill was smuggled though while there > was a tax debate.
A similar ploy was recently adopted by the European Union to enable people accused to pan-European fraud to be arrested and taken to any other member country. The law was created in a mainland country and totally undermines one the basic tenants of British (and virtually any other country who's judicial system is based on it) common law - Habius Corpus (badly spelling attack).
What this means is that somebody can be arrested in Britain or Ireland can face illegal imprisonment, be succeptible to "guilty until proved innocent".
How did they do it? They hid the documentation amongst a load of boring Budget proposal, and all the British MEPs who no doubt had a big fat lunch on expenses to go to, just signed it away.
Ah... And we pay for these fuckwits.
Mark.
If you don't think that 'fucked' can be a correct description of a situation, you haven't seen really fucked up code yet... :)
Besides, you are complaining that kernel hackers have small vocabulary -- so you want to restrict it further?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Think before you post.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Sure the whole thing is unworkable. I wouldn't be so cavalier about its effects, though. I don't know how reasonable the Australian legal system is, but in the US at least the threat of lawsuits does wonders for scaring people into over-compliance. Does an ISP really want to spend time and money (a lot of money) in court arguing that not blocking a site outright was a "reasonable" effort on its part? Probably not. When in doubt, do the safe thing.
This is similar to making a hard car speed limit of 20 mph. Sure, it's unenforceable and will not work, but now the police will have full justification to stop anyone whom they did not like (as in "he didn't look at us with proper respect"). Pissed at an Aussie ISP or just think that sex for pleasure should be banned? Call the police and complain that you searched for "Jenny" and found Jennycam. Why wasn't it blocked? Repeat at will and soon there would be great incentive for the ISPs to block everything but disney.com.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface like this. Good job guys...
* These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver
* to work on every motherboard design that uses this screwed chip seems
* bloody well impossible. However, we're still trying.
* within a buffer or sub-buffer should not upset us at all no matter
* how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
*/
* data transfers if we try to flush the fifo now.
* irixioctl.c: A fucking mess...
/* Fuck me gently with a chainsaw... */
* it (conveniently) fails to mention any of these in the
* translations property.
English is not my 1st language, but AFAIK these are common expressions of frustration
If a trainstation is the place where trains stop, what is a workstation?
How in the world did it occur to anyone to grep the source code for four-letter words?
:)
I mean -- I've been bored before, but I would usually read a book or something.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
...that the .au format should be banned. :)
.au format that caused me grief as much as it's the old Java sound API. It only recognized 8-bit mu-Law encoded .au files. Wait, it gets better. The only sample rate it understood was something like 8Khz. Not 11Khz, not 22.5Khz, -- 8! Took me FOREVER to find that out, but I digress.....)
(Ok, ok, it's not the
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
So if my name happens to be Pamela, I'm going to find my content banned in Australia? If I mention that my office environment is "total anarchy", the message will be silently dropped? This is why I find net censorship abhorant. This is as braindead as when an early version of the CDA tried to ban the word breast.
If the name Pamela is in the filter, I vote we also put in the names of a few Australian government officials that I find offensive.
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
huh?
/*rude*/ code!
aarnet [the australian academic research network] is a high-speed network linking the universities in australia together. since about two years ago they switched to buying their bandwidth from Cable & Wiress Optus [2nd biggest telco in australia].
C&W Optus have their own very fat pipes out of australia. Since getting into the wholesale bandwidth game you'll find C&W Optus actually have a pretty substantial market share [they're Ozemail's upline provider for one].
So hey, relax. And stop looking at all that
--
Rare Window - free your photos
The two players in the game are John Howard (our illustrious Prime Minister) and Senator Brian Harradine, a Victorian-era spinster type on a morals crusade. It wouldn't matter much, except Sen Harridine held the balance of power in our federal senate (ie, if the government wanted to pass any legislation, they needed his vote). Little Johnny Howard, snake in the grass that he is, needed to pass the GST (another kettle of fish, basically a very reactionary tax) so in order to get Harradine's vote, he put together the wonderful Broadcasting Services (Online Services) Bill, knowing that sort of crap appealed to him. Unfortunately for little Johnny, even though the Online Services passed, Harridine still announced he would NOT vote for the GST. Fortunately, Harridine has since lost the balance of power, but we are still stuck with the bloody censorship bill....
_______________________ I am the eggman, wooo! _______________________
Fuck has to be an engineering term. I work in a room full of us engineers and I hear that term an awful lot. I believe its not quite as popular as "Piece of shit computer" which really is aimed at one of the more popular :-( operating systems