Slashdot Mirror
Australian Net Censorship
An anonymous coward writes "The Australian House of Representatives has passed the censorship legislation which was passed by the Senate a few weeks back.
According to the EFA, from 1/1/2000 Australia will have more restrictive internet censorship than Singapore and Malaysia.
This legislation was introduced to win the vote of an independent senator for the GST vote.
The local news media has made no mention of this legislation. Apparently censorship isn't newsworthy. " If the Australian
media isn't saying anything, I think that's about as scary as the legislation itself. Wired ran a story about this the other day
that seemed to imply choosing Jan. 1, 2000 was not a coincidence. Conspiracy theories, anyone?
This legislation actually refers to more legislation which is to be enacted at a state level and is to contain provisions for criminal charges..
It won't be illegal to download the stuff. It will be illegal for ISP's to not make a concerted effort to block it or deny access to it.
No, you would be required to stop providing access to www.hardcore.com using the mechanisms defined in the ISP code of conduct, which will be worked out by ISPs and certified by the ABA.
I have discovered a wonderful
I find it interesting that 'supposedly' the same government that passed this piece of drivel also has a healthy appetite for porn... Lots of viewers of the cam girls out there...
:P
http://www.prairie-dog.net/ has most of the info I've seen.
Thankfully the US aint this anal... (and Pro Wrestlings not scripted either)
It *WILL* be illegal to send email with sexual content.
It would work, proxies would work too. That's why censoring the internet will not work.
>I think the reason most Australians
>(such as myself) are not bothered by
>it so much is because it is basically
>unenforcable.
Au contrare, any time the day or night the
police want to kick down the door and search
your home they can use this arbitrary law
(which everybody is breaking) to get a
search warrant.
> It was a bill put forward by people who
> don't even really know what they are
> dealing with.
Even a stupid law is a law, backed up with
the full resources of the Police and the courts.
> It will be interesting to see the first
> case which actually deals with it
> and how far it gets in our legal system.
Ask Phil Zimmerman (PGP) how he felt about
the US Attorney prosecuting him for export
of cr1pt0. They made his life hell.
>I think the reason most Australians
>(such as myself) are not bothered by
>it so much is because it is basically
>unenforcable.
Most Australians are apathetic so-and-sos:
They believe everything Kerry Packers TV
Network and the Kerry Packer's Government
tell them. Ray Martin is a God. They hate
the GST, but voted for a government that
gave it to them. Australians got the
government that 48.5% of them voted for.
(Yes, we have a stupid electoral system).
That 48.5% got what they deserved; eat
shit and die my friends. The 51.5% that
voted against the government still got
what they deserved, for not rounding the
others up as live sheep exports.
The people get the government they deserve.
One year after gun-owners were forced to surrender 640,381 personal firearms .22 rifles and shotguns, a program
to be destroyed, including semi-automatic
costing the government over 500 million dollars, the results are in...
A dramatic increase in criminal activity has been experienced. Gun control
advocates respond "Just wait... we'll be safer...you'll see...".
OBSERVABLE FACT, AFTER 12 MONTHS OF DATA:
* Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2%
* Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6%
* Australia-wide, armed-robberies are up 44% (yes, FORTY-FOUR PERCENT)
* In the state of Victoria, homicides-with-firearms are up 300%
* Figures over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in
homicides-with-firearms (changed dramatically in the past 12 months)
* Figures over the previous 25 years show a steady decrease in
armed-robbery-with-firearms (changed dramatically in the past 12 months)
* There has been a dramatic increase in breakins-and-assaults-of-the-elderly
* At the time of the ban, the Prime Minister said "self-defense is not a
reason for owning a firearm"
That is assuming, of course, that they know the difference.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
> The point of the poster you replied to, was that Australia was mostly founded by ex-convicts, like most of the initial immigrants that came to the US were religions outcasts
I seem to recall a convict colony or two in the US (eg. Georgia). Or has Winston Smith eliminated all traces of this from American history books?
After this goes through, the flow will be even more the other way.
Its a bad blow for our IT industry. As if the balance of payments deficit wasn't obscene enough already.
How come Sweden, which has so many guns per capita still has a low crime rate?
Crime rate really doesn't correlate to guns.
Careful, there. A little more of that apathy and you could be old Karl too.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
unenforcable or not, it will still cost us a tonne of unnecessarily wasted money. the ABA will need to employ more people to cover all the complaints they plan on getting. they've already asked for increased funding, and i bet they'll get it...
:(
... :p
and while the bill popped up occasionally in the news (mostly in The Australian on tuesdays - which features 50+ pages of tech news) when i asked my parents if they'd heard of it - they were not aware that it was going on.
i think we can pretty much kiss alot of future venture capital/investments in australian internet technology goodbye.
one day i'll set up http://censorship.is.f-cked.com
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Exactly. Without a chief. Close to but not exactly without rules. In use it has come to have other, related meanings.
Simplifying a bit, there are two sorts of folks who talk about anarchy. Proponents of anarchism (called anarchists) believe that without a chief we can get along. They often believe that the only rules that we need are those of the natural order of things. Opponets of anarchism belive that without a chief we will have violence, disorder and other nasty things.
Personaly, I am not an anarchist, but I try to understand other viewpoints.
My sugestion of an anarchy-totalitarian scale isn't right, but I couldn't come up with a better alternative for what I wanted to say.
>No, the current Australian government aren't likely to be nazis.
You obviously arn't familiar with the current Aussi government. One of their acts in their first term was to overrule a high-court decision that gave landrights to aboriginies. Many of their other acts have also been somewhat nazi.
hmmm... flame.....
colin
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Thomas Jefferson
Oh, and by the way, fuck you.
FYI, Senator Richard Alston's website is at http://www.richardalston.dcita.gov.au/. Hey, while you're there, drop the minister an email telling him what you think (be nice tho :)
> But hey, at least it's still legal to burn our flag, and that they don't think that sticking the 10 commandments up on the wall, and confiscating nail clippers will stop mass murders in schools.
The most shameful thing in the USA right now, IMO, is the way politicians are exploiting the Columbine tragedy as an excuse to ramrod their own agenda through the Congress. "Moral malaise" my ass. The USA has an astonishing history of violence. Are we going to blame the murder rate of 50 years ago on net.porn and video games?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I can't remember where I heard it.... probably here... but due to the use of the "F@#$" word in the linux code.... well does that mean I wont be able to download new kernels as they are released?
"Bread and circuses" is the second most dangerous problem with democracy. (The first is corruption, which is the most dangerous problem with every system of government.)
The masses have *never* been interested in being informed participants in any system. They care only that their lives are reasonably stable, and that they can get food and entertainment. In a pure democracy, the putative ruling class is "the people" but the de-facto ruling class is "the people who care enough to participate" --- always a tiny subset of the former, and thus easily marginalized by special interests (including big business, etc.).
-- brandon s. allbery, sysadmin @ cmu electrical & computer engineering "Think, youth, THINK!"
Not unlike the US drug laws, n'est-ce pas?
People (or in this case ISPs) that have lots of money/power/connections/etc. will get slapped on the wrist, if not "overlooked"; those without these things will rot in jail (or in this case, get run out of business).
Reminds me of those US RightWingNut politicos who go around ranting stuff like, "Let's round up all the people who get high and throw them in prison or have them executed." Like they're actually going to do these to 40,000,000+ people? Yeah, right...
This has nothing to do with "morals" and everything to do with having an excuse to discriminate legally against an (otherwise) law-abiding minority for the express purpose of intimidating everybody else.
I say that hangin's too good for the bastards!
--Z.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Violence?Why not?But,even thil strips the freedom ....terrorised
I live in a post-totalitary country,and,dammit,
here the gov't still thinks about censorship,but
because of that they were damn good
is no the right word,but it's something similar.
Sometimes it helps,but it's not the answer.Nowdays,
it's the publicity,I mean,BIG PUBLICITY...I haven't
seen anything on this subject except on slashdot.
Clearly written by a New Zealander, right?
Sure, right - believe the lies your government tells you. But you are dead wrong on the results of the gun prohibiton laws, dead wrong.
Try this - since the prohibition laws were passed for guns, gun related violent crimes has INCREASED, the rate of violent crimes has INCREASED 40% or more in some catagories, then number of occupied forced-entry (i.e. smeon breaks into your home while you are there) crimes had INCREASED by more the 40%.
The citizens are disarmed, while the criminals remain armed. In other words, the criminals are having a field day, because they rest secure in knowing that the government has provided them a much larger and completey unarmed pool of victims they can prey on. This was predicted by the action in Jamaica when they enacted similar laws. Try readin ghte modern research by Dr. Lott and others in the USA. You Aussies are fools for letting the government grab that much power based on your irrational and fear based response to press crusades on the behalf of those who wish to control you.
Lesson here: dont give up your rights, ANY of them.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
The guys at the Linux Group apparently have some kind of beta site under development that lets you surf the web anonymously. It circumvents proxy-servers (the typical censorship technology of states like Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Malaysia).
http://www.noproxy.com
The site has not been released yet to the public, but the beta works quite well... it actually REWRITES the links in your web page into an anonymized format. I use it every day to surf the net at work, because the links are unreadable to my sysadmin if he looks at the web logs... everything works through sessions that will expire after 15 minutes, so combing through the proxy server logs the next day will no yield usable links.
The law doesn't cover mailing lists -- email is explicitly excluded, newsgroups are explicitly included.
As to adults supervising children, the law intends that all Australian ISPs will sign up to a code of conduct which will include:
"(d) giving parents and responsible adults information about how to supervise and control children's access to Internet content;
(e) procedures to be followed in order to assist parents and responsible adults to supervise and control children's access to Internet content;"
Under the act, the Australian Broadcasting Authority also has a responsibility to advise parents about supervision.
There is no requirement placed on parents to supervise their children, and no requirement placed on ISPs to ensure that children are supervised while they use the ISPs services.
Some posters have said that any information stored on a host is subject to classification. This isn't the case, as the information also has to be available for access via an ISP.
The interesting thing will be to see what the ABA accepts as the means of dealing with offshore prohibited content. This will be defined in the ISP's code of practice.
This is where the next battle will be fought, and the result won't necessarily be a requirement for filtering at each ISP. The law isn't clear (to me) on when a code can be judged 'deficient' by the ABA and overruled.
I'm very glad that we don't have a (government owned) telecoms monopoly any more, or the government might have considered filtering content at a single point.
I have discovered a wonderful
I was thinking that Australia might need or want another hi tec employee. Guess I won't go work there after all.
ah, well. some dreams die hard, others die easy.
Quite wrong.
A fundamental right is involved here:
THe right to defend your life. This includes any reasonable means. And according to US Dept Of Justice statistics, and similar ones for the BoJ, one fo the most effective methods is the modern handgun. Your statements dont stand scrutiny - a fundamental right is not subject to a needs test. Handguns, escpecially concealed ones, have been shown to be quite effective at preventing a person from being a victim of violent crime, and for those that carry them legally (with the permit system) have been shown to have only a fraction of the crime rate of the normal citizen (Lott, Mustard 1998). And ilegal use of a concea;ed weapon by permit holders is almost nil. As an example, in florida where over 500,000 permits have been issued since 1997, only 12 deaths due to concealed handguns have been reports, and of those 12, only 2 (same incident) were found to be criminal - in other words, concealed handgunds deterred hundreds of thousands of attempted crimes, saved lives, and had very little cost in non-criminal lives. And since the handgun carry permits system was implemented allowing the average citizen to carry a concealed handgun, the violent crime rate in Florida has dropped rapidly and consistently - especially amongst older people and women, at 6-10% a year. Similare results are evident in Texas as well since their passage of CCW for handguns.
So, your statment doesnt hold any water - try thinking it through. Criminal prefer unarmed victims - and a handgun is the best form of personal defense: portable, easily carried, and it works - sometimes needing only to be shown, not fired (Kleck 1995).
Yours is the credo of slave. Think it over and come back when you ahve learned.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
I am sitting on Comcast@Home and that baby has a class A network. Now let them start blocking class A networks and we'll see how far they get
We have six months to develop a distributed hosting, posting, caching, viewing Internet.
Guess what? 500+ people are working on it. Quite a few projects. at least 2 dozen
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
The CSIRO (The government science body), along with almost everyone else, told the Senate inquiry that it was impossible to do.
The full amendment is available from the EFA web site, with comments. Links to reviews of filtering software can also be found.
There was basically no Aus news about this - the first I knew that it had actually been passed into law was from UserFriendly (although there was no doubt that the lower house would pass it anyway).
What I think should happen is that a group of ISPs shouyld put out a tender for filtering software, but specify a penalty cloause for anything which gets through that shouldn't, or anything which doesn't get through but should - including SSL, other langauges, and aything else pepole can come up with. Anyone which any sense won't take that up, so the ISPs can take the excuse to the bill along the lines that they don't have to do anything if its technically unfeasable.
Currently, this law only applies to Aus sites, but it must be reviewed within 3 years to see if the bill can be made to cover overseas sites as well. The big problem is that once an ISP has been told to remove something, they then have to stop anything similar from appearing on their site. Private email is not covered, but the status of mailing lists, newsgroups, and similar stuff is not clear.
Checkk your facts arsehole, violent crimes are UP.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
So according to this bill any computer connected to the net (and physically in Australia) is an "Internet Content Host" and therefore subject to coverage. Furthermore any and all content on such an "Internet Content Host", whether or not it is publicly accessible, is subject to this law. Hmmm. So they suddenly have jurisdiction over your hard drive (and CDs) just because you have an internet connection...
This bill seems to be so severe as to render itself unenforceable and therefore in risk of being thrown out of court. That can happen in Australia, can't it?
Oxryly
the site is amazing, even if it's just beta. who is the Linux Group?
That's a myth. The English did colonise Australia for the sole purpose of transporting criminals (this was during the industrial revolution when crime was so high that people were deported for stealing bread). However Australia is a hugely multicultural society. At the High School I went to over 70% of student's parents came from overseas, so the chance that you are actually descended directly from a penal colonist are extremely small. Also far more convicts were transported to the US before the war of independence. And as for our government, take a look at your own.
You're not listening, we tried all of the tactics you say, short of the armed rebellion, the media would have made us look like terrorists, they do the bidding of the arseholes who enacted the bill in the first place. Basically we are fucked! The government pander to the minority who want us disarmed in the first place.
Have you ever seen the movie "Mr Smith Goes to Washington, with James Stewart"? Normal people face that sort of political and media machine should they be "stupid" enough to stand up for their rights...
And you really believe that? This is coming from the political party with a track record of going back on promises as soon as they're elected, or re-elected, to government, at both the State and Federal level.
It's also the party whose leader is solely responsible for putting the country into hundreds of billions of dollars of debt over 15 years. I'd vote for One Nation over these bozos.
Matt
It's a shame that such laws are made with absolutely no understanding of the practical issues involved with enforcing such a law.
As an Australian, although this bill disgusts me, I am confident that it will be nigh impossible to impose such restrictions. We simply don't have the money or time for such a huge operation. Nor are we a totalitarian state, so I'm confident once the politicians realise how silly net censorship is to implement, the bill will be reversed.
I think more damage will be done to our country's technology image. It's already pretty poor, and this farce will just worsen international opinion.
Sigh.
They are some guys out in New Jersey, kernel hackers I hear - aparently they just got like $5 million in venture funding and are coming out with a bunch of other projects.
they have the linuxmail.com, linuxserver.com, apacheserver.com domains and a bunch of others. Some thing is going on out there. It's pretty secretive right now.
Um, That freedom wasn't granted by any god but fought for and won by The People.
Fuck your god.
"What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time
to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take
arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood
of patriots and tyrants."- Thomas Jefferson
The Australian media coverage on free to air television was quite extensive up until the senate vote. The issue has died down due to the GST vote taking the limelight, but it is likely to surface again after 1/1/2000 when the ABA starts censoring sites. The big issue with Aussie ISPs now is what filtering technology will be used - if they can't come up with one the ABA accepts, the ABA will (try to) enforce its own rules (likely technical disaster!)
Um, That freedom wasn't granted by any god but fought for and won by The People.
Please, leave your bullshit god out of it.
"What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time
to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take
arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood
of patriots and tyrants."- Thomas Jefferson
Why do people imply that these sort of things will be the end of the world? Either Way in 2000 the end of the world begins anyway so you might as well kill your local government. I guess this makes me the only slashdot reader to favor violent overthrow of government though.
It could be worse even than subnet blocking.
ISPs are required to enforce the legislation. If you are a paranoid ISP, you may want to pass all your traffic through filters. I can envisage consumer ISPs deciding to block everything but 80 and 25 connections from their networks, and filtering this stuff with something like AOLs psychotic software .
Thankfully our mercenary government probably wouldn't be advising the blocking of port 445 - SSL. Even they could see that would be business suicide.
But, Ozemail recently shut down its telnet service. For "Y2K reasons".
Feeling paranoid anyone?
but forgets that the sole purpose of government is to represent the people. If a society feels their government is not representing them, they have several options like talking to their representatives, impeaching their representatives and replacing them, or in extreme cases, remove the government by brute force. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say but time would be better spent changing the government to protect everyone rather than trying to shield a few from prosecution.
Also, unless citizens are bombed with poison gas or run over with tanks, I find it hard to criticize another government. That's it for now.
Australia: Alcatraz on a larger scale.
Suddenly that doesn't seem so funny anymore...
nobody wants to leech pr0n at 33.6k/s though :)
only outlaws will have hydrogren bombs.
In some sense, that is the case today.
Seriously, the H-Bomb could be argued to be an exception today based on the intent of the Bill of Rights since the H-Bomb is not reguarded as a weapon that is deployable domestically. The government can't count it as a weapon against the people, and the people can't count it as a weapon against the government. (No matter how tempting nuking D.C. might be sometimes) :-).
The founding fathers could not have been expected to predict the H-Bomb when the Bill of Rights was drafted.
At worst we might need a service which emails the contents of a URL to you -- that is certainly legal, even if the email contains prohibited content.
That's an interesting idea...
Yes, there have been several proponents of anarcho-capitalism. However, anarchist theory has strong anti-capitalist roots. I believe the general consensus among anarchists is that capitalism is a contradiction or a right wing theory instead of a form of anarchism. For a more detailed discussion of this I recommend checking out the anarcho-capitalist section of the anarchist FAQ (it can be found at spunk press, which has a lot of anarchistic material). In general, anarcho-capitalism relies more on the dictionary root of the word anarchism (greek an-without archos-government, chief, ruler) rather than the past of the theory. Still, anarchism does encourage individual thought. The history is the past, and for the present new ideas are needed. If you can make an arguable case that anarcho-capitalism isn't inherently hierarchal, than I for one consider it a form of anarchy.
I am an anarchist.
Anarchism without adjectives (anarchism without adjectives is a theory that anarchists should get along instead of dissmissing the ideas of other anarchists with different ideas as impossible or statist).
Seeing as the Legislation was used as a sweetner for Harradine to by his vote for the GST and for the further %16 sale of Telstra, lest turn the table back on the Government and Telstra.
As most small ISP's use Telstra for their backbone provider lets just forward any filtering requests on to them, and let Telstra deal with the problem on implementing filtering software.
Lets how this strategy will affect Telstra's IPO for the further %16 sale.
Are you sure that someone downloaded the Anarchists Cookbook? To the best of my knowledge, only the chapter on explosives is available online.
2. I don't think boycotts against our primary industrys (I'm an Ozzie) will do much, except fuck up our export industries. It won't create a political uproar.
I think that was the entire point. Sending email to a government official does little good when you aren't a constituent, and they need to understand that outside people are upset by this law. Fucking up the export industries with boycotts and other protests will get the message across quickly, directly, and (hopefully) without causing much damage before the government sees the handwriting on the wall and gives in.
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
The problem with a .SEX domain is that obscenity is subjective -- Different cultures have different opinions on what is or is not obscene. .SEX domain or lose his site? .SEX domain idea seems like an easy way out, but there are too many problems for it to work.
Some cultures have no problems with seeing a woman's bare breasts. Other cultures have serious problems seeing as much as a woman's wrists or ankles. Who would make the rules?
Some art can be considered pornographic too. If Joe Blow at foobar.edu/~joeblow puts up a picture of Michaelangelo's David, will he have to purchase a
The
-Perpetual Newbie
Pity those little runts can't be charged with fraud, forgery and illegal entry into a computer system.
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
Only wankers say mateship? Isn't the word mateship, in fact, in what passes for a constitution down there?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
There has been some stories in the news about the censorship legislation, mostly in the paper news though, hardly a peep on TV.
:-) ), and expresses our opinion. (but probably just gets told to shut up during party meetings and votes along the party line anyway)
Some of the newspapers , like the Australian, and the Age, have covered it pretty well. The other major paper in Melbourne (where I live) , is a thing called the "Herald Sun".
Here is a few stories that they have been printing about "the internet"
In the Herald sun , page 18 , 8 June 1999
"As Evil as porn"
The jewish group B'nai B'rith Anti Defamation commision wants the KKK banned from the net. There is a photo of a Nazi site "Stormfront" , and some guy holding what apparently is a gun, but what looks like a PVC tube (used in plumbing) , with a muffler stuck on the end of it.
"Genuine civil liberties orginizations have also expressed concerns about freedom of speech, but democracy is based on the tenet that induviduals are allowed to live harmonious lives without fear of persecution. Laws ranging from defamation to sexual discrimination provide that there is no absolutes of free speech.
Most Australian would not let a vehemant extremist into their homes, yet via the net, potentially all homes with internet access may play host to such visitors"
on 16 June 1999 , page 18 , the editorial piece says this :
"the insidious nature of the internet as a tool for pedophiles has again been highlighted by the arrest of an Australian man in the united states"
"Internet service providers have an obligation to eliminate or at least reduce the incidence of child pornography and the covert use of the internet by pedophiles"
(some australian person went to the USA to meet some kid he befriended over "the net". He was nabbed by the cops. Good on them.)
basically any story about someone using the internet for a "bad" purpose is hammered in this paper.
All the government has to do is appeal to the majority of people in Australia (who don't have an ISP) that the net is full of paedophiles, bomb recipies and porn , and then they can do whatever they damn well want.
To be honest, I feel totally and utterly sold out. Not just by the Liberal party, but by the whole party system in this country. Back room deals, bribes, the notion that a party member has their first loyalty to the party, not to the country, you name it.
And I've been thinking of a way to change it. (I'm sure lots of others have thought of this, but bear with me). Political Parties, I think, were set up because it was impossible to have all of the citizens in a country run the whole show at once. It just wasn't possible. Now with the net, it IS possible. we don't need to delegate our vote to someone else, who goes to canberra (or washington
So what I'm thinking of is this :
1) set up some kind of slashdot-like web site, where people can freely express any opinions they like on the budget, defense, taxes, social security, etc.
2) after debating for a few weeks, have a vote on particular bits of law. (voting to be done by citizens of that country only. Need to figure out some way to enforce this)
3) The majority opinion gets tabled in Parliment by someone, who the citizens have to vote in to represent them. That person agrees to represent the majority opinion, not their own. (of course, without enough people to actually vote for that person to get in to parliment, this whole step can't be done.)
Yes, I know, you still have to delegate someone to go to the government. But that's only because of the way the present system works. If by some chance the rest of the country sees that the "open source" way is better, and we manage to get a majority , then the whole government can become completely virtual. (and step 3 won't be necessary)
Once that happens, no more "secrets". No more "commercial in confidence" contracts , where citizens are not allowed to know how much taxes are being paid to a company to do some out-sourced activity like power generation , ambulences, or whatever. True power to the people.
OK, that's enough. I think you get the idea.
whaddya reckon?
GST = Goods and Services Tax, starting at 10% but I'll bet you anything it won't stay there for long.
He'd care plenty. He just can't do anything about it (yet)
"what are those guys independent of?"
Mainstream politicians aren't looking
to force censorship down our throats, i
t's the independent. On the other hand
the leaders of the government and opposition
are both family-values type conservatives
so they don't see it as a great tragedy.
And besides, its only nerds like us who care.
Just browsing through the legistlation and I notice that once a site is "classified" it cannot be considered for reclassification for 2 years.
So whats to stop you getting your URL rated G with happy pleasant content, then changing it to a full on porn site once you've got your classification?
This post does not exist
And wasn't one of the reasons for the American Revolution that the US free settlers wanted an end to convict transportation?
And thus that the founding of Australia was in fact a side-effect of said Revolution as the Poms had to find another place to transport convicts?
The ignorance in this little commentary makes me feel ill...
a) the legislation is *spattered* with "ought implies can" clauses.
b) they don't censor the stuff in the pipe, they just order ISP's to block addresses... that's nothing new, the British Gov't perfected that technique decades ago - it's called a D-Notice
c) we don't have a bill of rights, thank god - we have implied rights, and are signatories to the UN conventions. our right to free speech is limited to political free speech - and this protects democracy without allowing slobs and pornographers to trot out the free speech spiel in defence of puerility.
d) the bill may or may not be thrown out - but Labor (the socialist-principled equivalent of the Democrats, except we have our own different Democrats party, and they are decidedly unprincipled) is going to get back in at the next poll, and Senator Kate Lundy will save the day.
e) press coverage was almost non-existent, for the simple reason that we're overhauling our tax system.
f) you're going overboard - most aussies are shaking their heads at the folly, not going ape-shit and trembling with rage & fear
g) swear words don't count as offensive content
h) I seem to remember CDA... and CDA II? Something about ill-gotten moral high ground?
i) aussies don't say "eh mate"
j) aussies don't say "g'day"
k) aussies say mate, but only wankers say mateship
l) remember, you wrinkled Americans, we got the convicts and you got the Puritans!
Soyuz Loiter
(we do say that)
Learn to read, sludgeguts. Violent crimes involving firearms are down.
Blog
j) aussies don't say "g'day"
please refrain from very broad generalisations.....I use the phrase every day....
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
(maw, originally from Boston, USA, now in Melbourne, Australia, and less than pleased with this recent turn of events.)
You're a suburbanite.
There's also the suggestion that the general press didn't give this story the airplay and column-space that it deserved because of some self-serving interests
i often wonder about this. If your old enough to remember the East-Timor invasion by Indonesia, you also might remember the lack of press coverage about it. Noam Chomsky ~ manufacturing consent (Noam Chomsky on Journalism By Peter Cronau January 1995) also made a nice about how journalism and power can serve against the truth...
Chomsky views the media as an ideological system serving the powerful elites in society. He explains how governments get away with lying, how academics and intellectuals manufacture consent to the actions of government, and how the media confine debate to the conservative middle ground.
Chomsky argues the Western media have neglected their questioning role, instead repeatedly giving primary access to intellectuals who defend the role of Western governments. He sees the media's role as producing consensus amongst the public towards the ruling elites in government and business.
"The [media's] current mission is to ensure that any thought of controlling their destiny must be driven from the minds of the rascal multitude," he has written in, Year 501: The Conquest Continues. And, in Deterring Democracy, he writes: "The goal is to eliminate public meddling in policy formation".
Probably Chomsky's most known book in this country is Manufacturing Consent: the political economy of the mass media, which he wrote in 1988 with Edward Herman, a professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Propaganda Model sketched out in this book describes the structures and influences that Chomsky believes produce systematic propaganda in the media.
"It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalise dissent, and allow government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public."
it's only an opinion, but it's interesting to note the context in which this article describes censorship.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
As Denton always said:
Society's to blame.
this is the link to the article
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Check your facts, arsehole. Go to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (http://www.abs.gov.au) and you'll discover that gun related crimes are down 8% since the ban.
Blog
1. Although the previous respondent was incorrect on point, he was correct in principle. The citizenry of the US are supposed to control the National Guard and other "militia" (the term used to mean a sort of citizen-army, police force type organization, like the British Home Guard in WWII) throught their local governments. The reason why towns and counties used to provide complete units was supposed to be so that they could execute local control. That way, any revolt would have a nucleus of armed troops who were also citizens to assist in the revolution. Which is where the South got their army in the Civil War - or the War of Northern Agression, if you're from the American South. The Founding Fathers planned on revolution - they understood what we have forgotten, that no strong central government stays pure for long. So they set things up so that if things got so bad they required a rebellion, the citizens would have, if not an advantage, then at least a chance.
2. If things got so bad that armed rebellion was necesary, it wouldn't be military forces marching into battle against farmers. It would be a war of assassination, bombings, and guerrilla warfare. Sound somehow evil and just plain wrong? Of course - the government wouldn't like it much. But that's exactly how the US won independence, with hit-and-run raids on British units, murdering troops who were quartered in colonial homes, and firing on marching troops from cover. Only on a very rare few occasions did troops fight troops, and those were usually either one-sided British victories, or occurred late in the war, with French weapons and training supplied to the colonials.
This is why the first right to be taken away is the right to bear arms. Once you lose that, the rest follows easily.
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
>Switzerland has widespread gun ownership;
... ;)
>traditionally, on election day the voters march
>to the polls armed -- as a demonstration that the >polity exists by the consent of the people.
> Of course, everyone knows Switzerland's
> reputation as a dangerous place to visit
This is the way the swiss army works, every man has a gun at his house.
Why not? Any scapegoat is better than none. And if we don't bother to look at the evidence, we won't get confused by it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
As for the guns in the classroom - don't blame the guns. Don't blame the movies. Don't blame the music or the games. Don't blame Canada. (Sorry, just saw the movie.) Blame yourself.
My parents were firm, some would say strict. They spanked me when I needed it, grounded me for more minor infractions, and in general, they were parents. Name one case of a kid snapping and killing other kids where the parents were involved with their children and knew what was going on in their lives.
Oh, and I'll answer a quote with a quote. The full text - which I recommend you read, and actually think about, is here.
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
I can't find a single flipping candidate I like. They're all a bunch of bastards that want to limit something or another. Bush wants to restrict religous freedoms, freedom of speech, and so on, while opening up businesses. Gore - well, what can we say about Gore. And those are the only real choices.
The UserFriendly Dust Puppy for President - aw, crap, he's Canadian. Can't be President. Uh... Hemos for President!
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
The actual title of the legislation is the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999 Try here for the most recent text of the proposed amendments, or here for a summary of the proposed changes that was prepared for debate in parliament.
fuck the abos. as far as I'm concerned, make NT a separate country and ship all the abos there and they can do whatever they want. any of them that set foot on our side of the fence get it shot off.
Posted by 2B||!2B:
;-)
So I take it the intent of the law is that pornography is only legal in Australia when _everyone_ can see it on a public TV station or at the beach. If you try to see it privately at home(cable, Internet, etc.), then you're breaking the law. Does that mean you can only have sex with your spouse if it's broadcast on the latenight news?
That's a pretty twisted law. That makes Reagan and Clinton not look so bad after all.
Let's go colonize the moon. Frontiers are traditionally free because no one has the time or resources to waste bugging anyone else; they're too busy staying alive. Well, there's no frontier here on Earth. The solution is obvious.
Let's get off this germ-infested ball of mud.
No, you can't use that as your sig - that's my email sig. But you can have my old one - Happiness is Earth in the rear-view mirror.
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
Hmmm... isn't THAT ironic - not that I disagree, mind, it's just that you posted as an AC...
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
Actually, they do count. Just ask Brian (Im so Moral) Harradine.
I really detest the idea that someone else can tell me as an adult, that I have no right to look at whatever material I want to look at. I can buy a porno mag, why cant I look at a porno site?
Censorship is something parents do to their children, it shouldn't be what adults do to adults.
I want to keep my Freedom Of Self, to lose that well, you might as well give me a ten pm curfew and tell me I cant eat pizza whenever I want!
Ms Jute
"I only tell the truth, that way I dont have to recall what I said"
Arrest you? How?
Turn out the Army? Sure, as a roadblock. With cameras galore. Simply go around - the army won't shoot, if they did it would be news the world over, and you'd have won, the troops involved would be vilified, and the government would fall.
Do not simply grab your guns and a hat and turn out to shoot cops, soldiers and politicians. Organize things. Make sure you have designated leaders for each group, and each leader knows each other and who's in overall charge. Keep together, keep it neat, and don't damage any property or trespass on any private property without permission. Keep to main roads to attract more attention. March to the capital, to the parliament building itself, and demand redress. It's dramatic if you can arrange volleys (preferably blanks) into the air. Surround the building and refuse to move or allow anyone in or out until your issues are redressed. Have a spokesman, and be sure to invite the press, world as well as local. Use them instead of fighting them.
Now, of course, it's too late.
-- The meek shall inherit the Earth. In very small plots, about 6 feet by 3.
Posted by 2B||!2B:
.COM, .ORG, etc., it would be .SOFT (software), .CONS (consulting), etc.), and force companies to only use those which apply to what they do. It would make perfect sense to have a root domain of .SEX for _all_ pornography, and ban it from anywhere else (*encouraging countries to participate in said ban, levying heavy fines as needed). Thus users could block all of it at once, or make all of it available at once. In the case of Australia, then they wouldn't have to stress so much over rating content of sites, since it would all be grouped together. They could instead focus on the hypocrisy of allowing nudity at the beach and on public TV but not anywhere else. ;-)
I've long thought that we need to create far more specific root domains (instead of
>Sure, right - believe the lies your government tells you.
As oppposed to a git that won't cite sources?
Blog
BSD has fallen on hard times. FreeBSD is in trouble; Walnut Creek is struggling to stay afloat. Rumor has it that it is up for sale. BSDI growth is flat. And then there are the "also-rans" NetBSD, OpenBSD etc--no comment needed. BSD never caught on with users, and odds are that it never will amount to more than the niche OS that it has always been. Unable to attract younger users, a BSD BOF is looking more and more like an AARP coffee klatch. The BOF chit chat is now just as likely to center around prostate problems and "regularity" than it is to BSD topics. The twilight years of BSD are now upon us. A "Kevorkian" may eventually be in order. Who will be the first to "pull the plug"?
Posted by 2B||!2B:
When I bought my house a year ago, it had extras (placed by the previous owner) that prove the point about paranoia: monitored alarm systems for motion detection, breaking windows, opening doors, opening windows, feeds for cameras, etc. And this is a rather ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood. But that's nothing next to the big one: my house already had a bank-style vault (yeah, the huge black steel door with both combination and key required) about 25 feet (8 meters) deep for storing enough guns to supply an entire army. What do I use the vault for? It makes a really good closet. I keep half of it full of canned food that didn't fit in the kitchen, the other half full of musical instruments my wife doesn't want strewn around the house. One time a gun dealer I know showed me the machine guns and silencers he was selling (yes, even those are completely legal in America, if you do the paperwork and pay the permit fees). No, I didn't buy anything. I would like to hear even one good reason why a machine gun or silencer should be legal to buy. Hunting? Yeah, right! Even the military doesn't normally have any use for silencers.
Australians can't be motivated from within because our media is working against us by promoting the governments case or ignoring the issue altogether.
I am concerned that the legacy media industries (who have highly concentrated ownership) may have acted together to support the bill out of self-interest. It would kill off what they may view as a competing industry. Perhaps the ACCC or some other organization with juristiction in this area should investigate this.
I hope there is an Australian political solution to this crisis. However, if all else fails in the next few months I have some proposals on ways the international community might assist the cause.
Three ways non-australians could assist political change:
1)Australia is extremely dependent on commodities.
So boycott Australian goods and tell somebody why you are doing it, perhaps an Australian embassy or trade organisation. Lobby local politicians to impose trade sanctions. Effectively our new net censorship infringes on YOUR RIGHTS to conduct Internet commerce with Australia so why not get us back. I suspect this legislation will place us in breach of some international trade agreements anyway.
2)Australians hate to be perceived as backward rednecks.
Boycott Australian films and culture - protest outside Australian film screenings. Why should George Lucas make the next Star Wars in a country that doesn't even guarantee freedom of speech - send him an email.
3)Australians love sport.
Don't buy tickets for Sydney 2000. Don't attend sporting events involving Australia - if you do, take banners protesting against net censorship and make yourselves heard.
For those of you not in Australia, as the slashdot article mentions the net censorship was done to win an independant's vote for the GST.
(I like how according to the independant the GST becomes more moral when there's internet censorship, democracy for you).
At any rate, once all the independant's demands were met, he did a back flip and refused to vote for the GST yet the net censorship still went ahead.
Our beloeved Prime Minister John Howard, very devote creationist Christian, said that he was in support of censoring the internet because there were things on there he wouldn't want his sons to see. His youngest son is 19. Sadly I believe his sons take up a very small percentage of the Australian internet users.
I run a webpage which has a listing of mentally ill hate sites so people can look at them and see what they really are. If that bill comes in I wont have any ability to continue that page.
http://www.rebel.net.au/~andrews/dhw/index.html
Choose exposure over censorship.
It's turtles all the way down.
You asked about machine guns and silencers, I have and use both. The machine guns I own are to keep me in parity with my government. Don't get the mistaken impression that one man and a machine gun can overturn a government, but one man and a machine gun can take more machine guns and arm more men.
Silencersare one of the most useful devices when shooting, hearing protection is very important, and when shooting with a silencer, you are not damaging your hearing.
We also used them quite a bit in the Marine Corps, taking out a sentry quietly is quite an important task. Knife, silenver, it matters little, it is jsut a tool.
OF course, you do realize that your right to free speech is muzzled, because you allowed your politicians to take your guns away from you. If you kept your guns, the politicinas would not be quite so quick to trample on your basic human rights.
Forget it guys; I just heard that the NSF (National Science Foundation; same guys who used to run the Internet) just gave NETWORK SOLUTIONS exclusive rights to manage Mars well into the next aeon.
The media currently established would love to close the door on any newcomers. Monopolies are great for the bottom line.
Something like this would cut off all the clipping services, newsgroups, and Internet newspapers from you Aussies, making life very easy for your TV and papers.
The life of a newsie in the US, and in Australia, I'm sure, is going from one catered press conference to another, mooching meals and rubbing shoulders with the powerful. Pressies who effectively present the politician's views to the public are rewarded with more catered press conferences. Editors like this because the reporter must be "in the know" and "well respected" with all these invites.
Who wants to lose a job like this? Better to stifle the competition.
>>And since he's 19, I doubt good ol' johnny would care anyway
>He'd care plenty. He just can't do anything about it (yet)
Aw great! Because Howard can't stop his son from reading porn, we get barbed wire around the Internet. Might be time to get out photoshop and doctor up some "holiday snaps" of the Howards. Har Har. http://www.pm.gov.au/
One serious problem the Australian government faced was that many `porn' sites are password protected, and perhaps the owners of those sites would not like to give Australian government agencies the right to access their sites so they can be prohibited.
So it may be necessary to hack the sites, or to fraudulently gain access to their copyrighted material, which contravenes Crimes Act Sect 76 (and elsewhere), which act provides for a jail sentence.
What to do? It's simple: suspend the operation of all Australian criminal law as it applies to the operation of the censorship act. So that's what they did, in Part 8 - Protection from civil and criminal proceedings. What does `Draconian' mean anyway?
What does this legislative provision actually mean? Well, for example, since you might have a password or cryptographic key deemed reasonably necessary to permit the ABA to obtain information, the ABA can hire a consultant to obtain the password by torturing you. Giving Spooks the right to hack.
What is also interesting, in this regard, is the suppressed content of the Australian Government's Walsh Report " Review of Policy relating to Encryption Technologies." The government tried to suppress its contents, including this paragraph, among others which demonstrate the same intent:
1.2.28 The Crimes Act 1914 should be amended to permit the AFP, NCA and ASIO to 'hack' into a nominated computer system to secure access to that system or evidence of an electronic attack on a computer system. (paragraphs 6.2.3; 6.2.22 refer)
People have been wondering why the Australian government would bother trying to legislate to turn back the tide of internet content and have laughed at their ineptitude in writing the legislation. I suggest that the censorship legislation is merely a Trojan horse as cover for the kinds of covert operations spooks have been begging for.
This Trojan horse should be seen in the context of such legislation as NSW Law Enforcement (Controlled Operations) Act 1997 which enables police forces to break the law in order to catch criminals, after a case was lost on appeal to the High Court because the court exercised a judicial discretion to exclude evidence in a case where a criminal offence has been procured by illegal conduct on the part of police.
"There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order." Ed Howdershelt
Yes there was coverage about a month ago.
Heard anything at all about it since the senate passed the legislation? The passage through the House of Reps certainly didn't rate a mention.
Quite seriously, the tirade of obscenities which this action has caused me to spew forth is so vulgar and vile that common decency stops me from typing. I really hoped that for once our government would have some f**king brains, but nooo.
EFA is totally correct in saying that it is a political stunt. Honestly, they don't give a s**t about the moral wellbeing of Australians. Considering that one of our award winning adverts consiteted mainly of the word "Bugger", and that "If you drink and drive you're a bloody idiot" is a slogan endorsed by our police forces, that gives you a kind of idea about how non-anally retentive we all. Except Brian Haradine. This bill was introduced to pacify him, and him alone, so they could sell off our national phone service, and introduce a GST. Total assholes. I for one totally support the EFA's call for Richard Alston to resign.
But hey, at least it's still legal to burn our flag, and that they don't think that sticking the 10 commandments up on the wall, and confiscating nail clippers will stop mass murders in schools.
:-)
Plz don't do all the things that shirro suggested.
I don't think boycotts against our primary industrys (I'm an Ozzie) will do much, except fuck up our export industries. It won't create a political uproar.
Feel free to send email, and finally
Goto the Olympics! Don't take a banner - Ozzies hate in-your-face politics. But why come to the olympics at all? The more people coming in, the more empty seats leaving = it cost less for us Ozzies to go on Holiday overseas! Yay!
I was led to believe that included any materials transmissible over the net, not neccessarily accessible via an ISP. This means that, since the contents of your HD are definitely transmissable, that your HD is technically covered by this legislation.
Oh, you say, but its not accessible unless I have set up network services to allow it. I'm sure you've heard of BackOrifice, though..........
I share your elitist theory, and I'm sure many here a /. dot do too. But look at the masses they are dumb and enterested in government and polics. To mention uninformed by the moronic media. Most are just sheep and the ones in power know this and use it to their advantage. Just look and the popularity of Windows. Most use it because the media has shoved in there faces, and don't know their alternatives. Ok enought ranting for now.
Is it just me, or does the idea that something like this is possible just stem from the fact popular misconception that the easily proxied and filterable Web is the Internet. I mean, they can have all ISPs block off http ports so people have tp use the filtering proxies (I think) but to be realistic, they will have to block off all other ports as well.
I mean, how will they stop my naughty pic DCC file bot? How will they keep people from joining my Q3 server where I replaced the wall textures for pornography?
So far I have yet to here of program that scans tcp packets looking for dirty bits...
- All spelling errors are deliberate and for the sake of effect.
One of the major things that pisses me off about this is the way our Government is treating the 'net. They inisist that they are just re-inforcing the internet with laws comparable to TV and print.
They are yet to realise that the internet is not a passive entertainment medium! The net is interactive, and is a means of communication, not just an entertainment source like TV.
Censoring the net is like listening in on, and bleeping out swear words in phone conversations.. Much different to censoring TV.
But the politicians only know of the internet by the stupid catch-phrases thrown around in the popular media like 'surfing the net' as if its just some sort of joyride not a real means of communication and expression.
Finally we get an effective means of free speech, extremely accessible to the public, and this is what happens. I guess thats the precise reason why this is happening.
When will governments get over their arrogant, egotistical belief that they must take it upon themselves to exercise control over the citizens they are supposed to represent?!
...while Austrailia's computer systems might be year 2000 ready, their law makers aren't.
Time for a systems upgrade, eh mates?
2. Express 'surprise' when all
3. 'Regrettfully' inform the authorities that this kind of thing is certain to continue for the unforseeable future, as it is impossible to guard against hacker/cracker attacks.
4. De-install proxy with govt mandate.
-- Reverend Vryl
What are you going to do, shoot them? You say not.
Even if they use their pepper spray and start dragging people away?
I'm not saying a stand should not be made (I love the passive voice (-8 ) but is this actually going to achieve anything?
Dear Honourable Member,
I would like you to consider the following arguments against internet
censorship:
Forcing ISP's to comply with this legislation would be onerous and unreliable.
It is almost certain that there will be a contingent of rogue ISP's with a "free speech" agenda who will test this legislation. Detection will be difficult. Prosecution will be harder, mainly due to technical and legal ambiguities.
ISPs are opinion leaders within their educated and vocal user community. They currently oppose your initiatives, and the political consequences of their enmity should be considered.
Software-driven control of viewed material at the recipient end is cheap and reliable. It will be implemented by internet subscribers who are
genuinely concerned, whether or not there are censorship laws.
Implementing this legislation takes valuable technical resources away from other government initiatives e.g. controlling and taxing global e-commerce.
I beg you to abandon or shelve this legislation.
Yours respectfully,
the undersigned
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
/..
And when that day comes, I will scream very loudly ( and so will thousands of other Aussie hackers ).
Likewise, I will scream at my political representatives if they are dumb enough to block my favorite astronomy sites if they contain "naked eye astronomy" on the banner page.
And aussie doctors will scream if they are not allowed to access the latest information on "breast cancer".
Some people are upset about this situation. I'm not. I'm grinning from ear to ear over the fact that this legislation is going to be a major embaresment. Most of all, I'm grinning over the fact that I'm inevitably going to get to make politicians look like complete and utter idiots in front of the voting public.
I'm really looking forward to this. Better than any flame-war here at
I think that a service like http://www.anonymizer.com allows one to sidestep blocking of particular IP addresses very nicely -- unless of course the legislation was interpreted as requiring that Australian ISPs had to block access to such services.
I suspect it wouldn't be, and I think that providing such a service -- even in Australia -- may be legal. The person providing the service is (probably) not an internet carriage service under the act, and isn't hosting internet content either, and so isn't subject to the act.
This would make an interesting test case!
I'm pretty sure that providing such a service to Australians wouldn't make anyone subject to extradition.
At worst we might need a service which emails the contents of a URL to you -- that is certainly legal, even if the email contains prohibited content.
I have discovered a wonderful
Make sure the language of the complaints are of such a nature that it doesn't contain any lies - make sure it's very subjective, that is you claim it contains material you find objectionable (such as ads for Windows :-), without stating why you find it objectionable.
But governments no longer represent the will of the people. They represent the will of the political parties, their vested interests, and the advertising budget of the financially larger party.
Our "democracy" has reached the point where governments do not change. Certainly the MPs change, but the parties do not and the system of government does not. Voting offers the same choice of bad alternatives: anyone who actually wants a job in government should be automatically disqualified from it!
So we need systems like freenet, and we need a distributed internet - one that does not have such a reliance on ISPs and telecomunications companies. Both are a weak link for free communication.
Vik
... in the context he meant it in.
In fact, to my knowledge all constitutional monarchies are republics.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Similar to the US
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
How can somebody opposing censorship support and isolatoinist/protectionist?
Believe with me, my saplings.
I forget whether Australia is one of the places where the people have aquiesced to having their guns stolen by the JBT's.
If you're an Aussie webmaster, this would be a damned good time to get a gun, and learn how to shoot.
Any moral crusader who storms into your office to shut down your server because he doesn't want ME to read what you publish, is in sore need of a bullet up his arse.
I must say I'm surprised, though. I sure didn't expect Australia to become a theocracy in my lifetime.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I really want to talk to you about this issue, but can't find your email address on slashdot anywhere though. Drop me a line on craig@lpf.com.au or give me a call on 0882380001
Believe with me, my saplings.
I dunno where the original poster got the idea that we Australians didn't know about this censorship business. It was, and has been, most prominent in the press for the last few months.
The Independent senator (from Tasmania by the way) the conservative government was grovelling to got what he wanted and then said he wouldn't vote for the new GST (another party did in any case). Nevertheless he's now irrelevant as he doesn't hold the balance of power as of 1 Jul 99. The perfect example of hero to zero in one second flat.
In regards to the actual legislation, its basically a problem for the ISP faternity as they have to try and filter out material WHEN IT IS TECHNICALLY FEASIBLE TO DO SO. That is difficult enough for them at their own servers but a major drama for material coming in from outside sites. Once the ISPs are told to bar some site it will simply spring up somewhere else. An example of this difficulty was the list of British spooks posted a month or so ago. In the end the British government gave up (after two court orders) as it was pointless trying to find out all the places where the list had been posted to.
I wouldn't get too worked up about it for the time being. The law itself will no doubt be challenged in due course so lets just take a big deep breath and worry about something else.
Please provide me with a link for more information about this legislation ...
Does this law then also apply to television at all? (Assuming my presumption of Australian television is correct).
I always find it peculiar when a government attempts to legislate and regulate the Internet, which is an international phenomenon which obeys policital geological boundaries no more than a thought or idea does.
---
seumas.com
This is where I start doing my desperate boat-person impersonation...it's a long swim but I figure if I start soon I'll be outta here before D Day hits.
Paranoid? There is no conspiracy. Only policy.
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
So how do you know it actually does contain abhorrant sexual activities, or maybe it's just a video with a political message 'they' (Tasmanian politicians mainly, I believe) don't want you to know about.. For instance, an anti-cencorship message. Ahem. More conspiracies any-one?
Legally sane adults (i.e. voters) should be allowed to see and discuss anything. Full stop. And if politicians want to make life more difficult for kids ('protecting' them), they should check with the parents first. That's what they're there for. Duh.
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
No "constitutional" type protection of free speech rights exist in Australia. Their system has always been subject to this type of regulation. The same rules have always applied to all their broadcasting.
Really its no surprise, no matter how pathetic it is to see it actually happen in a supposedly free nation.
The passing of this idiotic bill is one example of the general incompetence and no idea mentality of politics over technology. But it comes as no surprise. Look what we have to work with...
Internet is a good way to get on the Net. -Bob Dole
BLAMMO shaken not stirred
"I am confident that it will be nigh impossible to impose such restriction"
... remember, this is a country that has never had Net access before. On Jan 1, 1998 there were ZERO ISPs in Saudi Arabia. And one year later, there are 250 ISPs which were hand selected by the government, and deployed within 6 to 9 months. Don't forget that huge portions of the telephone network had to be upgraded as well. This was a project far greater than the Australian one. And it was done.
I don't think so. Web Access is cencored all over the world. For example, in Saudi Arabia the authorities allowed Internet access in mid-1998, as long as it was cencored. And within 12 months, not only was the cencorship system put into place
It costs money, but I'm sure that Australia has enough of it. Technically, it is very possible. The only problem is finding all URLs that should be blocked. At first, only the big sites will be blocked. You know, sex.com and stuff. Then slowly smaller sites will start showing up on the shitlist. And one day you'll click to download something from Freshmeat, and the file will be on Geocities and you'll get a glaring message about the address being forbidden. And you'll wonder why the hell some little Linux app would be blocked. geocities.com won't be blocked. But for some reason that exact address will be blocked.
I live in a country with net cencorship. No, they CANNOT stop you from DCCing pics or downloading stuff from your friend's FTPd box. It's not possible. They will probably just block URLs through a proxy. Here, there are two proxies. One is on the ISP and the other is a national firewall (see www.isu.net.sa). I'm not sure what the local, ISP proxy does (other than caching). The national firewall is the one that does the cencorship. You have to use your ISP's proxy, and your ISP uses the national proxy. This is probably a bottleneck. But it seems to do the job, in most cases. It's amazing how they can find the most remote websites and shitlist them. But they can shitlist everything because the web is almost infinite, as it is growing constantly.
But I seriously doubt that they can stop you from doing whatever you want on IRC and such. And it will probably be possible to simply use a foriegn proxy (as long as it's listening on a really weird port) and thus bypass any cencorship at all.
But don't get me wrong. This is still going to be glaring in your face almost everyday. The bigest downfall to this is when they start blocking stuff that shouldn't even be blocked. Like somtimes you'll click on a download at Freshmeat and you'll find that the particular address is blocked.
Just hope they don't block any major hosts like GeoCities. That would mean you can't access thousands and thousands of websites.
Australia, a country founded as a penal colony and long known for independent, self-reliant citizens, is now closer to a gun-free zone than any of the American school districts with the cute signs so declaring.
... ;)
... besides itself.
Brittain, where in WWII handguns were distributed to citizens when German invasion seemed imminent, is even more so. Airguns are very popular there (high-quality airguns, not $30 Walmart guns like Americans typically think of if asked to describe an airgun), but firearms? Tough to own, tough even to find a place to shoot someone else's.
Switzerland has widespread gun ownership; traditionally, on election day the voters march to the polls armed -- as a demonstration that the polity exists by the consent of the people.
Of course, everyone knows Switzerland's reputation as a dangerous place to visit
Point it, only vigilance will protect your rights, but once you take away the means to resist government, government might not see the harm in protecting you from all sorts of nasty things
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
You need to keep in mind that australians (the original white ones#%*) are the descendents of convicts, loaf-stealers and other rejected Englishmen.(i.e. not trusted, not responsible and in need of "sensible" guidance)
Our esteemed midget, little Johnny Hayseed, has found life a little difficult since the old divisions of master-servant were abolished and he jumps on every opportunity to do a Jesus (although he's still working out how to avoid the loaves and fishes trick for all those bloody dole bludgers).
Anyway..the moral minority's paedopliliac obsession with suffering little children seems to provide his best opportunity to show his sheep that he knows best.
In the Internet Censorship bill, Johnny gets to treat all his grown up voters like little children and keep his worthy pastors and corporate interests happy..(oh, yeah, johnny wants a nice upper-middle class world where the women wear pearls, men talk (BIG) money and the rabble eat donuts.)
Just a thought..i can't think of one sexual act that is more abhorrent than the thought of getting my head blown off with an uzi or my guts knifed out and yet i can see this each night on prime time TV..any suggestions
As I understand it, the original problems with thalidomide were caused by incorrect preparation / extraction of the drug.
The beneficial substance is an optical isomer of the dangerous one, IIRC (and I haven't done any chem. for years, so..) The two weren't separated in the preparations originally used.
As others have stated, the media in Australia have largely treated the passing of this Bill as a non-issue. Though there have been some strongly worded op-ed pieces in the national newspapers, they haven't really devoted any major press to it.
Time to use the /. effect for a really good cause...
A national newspaper, The Age, has an internet censorship feeback section which would be good spot to voice your concerns (nicely and intelligently of course... ;). The only downside is that the feedback section is only appearing online at the moment and not making it to the printed version (ie. comments there are being read by people who already agree that the legislation sucks), but it is still worthwhile.
A much better approach, however, would be to CC those comments to letters@theage.fairfax.com.au as this a place to submit comments to their daily reader column for the printed version.
The Age does carry a lot of influence in Australia, and if they had the reactions of the rest of the world pushed at them, along with a valid reason as to why this should be an issue,then we could maybe get some press involvment and some proper public understanding (guaranteed to be followed by contempt) of what the Australian government has just done.
Make it happen. M@T
'sapientia potestas est'
This law will have to be reversed. Attempting to censor the Internet is worse than passing a bill saying "no swearing or saying 'crap'". It just won't happen. But the relevant authorities, the Government, and the Independant who it was done for (to get his GST vote - although he later withdrew it), are still stuck in the 1950s. And we're getting a GST (courtesy of our new Government make-up). We're not THAT MUCH of a backwards country ... we have slogans like "Drink, drive, you're a bloody idiot", and an ad where people say "Bugger!" a lot ... it's just our bloody Government. And, if you have porn or whatever, why not just move it to GeoCities, Tripod, or somewhere in the US, Europe, etc ?!? It just will not work ... and I hope the relevant people realise that, too.
This isn't the Australian equivalent of the lame-ass Canadian goods-and-services tax (aka the Mulroney Tax) is it?
Like, do ya think certain pro-censorship members of the US congress might be watching this one?
"We must protect the people from themselves" - that type of thing.
It sort of troubles me that with Al Gore (and pro-music censorship Tipper) and the M$-Republican party, we really have no good alternative for the year 2000 elections.
Never checked to see if it got published :>)
There is some pretty awful stuff on the internet. Child porn, rape,
mutilations, racism, the list goes on and on. It sickens me to see the
filth that is out there, and the last thing I want to see is young
children perusing this content.
But as abhorent as I find these things, I find the proposed legislation
on Internet censorship even more so. I see the people of Australia
giving up their right to free speech. How many countries have given up
their right (or potential right) to free speech this century? In every
single case, what has been the outcome?
The government claims to want to protect the children. That is an
admirable aim. But there is one problem. It is NOT the government's
responsibility to raise my children. That responsibility is mine and
mine alone. Too many parents are more concerned about their careers and
keeping up with the Jones' than to worry about what their children are
viewing on the net. It is the parent's responsibility to filter the
internet content, not the government.
It is also not the government's responsibility to tell me what I can and
can't view - with one major proviso - that no-one is endangered or
injured by my actions. There are existing laws to deal with the
sickness of child porn & such. People in their fever to
'protect the children' seem to forget this.
And how is content to be filtered? Will it be by the 'community moral
standard'? What happens when the community finds a particular political
view inappropriate? Or a particular sub-culture? The temptation to
remind people of the 'community moral standard' of Germany in the late
thirties is overwhelming. But it could never happen here, right? Where
does the censorship stop?
What of the hard-core pornographers? Do you believe they are frightened
by this legislation? If I was such a person, I would be elated! Guess
what just happened to the price of porn! And not just to the price of
porn. Everyone is going to be out of pocket. The astronomical task of
filtering content is so technically infeasible and will require so much
effort that the cost of getting wired will dramatically increase.
Smaller ISP's who cannot maintain such an effort will be forced out of
business. Ahhh, but our children will be protected, right?
Think again. As a youngster I could crack just about any computer
system, & I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. This is the
greatest irony - after all the effort of enforcing the censorship, kids
are still going to be viewing the filth.
Parents, you need to take a greater interest in what your kids are
doing. If that means taking a computer course to understand this
digital age, then do it. The responsibility for their upbringing is
yours. Do not fob it off to the government. These are not just your
rights that are at stake, but your children's rights.
And if some internet content offends you, don't look at it.
This content regulation bill has been passed despite everyone who knows what they're talking about saying it was not a Good Thing, because the people who makes laws didn't listen.
.au doesn't.
.au predicted. Pictures at /.
Yes, it's a Bad Law. It's restrictive. But what does it do?
Essentially, it makes illegal on the net that which can be freely purchased over the counter of a newsagent.
E-mail is *not* censored, but mail lists *are.* Somebody heard about lists but did not make the connection. ah well.
R-rated material (18+) can only be accessed after an "adult verification procedure", but content not hosted in
ISPs will be made responsible for all content on their servers, including mail lists but not email. The ABA can act only if a complaint is recieved. They give the ISP 24 hours to remove the offending material or face fines of AU$27,500, and the user faces AU$5,500 fines, PER DAY.
So Aussies will;
-Not be able to view Refused for Classification content or X rated content.
-Only be able to view Australian based R rated material if it is protected by adult verification procedures.
-R rated material from overseas will not require adult verification, thus putting local industry at a distinct disadvantage.
-Content will include all web sites and any other content which may be stored or archived.
-Email is classed as content and is not excluded.
-The ABA will be notifying Internet Providers and Hosters to block or remove content within 24 hours or large fines may be issued.
-Children will not be able to access the Interent without the concent of an adult.
-Adults must supervise and control children's access to Internet content.
that last one gets me. It renders the law pointless. Who is the law aimed at? Adults?
check out http://gomed.rodos.net/censor/bill-summary.html and http://www.efa.org.au/
Death of
More fruitbats in Literature!
In short, privately owned guns are no protection against governments becoming tyrannical.
That's because of weaseling on the part of the U.S. government. The thought behind that amendment was that the population would be armed on an equal footing with the military (at the time, rifles and cannon were all the army had).
The various restrictions on assault rifles missiles, tanks, and bombs are not consistant with the intent of the amendment.
The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are very plainly written, and meant for literal and absolute interpretation. Anything else is simply an insidious erosion of our rights.
I'll bet that providing VPN connections in other countries for Austrailians will be a big business. You can't censor what you can't decrypt.
I am bitterly dissapointed in which the manner the GST was brought in - by sacrificing the Australian people's freedom to persuade the vote of a man who holds values that were applicable in the early 1900's.
The fact that Senator Alston has forced his twisted way of how life should be, by holding the Government at ransom for his vote enrages me.
Instead of reforming the tax system Australia should be reforming it's govenrment, as doing so would far benifit Australia than the sale of Telstra, the introduction of the GST or the indroduction of cencorship laws for the Internet.
I have decided that one of my protests will be to purchase a copy of PGP 6 International and register it as a business related expense claim in the next financial year.
And on the lighter side of my protests, I'm happy to announce that even as I post this I am watching the fully uncensored version of Lady Chatterley's Lover on public access television - because I have the freedom to do so.
Alston, nay, everyone in the government, needs beatings. BEATINGS!!
Seriously, this law will probably end up like the Austel regulations regarding modem use. Use a non-Austel approved modem and you are liable for an $12,000 fine.
In all the years I have known about that regulation, I have yet to hear of one single private citizen being fined.
This law will be the same. If the son of a Senator downloads nasty pictures off your over-18 site, you're in trouble. For 99.9% of the rest though, nothing will probably ever happen. The law just makes it cut-and-dried for when they want to make a public example of a particular porn website that for some reason gets noticed in a scandalous way.
As one of me sagacious associates remarked to me today, "commonsense is not popular". I've already done my ranting about this subject, so I won't add much here.
Some have suggested that this law was a bone thrown to Senator Harradine in order to get his vote on the GST legislation. That was a nice theory at the time, but we know it didn't work, because Harradine voted against the GST. On the whole, I get the feeling that we have the cart before the horse on this issue: the government wanted the legislation and rammed it through before Harradine lost his balance of power position precisely because they knew he'd vote for it. Harradine's position was always that the proposed law wasn't strong enough, but of course anything is better than nothing. The government really wanted this law, and I don't think we need introduce conspiracy theories to explain it when simple "stupidity" provides an adequate answer.
There's also the suggestion that the general press didn't give this story the airplay and column-space that it deserved because of some self-serving interests. No, I don't see the need for a conspiracy theory here either. Australians in general don't see the film ratings system as an invasion of their rights, and PM John Howard can legitimately claim popular support for the morality-based censorship system that exists. Senator Alston (the minister whose portfolio covers this area) is basically right when he says that this law is simply applying existing censorship laws to the Internet. This is why the whole thing isn't newsworthy, except for a little coverage of the protest marches. Most people buy the logic of our politicians in this matter. Most people simply don't understand that their logic is flawed to hell.
The average Slashdot reader knows that the whole concept of Internet censorship is ludicrous, but the broader public (and our illustrious political leaders) don't. Educating them (the general public, not the politicians -- politicians only want to know about political expediency, not technology) would be a long and slow process if we had to do it ourselves. I can only hope that the vast majority of them will find whatever mechanisms we are obliged to use to "clean up" the Internet for them a complete and utter nuisance. May access times slow, may prices rise, may quality of service in a general sense go to hell, just for a little while. Australians are just as wired as the US, and once the nearly-40% of Australians who use the 'net get sick of their ISP saying "sorry, but we have to do it because of the Broadcasting Act," we'll see how quickly this stupid law gets taken out, or at least cut down to size.
I think the majority of Australians would be in favour of a ratings system for the Internet if it could be done without other negative impact. They just don't understand that it's impossible. Once the price of enforcing this law becomes apparent, I think we will have general support for its abolition. Please, God, may the damage to industry and our global reputation be as little as possible. We are stupid and we deserve the fruits of our own stupidity, but may it be as brief as possible.
Posted by Ungrounded Lightning Rod:
These laws SAY they are to clean up the net.
But that's not what they do. Instead they
allow the government to arrest, fine, confine,
and otherwise penalize those who "have broken
the law".
It's hard to run a pornographic - or an
anti-government or anti-party-in-power -
web site from jail, or without money.
And while martyrs might be an organizing
point, the example of what is done to them
makes many people think twice before repeating
what they did to provoke it - regardless of its
virtue.
The next step after the law is passed is to
run a test case - by busting the most disgusting
pornographer they can find and having a show
trial. Then they work their way down through
a few less blatant and more lucrative scumbags.
After that it might just go on hold until a
crisis is brewing.
But come big enough troubles for the
people in power, count on some of the internet
voices of their opposition being defined
as pornographers, and finding their computers,
money, and/or bodies siezed by the government.
They'll be out-of-service for weeks, months,
or years when the crisis times are measured
in days or hours.
There will be more of them than the government
can sieze. And some will be so obviously the
opposition's spokesmen that siezing them would
be counter-productive and might be avoided.
But every one down disrupts the
opposition's communication some more, and it's
the ones who reach the most that are the easiest
to find and stop.
Famous words from Public Enemy...
The news media in Oz report what the government and the "bleeding heart" politically correct vocal minority tell them to! Ground breaking stuff like this doesn't even rate a mention, yet the friggin' Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras get's it's own Documentary Special!!! You do the math!
All this crap becomes legislation without even a single referendum, these deals are brokered behind closed doors, forged to meet the hidden agenda of whoever the greedy politician was that wanted it, and then the Australian people are TOLD what to do, it's sickening - I thought democracy meant more than this...
Anarchism is a belief in the absense of formal government. In its purest form it is a simple belief in the ability of folks to get along without the necesity of laws and police and so forth. It's more of an organization concept than an economic concept. Of course, organization and economics can never be completly separated.
Grass roots, small scale, capitolism amongst honest folk is much more compatable with basic anarchism than any real world implementation of socialism has been.
But I guess that is unfair, compairing an idealized anarchic state with real world socialism.
The real world couldn't be run as an peaceful anarchy either. The best we can hope for is a reasonable spot on the continum from the anarchic to the totalitarian.
At least we aren't equating anarchy with violence.
they only said internet not bbs. so they cant control everything.
The legislation is completely infeasable, from what i have heard. Probably some "consultant" spun a line about filtering software, and the powers that be believed it (proving in the process that they are completely incompetent). I do not believe it will last long.
My worry is that it will last just long enough to wipe out all the little ISPs, while the big fish buckle down and weather the storm (to mix several metaphores indiscriminantly). The effect will be to destroy all the little stuff, the independant views that bind the web together, leaving just the big companies with legal muscle to spin their same old cotton-candy lies.
...started as a prison colony and still is a prison colony. All of you are prisoner's of some worthless government and haven't a way to make much of a stand. Citizens of Austrailia should be thinking of a revolt, it's the only way to change. If you want freedom you're going to have to fight for it.
A sales tax I Assume? I Canada GST = Goods & Services Tax.
I'm sorta a newbie at this kind of stuff, but I've noticed that IP addresses seem to change every time you connect to the net. So why can't I set up a server with no fixed domain name, fill it with porn, and then tell people about it through spam and BBS's? When they come to my site, they'll have the option of joining a mailing list; every day, I'll send out a mass mailing telling everybody who signed up about my new address. Is there any reason why that wouldn't work?
If you provided these services enough from North America, you could be wanted in Australia. Most western countries have an extradition treaty with them.
Once they get that through their heads, perhaps it will be the end of this.
Here in Canada, I am very glad that it was decided not to regulate internet content as if it were television or film.
WHy is it that keeping firearms are seen as the be-all and end-all solution to all political problems over there in the US?
:/ Madness.
I am damn well *glad* we got rid of most of our guns. Good riddence to bad rubbish.
I mean - you guys have got school kids blowing each other's brains out, and yet you keep telling every other country to give a gun to every citizen.
And please - none of that "Guns don't kill - people do" crapola. People kill a lot fewer people with a knife, than if they would with a semi-automatic.
Anyway. Off topic - but I couldn't let the firearm jibe slide.
They don't *want* to throw everyone in jail. They just want to have the *power* to throw anyone they want in jail. I'm just amazed that so many people don't realize the true implications of such overly broad laws. I see so many dictatorship apologists right here in America saying things like, "Ignorance of the Law is no excuse" or "If you're not doing anything wrong you've got nothing to fear" or the granddaddy of them all, "Love America or leave it!"
I suppose you have so-called 'patriots' like this in Australia too. *sigh* Is there any place left in this world where true freedom is possible?
The point is, the Australian government has more capricious and arbitrary power over its citizens. If they are passing a law that makes virtually everyone a criminal, why then they have the power to throw virtually anyone in jail. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, mate.
True, in the major parties we have no good choices. So vote for Ralph Nader! Or Bill Bradley! Or Michael Moore (if he snatches the Green nom from Nader)! Just don't lay down and let those bastards do whatever they want!
/.ers need a party of our own. Call it the Technocratic party, based not on ideology but on logic and common sense. It would fail miserably in the general elections, but at least we could say, "Well, we tried."
Y'know, us
She was the best thing that happened to Australia, now that she is gone Australia is going to hell and darkening on the way.
They could block out your entire subnet.
Whenever I connect to the internet, my computer' IP address is always the same except for the last number. It wouldn't me hard to block an entire class c network...i've been on ftp servers that do that, and irc channel ops have the power to do it as well.
I know what would scare me.. A Transparent Proxy. Very sneaky way to deal with the problem. Of course, they couldn't USE linux.. Our source code has dirty words ;-)
That is why you have Internet censorship.
Humm... Have our government try and pass a law which will be overturned anyway or kill 12 kids a day in the name of "freedom"? How long until the gun becomes part of the school classroom?
...in the 1996 elections. Sure, he's nowhere near 35, but neither Clinton nor Dole did anything for me. I didn't think Ralph Nader was presidential material either, whereas Griffey Jr. has the charisma to carry the job off, and the moose seems like a reliable back-up.
This is very odd... As if the Australian government has listened to the song "Anthem for the year 2000"...No but really.. Silverchair denounces the government in this song...and they talk about the year 2000 being when they young folks get the power... And they pass their Internet Bill on January First..HaHaHa...
Australia is gonna regret it very profoundly...
...let's universally fair and extend that generalization out to all the world's politicians, or perhaps just the politico profession in general.
Ocassionally one runs into a good or even great politician; however and in general, while weasel their way up from dog catcher to some mildly important postion they cross some sort of moral/ethical/philosophical boundary to turns them into the most estemed scum of the earth. Then again, I've always felt that I was only qualified to represent myself. I think, in essence, that's what being a freeman is about.
Hey all,
How far does this bill work... for example, if I knew of a 'security' web site that a particular enemie of mine owned, and on that site had the odd bit of fscking bad language, could I report that site as being offensive and thus have it closed down ?
Ya, but much legislation passed is set to take effect at the beginning of the following calendar year... usually with the effect of lawsuits being filed (ACLU or the Aussie equivalent) which prevent the beast from ever going into effect.
later.
Subject says it all.
Whenever such wide-ranging unenforcable legislation passes, history has shown it be result in SELECTIVE ENFORCEMENT.
.sig file... what would you like to open it with?" ---linux
"Microsoft windows does not recognize this
@gamehacker.com? Playing quake made you feel real tough, huh?
This is a stupid law. If you make stupidity a capital offense, remember 50% of the poulation is below average intelligence by definition.
The tone of your post inclines me to categorise you below the line.
Violent overthrow of government might work some time in the future, but the past indicates the odds are against. Too many babies get thrown out with the bathwater.
You want to be a terrorist? Playing games ain't gonna get you there.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Australia is not the USA. We are not neck deep in garbage with religious fundementalists the way the USA often seems to be.
After the legislation is shown to be unworkable, it will be thrown out ( like your "no flag-burning" ). Everyone will have a good laugh at the expense of the idiots who proposed the legislation and we will all settle back over a few cold beers.
When are you going to understand - the way that things get done in the USA is not the way that they get done in other places?
Well, the definition of what is risque is cultural. In Kazikistahn, women showing their ankles is considered a lewd act. In Australia, bare breasts on TV isn't something that we care too much about. We've had two TV shows about sex, notably "Sex" and "Sex/Life", plus numerous documentaries. Both of these TV shows showed both sexes naked at various times. I belive the broadcasting laws say it's ok, as long as it's after 9PM. I've been back in Australia for 3 days, after spending 11 months in Canada, where almost all of the TV is American. In three days of casually flicking through all 5 of our TV stations, I've seen more nudity than all the time I was in Canada.
;-)
Maybe they should have put a clause like that into these net censorship laws. No www.playboy.com before 9PM
How do you think Hitler got control of Germany? It was done step by step. Small measures which didn't seem that restrictive, and wasn't really enforced that hard either (it was done silently - they went after important parts of the opposition first, and only when they were in complete control did they start cracking down on the rest of the people).
No, the current Australian government aren't likely to be nazis. But the point is that when you first start allowing censorship, you're on a slipperly slope that unless stopped can, and eventually will, end in disaster.
Just as a side note, that photograph of the demonstrator in Tianhmen square was taken by an Australian photographer ;-)
...as a way of emphasising the fact that we don't have any patience left for the usual left wing/right wing party political garbage?
I like that term since it also implies that some of us might want to actually go off-world...
As an Australian, I'm going to do with this bill what the Europeans do with stupid EU legislation. I'm going to ignore it.
After a few test cases it will be thrown out, it's completely unworkable.
There was a wonderful story in this week's " This is True" about New Zealand censors being required to view all the scenes in computer games to rate them, but simply not having enough time (12 hours of video, 100 hours gameplay - it's not like watching a 90 minute movie).
Kris.
Win a Rio (or join the SETI Club via same link)
As a service provider wouldnt this mean that after Jan 1 2000 I may get a phone call asking me to prevent CustomerA accessing www.hardcore.com
The best way I can think of restricting this access is userdel CustomerA
Problem solved!
It's not surprising that many politicians jump on the 'PC' bandwagon. It has very little to do with protecting the rights of the minority, and everything to do with PC thought being closely aligned with the totalitarian impulses of the power elite.
The most common PC argument in favor of totalitarian government 'to protect minority rights' that I hear is: "Well, if group A is ten times bigger than group B, then group B is ten times more likely to experience discrimination at the hands of group A than group A is to experience discrimination at the hands of group B - therefore, group B deserves rights above and beyond the rights granted to the majority."
If you buy that kind of argument, you're an idiot. If you wonder why, post as a non-AC and I'll happily expose your idiocy to the world.
I just returned from a conference last week here in Australia that had a session dealing with this new legislation. One word describes it... scary.
Not only are the Australian government try to censor material here in Australia, they are trying to censor material from outside Australia!
Note that content is not by default to be blocked. Only when a complaint is made and investigated will the service provider have to remove the content (and only that content) for content on their site and also ensure that that content *never* reappears on their site.
For content outside of Australia, once the complaint has been investigated the provider must block access to this content.
Upon receipt of a notice, the provider has until 6pm the next business to remove or block content. Fines of $27500 (for companies, $5500 for individuals) per offence per day for non-compliance are also very scary.
It will be very interesting to see if this legislation will survive for long.
Crimes committed with a firearm is up in Australia since the ban. Per person you are more likely to be assaulted in Australia than in the U.S. Not everyone in the U.S. lives in L.A. or N.Y. City. A so called 'fair market value' is a crock. It's still forced. You don't turn in the firearm you are automatically made a felon. The money for guns scheme is just an endrun around any sound Constitution.
The big pattern I see here is that after they ban guns major censorship laws are passed. That's why the U.S. Constitution has the 2nd amendment. Because all the free speech in the world doesn't amount to a hill of beans when buraucrats don't listen.