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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?
How come Sweden, which has so many guns per capita still has a low crime rate?
Crime rate really doesn't correlate to guns.
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 :)
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
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...
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.
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.
:-)
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Wanted for what? I'm not an Austrailian ISP. And of course, there are many countries such a service could be provided from.
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)