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Australian Censorship-client side filters
mikecheng writes "The Internet Industry Association in Australia has decided how it will implement the new censorship laws in this country - mandatory cliet-side filtering. Read here how you must use net-filtering software (NetNanny and the like) and you must supply to your ISP a "a guarantee [you] are using client-side filtering". Of course you have to be using one of the "approved" filtering programs, or else the ISP charges you $5 and filters for you. (Now all I need is an approved open source filter!) "
ditto aswell
stupid, two bit, regressive, tin pot, country of mine
Ah typical brainless pro-gun rant. The volient crime rate in Australia may be up, but so is the volient crime in the US. And You just happened to forget to mention that the murder rate in Australia has dropped. In the US the volient crime rate is up, the murder rate is also up. The only good news for the US in terms of crime rates is that the volient crime of younger people is dropping. I have thought for myself and you know what I still can't see why I would want to own a gun. I don't like guns, the only thing a gun is good for is shooting things. Well I don't want to shoot things, I find the idea truly disgusting. And whether you want to believe it or not the simple fact of the matter is that if there are less guns, then less people die as result of guns. That is a simple undeniable fact. So if you insist on the idea that everyone should owns guns, then you can stay in the US cleaning your guns and surfing the internet without censorship and I will stay in Australia and still be able to surf the internet uncensored, simply by ignoring the stupid internet laws. And the only difference is that I can walk home at mid-night thru the worst part of town and be fairly safe.
No it doesn't make normal people break the law. What it does is nothing, if you are 18 in Australia then the government can't stop you looking are what ever want. The aim of the law was to stop x-rated web sites being available to the public, you can't buy x-rated magazines here, you can get them but you have to mail order them. The aim of the law was to do the same thing to web sites. So if you are 18 there is no law against you looking are porn, but there is now a law which stop you making those sites available to the public without somekind of censorship. That is all it means. So it is only forcing under 18 year old break the law.
For at least one small moment you feel what it is like to live here in the US.
Don't worry though. Wait until the EU starts paying attention to the Internet. I'm a motorcyclist and right now the EU is busy trying to enforce power limits, enact mandatory side airbag laws for motorcycles, and eliminate the aftermarket parts and tire markets. So far, the EU is far worse than the US. Just wait until they get around to the web. Anytime you create a giant beauracracy like the EU or the US government, it can't leave anything alone. It just has to legislate, legislate, legislate.
There's so many dorks running around on Slashdot crying about the loss of freedom, etc blah blah blah. If you don't want to run software filtering then you just don't. It pisses me off when you get Americans ripping on Australia when they are like 50x more fucked up than we are. We're just heading in the same direction.
What makes you think that Australia needs any kind of funding from the U.S. ?
Whilst I think that the Australian Government does suck up the the U.S. you guys aren't that rosy either.
Remove the tariffs from Australian lamb.
And you my fascist friend, are the poof.
Politicians and mass media go together like, well, things that go together well. Politicos lack the mental capacity to deal with real issues, so the media bends the "truth" to fit whatever agenda profits the most. The media need politicians to demonstrate "results" like this stupid law, since it's much harder to go out and look at objective reality.
err your right
Liberal big L is the political party.
liberal little l is the adjective.
They arent supposed to be the same.
So if you don't think the same way that you do and have the same ideals/beliefs then you are an ignorant moron? Read your post again, I think you'll find that's what is ignorant.
As a fellow linux person told me a while ago, this law also prohibits australians from downloading linux kernel sources, since there are quite a few 'naughty' words in the comments scattered around in there.. So what is the next logical step for Australia? A total conversion to Micro$oft, or go to jail for being a linux-addict.. -- Ren Hoek (ren@arak.ptf.hro.nl)
I meant to say "ignoramus". I guess that makes me one. Sorry.
Maybe the original poster was a troll, I don't know. It didn't seem too much flame bait to me. Moderation was possibly the worst thing to ever happen to /.
or people allow this to happen. being forced to run netnanny... sounds like insulting people's intelligence. Don't think I'll be accepting jobs in australia any time soon.
I was rather amused to see tonight's TV line up included the Italian movie "Forbidden to Minors" (on SBS, of course, at 12:50am) which reads: "A pornographic film is shot in secrecy on the Island of Elba. (MA: A, L, Sx) (Rpt)" Censoring the Internet was an easy brown-nose for the government; sure, they've annoyed a hell of a lot of Internet users, but since most of them are young, they're usually smart enough not to vote conservative. In contrast, censoring SBS is guaranteed to hurt them in the marginals. Wake up Australia - don't vote for these turkeys!
Check it out if you're Australian in Australia!!!
While I'm totally disgusted about the censorship laws, I strongly disagree with this comment. Australia has a preferential system, where the person most people _prefer_ gets in, rather than the person who gets the most first votes. And that's really good, because if I vote for a small party, and they don't get in, I should still be able to choose which big party I prefer. It's only people blindly preferencing the way their party tells them and not understanding the system that fucks it up. And big parties have no interest educating people, since people actually think that if they don't vote for a major party their vote is wasted. If that changed we might get some fucking accountability in politicians.
Damn - no lynx support. But there's an even funnier solution: a secure web proxy which claims to be a porn filter. Imagine the fun they'll have if everyone picks this as their government-mandated solution. Everyone will be flinging encrypted packets around, and the government will lose all clue as to what's going on on the net.
Just install an approved filter, "advise" your ISP that you have the filter (you're not lying!) and then uninstall it. Problem solved!
Sheesh, do we yankees have to figure everything out for you?
Are the databases used by these programs editable? (never used one) Wouldn't it be possible to go in, clear out the database except maybe one or two sites (microsoft.com and aol.com) :) so you can truthfully say "Yes, I am running censoring software". A step further - if this can be done, maybe someone would be so kind as to submit a crack to spread to the censored oppressed to crack into the censorware and empty the database... Anyone up to a sneak attack of local libraries? :)
It is released under the GPL.
We Americans expect this kind of shit in our political system. Sometimes it surprises us to find out other nations can be just as bad.
Actually, the violent crime rate is down in the US. Just out of curiosity, how often do you "walk home at midnight, thru the worst part of town?"
No, people who choose not to take any interest in the actions of their representatives and live their lives uninformed about history and current events are ignornant morons.
even more twisted than Sluggy Freelance.
"die die die"
In Australia we say mum not mom.
That's a very typical mature slashdot response to a serious problem. Instead of proposing a legitimate protest, you'll just mailbomb them... don't you people ever learn?
Actually, its the US that is mixed up... liberal, conservative, and a few other political terms mean different things in the US than they do in the rest of the world.... I'm from the US, but facts are facts, we are the ones being different here.
What an amazing coincidence that in Australia you can't own a handgun, rifle, or even an airgun. This has been shown time and time again, when a govt takes away the basic right for its citizens to arm themselves, it doesn't have nice things in mind. The cycle has begun, it's only gonna get worse for Aussies until they do something about it. DON'T let this happen in the USA. www.nra.org
was shut down the 'pornographers'. Most folks applauded. Look how well that turned out.
Probably the most intelligent thing that's been said about this whole affair. Anarchy rules!
I think a lot of computer geeks who call themselves "libertarians" are really anarchists are heart, they just don't know it yet.
In my head. It's called common sense. I use it when I find something objectionable. It causes me to hit the "back" button, or go somewhere else.
Despite that... I don't think the filtering is actually the issue at hand here... I think it's the idea that this is a precedent for accepting censorship as acceptable (on ANY level), and requiring even with an impotent law that it be mandated. The next law may not be so unobtrusive or easy to get around.
And then the right wing racist kook element in the Australian legislature catches on and forces ISPs to drop ssh'ed packets because any encrypted data stream might be carrying porn, and offer anyone who disagrees the same $25,000 a day fines that they're facing now from the current law.
You left out "George and Liddy", son. Don't think any party that gets a seat at the presidential debates is innocent of wanting the net a little more bland.
And we all remember how well it worked out when the Clinton White House said "Look, the Canadians have a single-payer health care system, we can do the same here! There may be a strong HMO/insurance lobby, but now there's precedent."
So they NOTICE! So it HURTS! So that they TAKE ACTION! Of course you punish the majority. If you don't, they can just kick dirt over it and get along. If they suffer, they might be inclined to do something about it.
Sure, I understand not paying verisign. But does the certification on your site serve any purpose(aid to another function for example)? Because if it isn't needed for something else, it has no function, since you have signed it yourself.
Filter programs Block more ANTI-Porn Sites than Porn Sites!!! Oh well i can breath more easyer though AU government is spineless anyway they like passing Feel good laws with no teeth. Its Australian :-)
Ackkk!! Don't wish such things upon us. What was that figure..90% of canadians work for the governent? Things like socialized medicine are why the governemt is so huge over there. The way I see it, it's like giving nearly *all* of your money to the govt, for the privelige of obtaining free band-aids(Which cost the govt 100$ apiece to manufacture due to inefficiancy and corruption). Whe the govt purchases stuff here in the US, it pays 500 dollars for a hammer. 100 dollars for a little piece of plastic that fits on the bottom of a chair leg, etc. To have that level of stupidy and corruption running the *entire* medical system just scares the shit outta me. It would be a slow death for the nation.
australia cant revolt now. their citizenry allowed firearms to be taken away from them. just goes to show you that people who will sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
We need an open source filter that can filter ads. I'm tired of watching 1 minute of flashing pictures whenever I connect to sites, even (gasp) slashdot. Perhaps I need to write one for Apache. Is anybody actively working on this? Tim daly@mhv.net
How about a plug-in for the "net-nanny" that filters out objectionable politicians? Let's see their opinion on censorship when they themselves are censored. By the way, what's a shonk?
Yes. They come a little bit closer to speaking English there.
Some were not only ineffective, they seemed to preferentially scoop up porn sites. Some were amazingly good.
Then somebody pointed out the ineffective ones just happened to be recommended at the begin pages of porn sites, and Focus on the Family had recommended the few effective ones.
Now how does that sit with all the liberal do-gooders, following the recommendations of James Dobson. Hope you choke on it.
It seems the most common response to this system is "just lie." This is absolutely the wrong answer. This is what THEY want you to do. The next stage will be coming down the pipe, and when it does, it will be justified by your lying. Lie and say you did... and abandon the moral high ground that is rightfully yours, allow the true issue to be completely buried, and eventually you will get what you deserve. "When the law is unjust the just man's place is in gaol."
This (assuming you are in the US) is NOT a democracy, it's a Republic. There is a reason for that. "Those who would trade their liberty for a little peace and security will eventually get what they deserve - neither." Ben Franklin, paraphrased from memory so don't flame me if it's not the exact words. :P
Slashdot has done this for a long time. If you are a registered user and consistently get moderated to higher scores, your posts begin to start at a higher number. (and presumably you start getting moderation points.
huH!?? we have radio shacks galore with electrical kits and magazines to build anything we like.
At least we dont have shootings in schools.
wearing helmets is logical, dumb head.
2. 3rdparty isnt required in all states, jus tlike USA
3. we dont, our employer invests the 6% into super for us. , hell doesnt hurt does it.
Your a moron, you dont have to install it, just say "yes" whenthe ISP says, "areu running it?"
at least you have a 1000x more likely chance to live here than usa.
At least we dont have 100000 nuke targets too, so watchout... china's gona nuke u
Nothing could be easier. In Australia with have two main political parties. These are the Liberals and the Labor Party. So the Liberals are the conservatives, they are not as conservative and the right wing of the Republican party in the USA, but they are still conservative. The Liberal party is pro economic rationalism, and moral conservatism. The Labor Party is the blue collar party, at least that is how they started, the Labor Party is very pro Union, welfare, government funded education and hostpitals.
Learn your history... Most revolutions have been carried out by large amounts of unarmed or poorly armed people going against substantially better armed governments, or by guerillas that armed themselves despite government bans on guns. If you actually believe that not having guns in the hand of every citizen will ever stop a real revolution, then you're thoroughly mistaken, and misled by NRA propaganda.
At least once or twice a week after Uni.
Your just brainless. Owning guns is not about freedom. And if you really want to know I not anti all guns. I'm anti guns in cities and I'm anti guns for sale in shops and I'm anti guns without very strict licencing. If you can prove why you absolutely must have a gun then I don't have a problem with it. Some people do have good reasons to own guns (farmers, professional hunters). But I don't think people should just be allowed to walk into a shop and buy a gun. I don't think self-defence is a good reason to own a gun. In England most common crimnals don't carry guns, the reason for this is they don't need to. Police don't carry guns so the criminals don't have to worry about being shot by police, as a result they don't have the need to carry guns. If you don't believe me go and check how many people are arrested in England for carry a gun, you could also check how many gun deaths they have compared to the US, also check how police are shot at. You should start to get the idea that, if guns are not easierly available then nobody feels to the need to carry a gun all the time. And less people die as a result of guns.
Owning a gun is not about freedom, I would feel more free if I did not have to worry that some psycho-lunatic can walk into a shop buy a gun then walk into a school and start killing poeple. That is what scares me and if in I owned a gun I still wouldn't be able to stop him. As a result people would die, the fact that I'm also allowed to own a gun doesn't not make feel even slightly better. Answer stop people being able to get guns without a very good, well investigated reason.
No, no, no.
This is how it works.
The Liberals are conservatives, Labor is liberal, One Nation is divisive, the Greens are led by someone called Brown, and the Democrats are republicans.
I love Australia.
If I move to Australia, I'll simply tell my ISP that I have a wetware content control system in place, and that'll be that.
I'm all for it. I'm bigger than you, I WIN. End of story. WHuHu.
I have read a lot of people asking "How can such a thing happen in a democracy like Australia?" The answer to this question is important for people living in any democracy.
One of the basic principles of a modern democracy is that people are allowed to make free and open decisions, vote etc, based on the information they have and beliefs they form from that information.
Information - that is the key word. Where do we all get information in the modern age? The mass media. We rely on the media for the inforamtion we use to develop and make politcal decisions.
The inevitable result of this is that political agenda are determined principally by the mass media. Now as we are all aware the age of single proprieter newspapers is long since gone. The media is controlled by very large corporate entities, throughout the "Western" world. These corporate entities have a single motive - profit.
This motivation affects the political agenda in several ways. Consider teh Lewinski debacle. Major news in Australia and Canada (and just about everywhere else). Why? Because media organisations knew this story will sell (we all love a good story involving sex, power, money and politics).
Now let's look at Australia. As many readers have pointed out the Liberal-National Govt in Australia (which is actually Conservative) had at the time been trying to push through a GST legislation. At the time a certain arch-conservative Senator Brian Harradine held the balance of power in teh Senate, and thus his vote (in conjunction with the Liberal-National coalition)could pass this legislation.
The big winners from the GST package is large corporations, who benefit from reductions in payroll tax expenditure (paying income tax on behalf of employees) and reductions in corporate tax. Who benefits from the GST - large media corporations eg News Limited (newspapers), Channel 9 (packer) etc.
Playing on the idea that if Lib-Nat coalition looked as though it were concerned about porn on the Net (protecting children etc)the Lib-Nats introduced the Net censorship legislation.
Australians never supported this legislation (surveys have shown that over 90% of parents believe censorship is teh role of the parent and not govt), however very little public discussion took place while the Bill was in parliament. That is not to say NO discussion took place, but compared to other news articles (Lewinski, cricket, old lady mugged in home $5 stolen), very little activity on the part of media vendors about this topic. What little attention there was, was very biased (Senator Alston proclaiming anyone opposing this Bill was supporting peadophiles!)
NAturally without avid media discussion, very little public discussion took place. One day Australians woke up and the Bill had been passed. Had you missed the last few minutes of the nightly news (just before sport) you would not have even known that the Bill passed.
What is teh point of this overly lengthy treatise? Media outlets chose not to make Net Censorship a part of the political agenda. Why? Because at teh time they believed that HArradine would pass the GST legislation if NEt Censorship went ahead. If censorship had been at teh forefront of the political agenda there is no way the govt could have proceeded given the opposition to the bill. Solution - let's not talk about it, then noone will know, no public outcry.
There is a lesson for all of us here. Big business owns all our media - they participate in setting the political agenda.
Rupert Murdoch owns the US political agenda as much as he does the Australian. IF trappling over US political rights is what it takes to make more money, they will. Before you start screaming Constitutional rights, it will be irrelevant. The damage might be done and you will never know, cause Rupert never told you!
PS Harradine never voted for the GST anyway. Legislation was a waste of political effort as it was.
Yeah, I want to know that too! I live in Australia and I think that being *forced* to run certain software on my computer is pretty bad... now all M$ has to do is pressure this comittee to choose software which is only available for their pseudo-OS... And no, there is no guarantee of freedom of speech in our constitution. Heck, we don't have a Bill of Rights at all! The people who wrote it figured that the government would be nice enough to provide citizens with all those rights on it's own. Pretty silly assumption. The only rights that are guaranteed citizens by the Australian constitution AFAIK are the guarantee against double jeapordy, and a guarantee that job applicants will not be discriminated against on the basis of religion. The second one being pretty silly, since our head of state, the queen/king has to be an Anglican under British law.
Or more like...
Bend over, drop your pants, and I'll show you where it's installed.
As a self professed cyberpunk the idea that the IIA, which represent corporations not the people, is hand balling the cost and inplementation of F@#Cking studid brainless governmental luddites ideas of 1950's utopia takes the cake. we know which F@#kers will first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Your choice I guess. Run Windows 98SE with NetNanny or go to prison so you can be fucked up the ass by some scary faggot who will claim ownership over your anal cavity.
I have to confess i like to get up people from the US for not standing up for themselves and accepting there governments opressive crypto laws. But now it seems i am much the hypocrite :( Im am surely embarased by the auctralain censoriship laws. But what to do about it ? How can you fight these people ? Do politicians really care? Im no expert but i think australia is pretty poor when it comes to protecting the rights of an individual. (but we arent considered convicts anymore !) We really need one of those bill of right thingys that you have in the USofA, however i dont expect to find one lying around anytime soon. Maybe i should just become ignorant again.....
Do we need guns to make our opinions carry weight? Is violence the first, last and only resort of the dispossessed?
Do you think that giving citizens the right to bear arms ensures your freedom?
Certainly the principle is heart-felt: In the event of an oppressive regime taking power, there are definitely enough guns in the US to foster a violent revolution....
But since less than a tenth of the US population is even bothered to VOTE, I can't imagine there would be enough interest in the situation to support a revolution - violent or otherwise.
Carrying a gun has nothing to do with freedom moron.
Strangely enough, our 5 free-to-air television channels have more sex and "bad language" than all the non pay-per-view networks in the US combined...
Of course - we don't actually have *any* pay-per-view channels at present.
As for stupid laws and smart laws - the one political body never makes all the laws at one time.
They're always lumbered with the laws previous eras have created until such time as these laws are repealed...
Then I suppose it would not be `technically feasible' to filter your internet usage. Maybe that means that people using alternative OS's don't have to censor their own usage.
at http://people.qualcomm.com/karn/code It's by Phil Karn of tcpip fame. I've been using it for about a year to block advertisements Joe
Its the only way to be sure...
Which countries do have "Free Speech"? I'm not surprised Australia has no Free Speech clause because few countries do. I've always thought Free Speech was some weird ass American thing.
>We have all been living happily in a world where >we have not had to put up with prohibitions on >what we can read or see That's simply not true. Australia is one of the few Western countries that still censors the written word. A couple of years one of the women's magazines here had to pull a cover-mounted paperback that they were giving away because it was too raunchy. Australia has no guarantee of freedom of speech, either generally or for political speech. This Internet censorship mess is completely consistent with decades of insane, wowserish limitations on freedom.
The 150 million people murdered this century at the hands of communists might take issue with that.
Supportive members from the GNU community will set up proxys around the globe for the Aussies to get their unfettered IP feeds from. Packets will be encrypted and then send to the land of Oz where they will not set off filtering software, Local machines will then decrypt the packets and relay them to local nodes for distribution to the masses. Outbound traffic will follow a reversed process. Free speech and open communication will continue to live and thrive while closed minded asshole bureaucrats fume in their lairs!
Ho man, isnt Astralia a democratie? You cant pretend to be a democratie if you dont allow the free circulation of ideas. It seems that the powers that be may not be those who are elected. Just like in the US. On top, you have corporate interests, the you have the gov., then the church, then the people. alexandre Leduc
Please. Do people forget all the communist countries this world has seen the past century? I suppose the Soviet Union and China were bastions of freedom. Please provide an example of a "right-wing" based dictatorship that comes close to the 100+ million killed at the hands of communists this century.
OK, so this is a done deal. Too late to do anything about stopping it's passage.
Time for civil disobedience.
If you have to use "approved" filtering software, then we've got a closed set of what's being foisted on people.
I've never advocated this before, but I think it is a moral imperative (seriously) that people who see this for what it is do what they can do to stop it. Time to start writing viruses that kill the "approved" filtering software. If the law depends on client side filtering software, then the law is useless if the software cannot work reliably. We're all clever hackers here, and we can collectively bring all of these packages to their knees and keep them there. Sure, the Aussie gov't and the companies can throw coders to adjust for the viruses, so we mutate them, release new ones. They can't match us for knowledge or resources.
Can someone please post a list of "approved" filters so we know what we need to attack.
This is the same country which forbids citizens from building electrical projects because of the dangers involved. I remember reading about this a few years ago. Austrailia definitely qualifies as an authoritarian government. I suggest you people start planning your revolution now.
And you thought Iridium freaked out gov'ts!
In the first place that's Java Script not perl. In the second place IE breaks legit code. Don't use a broken-standard browser and blame a language that's not being used.
Australia is about as democratic as the US, ie a one party state masquerading as a two party state.
pompomtom
740 Unexpected close of server socket
Connection closed by foreign host.
That's rich. We in the US are responsible because the flueless cucks in the Australian govt. prefer laws to insight. I thought we were the nation of puritans? I'll never understand the need of the many to control the thoughts of the few, behavior yes, thoughts no. Oh well, too late smart, too soon old...
It just proves to me that human stupidity and ignorance dominates life no matter what part of the world you live in. Every once in a while, some government somewhere makes a decision that falls on the side of common sense. Unfortunately, it's almost never intentional. Cluelessness just happens to err in your favor sometimes, and against you most of the time. I wonder if the entrepreneurs during the industrial revolution had to deal with a bunch of idiot farmers in government.
So eh, HEHE, we're suggesting that giving the bright boys guns and bhudism would somehow improve their lot?
But we can't let ideals separate us from reality. I think that the freedom ideal is very nice - democracy does indeed depend on it. But how can you say that "Most people really are completely ignorant and don't give a damn about freedom"? Is anybody who doesn't give a damn about freedom ignorant? What's wrong with having a comfortable standard of living?
Personally, I think that it's a crime to restrict freedoms to such an absurd extent. People should be allowed to do certain things for themselves when it doesn't affect others. But at the same time, this *is* a democracy. Putting yourself ahead of others just creates another special interest.
fsck this noise... I'm moving to holland.
Yea I've always wanted to do this. Maybe a commune would be a better approach. We could live by the Constitution unlike the rest of the country.
Did this hit the news in oz? Did anyone make a stink about it? What the fuck is wrong with you people down there?
Oh to hell with you all.
You said:
I assume that the Austrailian goverment likes to suck up to NSA, (or add a US goverment agency here) so they can get more funding.
Geez -- does the US have to fund everything ? I wouldn't mind us throwing our weight around if I agreed with more that we did. In actuallity, Australia is not one of those African countries we fund, I rather suspect they send out a lot of money to other places.
Which is not to say they don't suck up the NSA and friends.
I am suprised by the number of /. posters who think this will actually filter any net content. First off, the ISP has no good way of verifying the actual use of the filter. Second, to be in absolutely *formal* compliance you could configure a filter with nothing on the kill list - the wording only says you have to advise you're running a filter - it says nothing about what must be blocked. Yeah its ugly that the Aussie gov't did this, and yeah its ugly that you have to lie to maintain your freedom, but the net effect is zilch. Very much like the US gov't ban on exporting serious crypto - you think Saddam hasn't got an agent here who has already gotten copies of everything useful and shipped it home. Actually, its good from an anarchist point of view to train people to sneer at their laws and use every trick in the book to slip around them.
Constitution ?, whats that ? They don't have a constitution. I'd quote you the pre-amble from the proposed one, but a) I can't remember it, and b) I find it really hard to type when I'm laughing ;) "I just work here"
We have a prime minister who has stated he want's to take australia back to 50's family value's, The senate commitee had no one who knew even what a computer looks like, but they where given all the information. The senate commitee was concerned about Australia's children and themselves B). So on the 1st Jan 2000 we have internet censorship laws, a new tax system and the y2k bug :). And plenty of IT Personel B)
getting around it doesn't change the fact. aussies just submitted like the slaves they are to the big gov
'nuff said.
Its pure communism, plain and simple, under the guise of "saving the children," slowly infiltrating all major governments of the world. Last thing I heard communism had nothing to do Christianity, BTW.
It was written 100 years ago. There have been proposed changes to the preamble. Maybe that's what your referring to.
What a troll. Let me address the "disarmed" part first. If this law were passed in the "armed" US, do you think anybody with a weapon would do anything about it? Do you really think that anybody should respond to this with deadly force? I own several firearms, but I would never, EVER, even consider pointing them at any other citizen for any reason, especially one who just disagrees with me on some political issue.
Second, religion is everybody's right, but nobody's obligation. If you just blame Christianity, you've missed the point. Morals transcend religion. At my age, almost everybody I know has small children. None of us wants to see porn on network TV, but none of us are in favor of mandatory filtering software either. My friends are Christian, Jewish, and agnostic.
I am Christian, I'm a gun owner, I watch porn with my wife, I shield my kinds from porn, and I totally disagree with what Australia is doing. Where in your narrow categorization do I fit?
no one deserves freedom. they all need to just be thr0wn in priz0n and raped up the ass for their own good.
Australia has a tradition of poor legislature.
m )
;)
(If censorship weren't bad enough, consider yesterday's news which brought to light a court desicion that:
IN AUSTRALIA GENOCIDE IS NOT UNLAWFUL!
(not even in the context of Common Law)
(One wonders how many ex-Nazis were welcomed to the country, provided that they were bringing lots of money along with them.
This could also help to explain the way the 'Net Censorship legislation got through and/or the mind-sets at work here.)
While Australian Net Censorship Legislation pushes Australian content-providers' web sites off-shore, the country's pro (online) gambling
legislation attracts online casinos, et al. (from off-shore) to Australia.
Let's not forget that Australia has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and hope that whatever has disconnected its legislators from its People, and the common good, gets reconnected ASAP.
It seems that many feel powerless to change the direction of government; in fact, one outspoken commentator - who used a Linux Users Group mailing-list to call for support of a Bill of Rights (rather than a continuing need to "fire-fight" each & every infringement of freedom that comes out of the country's legislature) was ultimately banned from the LUG's mailing-list.
Controvertial outspokeness is not tolerated in Australia, even in those places where one might expect it to flourish. It is this tradition of
"self-censorship" that holds back a people from freedoms that works elsewhere in the world.
Ah, but then, since it's only a matter of cost... (for net-nanny-style client-side filters -or- newer, faster infrastructure... i.e. to compensate for the "speed-hump" that net censorship comprises... well, some vendors - like the aforementioned producers of goods - will be pleased-as-punch to help Australia "solve all of its Internet problems"... for a price, of course!)
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Australia seems to be a country of "mugs" at least in some ways.
ABC (or was its Radio National? In any case, a gov't radio station) interviewed a man who - *after* suggesting that in USA, et al. it was the common citizens (as individuals) who comprise source of the nation's leadership - *later* maintained that, in Australia, there was still a need for leaders, such as himself, who were somehow invested with what it takes to lead the masses. (I assume that monarchism might explain such a train of thought...)
The idea was so repulsive to me that I tuned it out... but, in hindsight, I would have liked to have noted the interviewee's name & looked for a transcript of the interview for you to read... and laugh at (or better, respond to...)!
It would seem that the strong (and limiting) colonial powers of Australia's past... have simply been transferred into local hands.
They inhibit "public interst law" - to use Ralph Nader's term - (to hear it directly from Ralph, c.f. http://www.law.indiana.edu/law/realaudio/nader.ra
Genetically Modified foods will not be identified (the producers' needs outweigh any rights of the consumers to know about the products they are offered).
For a long time even "Imported" was enough to put on a product from elsewhere in the world; one would not be told from *which* country the goods
came (e.g. in case one would have liked to partipate in a boycott for political reasons).
Elsewhere, we find governments "protecting" its citizens & residents by providing MORE information, not less - with which the people can inform themselves and make their will known to their legislators, after due consideration of that information...
In Australia, the government decides, not always for reasons that are in the interests of the people.
'still "riding on the sheep's back" in Asutralia, except now:
It's the government... and the sheep are the "mugs" of the population.
Let's help the Aussie gov't lift its game...
If I use your secure proxy to connect to your secure proxy through a mirror of your secure proxy, do I enter a time warp? Or do my packets just get crushed into singularity (1bit)?
I can't go that far. I like technology and I like human companionship. I like to learn. I have strong opinions about what humanity should be achieving.
I do have experience in the wilderness (no more than about 3 weeks at a time), I've done a fair bit of hunting, I've had survival training in the military, and I love nature and exploration. But I couldn't live my life outside of society.
I have no interest in giving up on society. I'm just really dissapointed (almost heartbroken)
It didn't say if the filter was supposed to let anything through at all. Was there any specification of how long this filtering software is supposed to be "activated"?
Sorry about the nearly duplicate post, I've got a hyperactive TAB key.
I can't go that far. I like technology and I like human companionship. I like to learn. I have strong opinions about what humanity should be achieving.
I do have experience in the wilderness (no more than about 3 weeks at a time), I've done a fair bit of hunting, I've had survival training in the military, and I love nature and exploration. But I couldn't live my life outside of society.
I have no interest in giving up on society. I'm just really dissapointed (almost heartbroken) about how little society has learned from history.
I don't follow politics, but I do remember reading an article that detailed the following:
In Australia, the current government has been trying to include a new Tax regime that includes a Goods and Services Tax (GST). The interesting point is that the balance of power was held by a politician outside of that government, who was pro Internet Censorship - low and behold, the GST went through and the Australian Internet Community got Censorship.
- Annon Australian
Not correct. The High Court a few years back decided that there was an implied right to freedom of speach in the Consitution, although how they read that in is beyond me. The tobacco companies almost lost control of their bladders when that one was handed down, because they thought they had half a chance to start advertising again. They didn't press it though, which is kind of odd.
Try these:
:)
www.gpf-comics.com
www.after-y2k.com
www.redmeat.com
Further time wasting
Just a thought, in case anyone decided to get uppity and flaunt this policy of the all-mighty state...
And here is a quote from this site
In reality, the new technologies do not live up to their promises at all. In a recent small-scale study conducted by Consumer Reports of 22 easy-to-find websites that had been judged by investigators to be inappropriate for young children, not one of the four most common software blockers--CyberPatrol, CyberSitter, NetNanny, and SurfWatch--blocked all of the sites. NetNanny failed to block any of the 22 sites, while 14 were blocked by CyberSitter, 16 by CyberPatrol, and 18 by SurfWatch; and only 3 sites were blocked by Internet Explorer (Is your kid 1997, 30). These rates are far below the levels that parents and other consumers have been led to expect. Another small-scale study by PC World found marginally better performance: two of the five products tested were effective in blocking all ten of the adult-oriented sites in the evaluation (Internet filters 1997).
The thing is ludicrous on several levels.
John Lapeyre
Installed and has operational. Doesn't exactly say much about having to advise their ISP that they are actually going through the filter, does it?
Cheap shot, I know -- it's not that I like the law, more that if I don't laugh, I'm sure as hell going to cry. Oh, well, I was always thinking that Canada.. or maybe New Zealand.. sounded like a nice place to live. Maybe I'll migrate from Melbourne someday.
What is with Earth? They have always been 'with it' and they've have had some intelligent life (i.e. cows) but then they have some mind bogglingly stupid lifeform (i.e. humans/earthlings). I just don't see how this can happen on the same planet. Perhaps someone on Earth can fill me in, it baffles me...
Isn't this the Country that outlawed software
patents awhile ago?
Anyway to get the bunch who did that to overturn
this pile of crap?
Not that I live in Australia or anything, but they
seem to have a more liberal legislative history than this.
I'm just waiting until the complaints tribunal opens so that we can build a bot to "complaint bomb" them. Each complaint will presumably have to be assessed by a human, which means it will cost a certain amount of money to investigate each one. If we send a couple of million of complaints per day the tribunal will be completely ineffective.
Actually, thanks. Just got through the first few of `Satan' and it was a laugh. Highly recommended.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
issuing your own certificates recently?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Do these people actually stop one moment and THINK "are we sure this is the right thing?". Looks too me that they just rushed this without thinking.
Oh well, in democracy people get the government they deserve.
Jón
A total of 3 posts to /., and that was about it.
As far as what the IIA have done, I thank them. They've turned this legislation around, from something that would have totally destroyed the internet in australia, to something we're barely going to notice.
So what are you bitter about again? It sounds like you're quite happy with your censorship. Maybe the lack of response in the US of A has been because people like yourself have said "Well, its not going to be that bad". Make your bed, and sleep in it mate.
Perhaps if you yourself were a bit more upset about it, then maybe the rest of us would be. Personally, I think you're a fool for even going along with this law. I would happily break it and suffer the consequences for doing my moral duty of not obeying an unjust law. You should do the same.
Australia is on a slippery slope of its own making with this one. Liberty is rarely something that is taken away all at once. Its almost always chipped away a bit at a time. By the time you realize whats happened, it will be too late. Australia is slidding towards that cliff right now. Its your country mate, do something about it now before its too late! Protest this affront to your rights now!
The best forms of censorship are.
--
Python
Python
You're tilting at straw men here with bald assertions about just having to advise your ISP that you are using a content filtering software package on Schedule I. The issue is that content filtering is wrong. The mechanism is not relevant to that argument. Censorship is wrong. You're caving in to that argument and accepting censorship with this law. Its that simple.
--
Python
Python
Yes I was rather offended by that.
I am a small ( 1000 user) Australian ISP, but I don't consider myself a 'shonk' or 'cowboy'. I find censorship distasteful, and am not at all pleased with this decision.
It could have been much, much, worse, for that I am thankful.
What are you talking about ?? We are pissed about it. Noone in Australia wanted it We only got it because the Government was trying to bribe and Independant minister. All He was saying was that implementation isn't as bad as it could have been under the laws that were passed. But consider this. If they ask you to prove you are using some form of net censorship people like my self are screwed because there are none for Linux.
HeTTaR
M&D Eaton
http://www.uq.net.au/~zzmeaton
hettar@uq.net.au
Hettar.
Hmmm .. interresting ... .
.. setup a gz compressed pipe .. and redirect all traffic thru that ... thereby they cannot filter it since it's ssh encrypted .. and gz compressed ...
.. and get compression ;P
why not just get a shell account on a machine outside AU and ssh into it
so you bypass the filters
Bain
Sanity is a majority vote.
say your running some old machine with an obsolete OS and you so happen to connect to the inet with. does this stop you from using this machine??? what if there is noooo LINUX clients???
our governement sux!
-k
damn - no lynx support.
Probably due to stupid export restrictions, the default lynx installation does not include SSL. You'll need to get a SSL enabled lynx.
AFAIR, the legislation required that the censorship was "technically feasable". If studies like the ifilter one here are done on the proposed "approved" filters, could it be reasonable (even though reasonable has nothing to do with it) to show that the current stuff doesn't work?
A group of ISPs could then put a tender out for a "working" filtering program, but have a penalty clause if the program gets it wrong. If noone bids, then that proves that its unfeasable. If someone does bid, then someone makes lot of money....
Also, the article I read in Tuesday's Australian seemed to imply that the $5 charge was what they thought it would cost the user if an ISP bought the software in bulk. It still has to run on the subscriber's computer, which leads to the question of Linux, and other OSs...
Bradley
PS Why is this shown in the wrong day by slashdot? I didn't see this yesterday, and only 4 comments so far...
Come to think of it, what? You've got your Bill of Rights and constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, and your high-tech industry, and then you've got software patents, the War on Some Drugs and bans on evolution in Kansas?
Seriously, it's the same deal. The censorship law was pushed through by the conservative Liberal Party to appease a religious-rightist senator from a small, highly conservative state best known from jokes about inbreeding. You can bet that most of the people in Melbourne and Sydney who are aware of the issues believe that this law is an ass; but in the name of political expediency, it got passed.
-- acb [who won't be voting for the Liberals anytime soon... sod them...]
Even worse than just your fascists using Australia as a positive example (which will happen) will be Australian-funded lobbies backing your Religious Rightists and morality crusaders. Once this law kicks in, you can bet that the only Australian high-tech information industry with a future will be that which manufactures censorship devices (filtering routers, &c.) China, Saudi Arabia and Singapore may be good export markets at the start, but they can only buy so many, and for further growth, Australia will need to find more repressive states wanting to censor their networks. Thus expect the Australian Government's trade missions and private Australian companies to be funneling money into the Christian Coalition and anti-porn feminist groups and such by the million.
If, however, you bypass the filter and access the unfiltered web, you are committing a criminal offense.
Granted, being prosecuted is about as likely as being jailed for having private homosexual sex in Tasmania (also a crime, or at least it was until recently). Unless they have some technical means of checking machines.
Or just mandate the use of a "secure" operating system, which the user cannot hack into bypassing censorship, i.e., Windows.
Linux users may still be able to use hardware filters, akin to the situation with hardware DVD decoders.
This law can actually be technically enforced.
The Broadcast Services bill mandates that overseas sites banned by the ABA be blocked. Which would require the approved censorware to regularly download an encrypted list of banned sites to block from an ABA server.
What happens when they go over the logs and find that very few users have been downloading it? They send in auditors, subpoena ISP dialin logs, and determine who hasn't been complying. Then they find a few deviants and make an example of them. Expect heavy fines and possibly jail terms.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
...resistance becomes duty.
> ...learning how to hunt and butcher...
Remember that *everyone*, even you, is amazingly stupid. So before doing that (or buy your next piece of meat, or most other things too), please sit down and think through your prejudices. And/or read a good book on ethics. Thanks.
Very much like the US gov't ban on exporting serious crypto - you think Saddam hasn't got an agent here who has already gotten copies of erything useful and shipped it home.
I thought the purpose of the law was to prevent strong crypto to make it as a standard feature in normal user apps. Of course the current Bad Guy(TM) has all crypto it needs.
So let me get this straight. ISP's are not required to do anything and all users have to do is tell the government they aren't looking at bad things?
Mom: Johnny are you looking at porn in their?
Johnny: No mom.
ha ha ha ha....This raises government stupidity to a new level. Everyone who wants to look at porn continues to look at porn and everyone who doesn't want to look at porn gets to pretened no one else is.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
Woah. Censorship is not a potential revenue stream. When we sign up customers, we're not going to take their money until they answer yes to 'Do you have filtering software installed on your computer'. We're also -not- going to make them prove it.
I, personally, am -violently- anti-censorship, and I was actually the guy who had the 'Australia - Global Village Idiot' sign made for the Sydney protest (seen in numerous shots). I don't want to make money from this. I just want it to go away. It's a stupid concept, from the ground up.
And yes, this never made it to the front page. Yet another reason for my anti-US rant above.. They don't realise that their government is going to come out and say 'Look, it worked in Australia', and foist the same thing on them...
We've got to protect the children!
*snarl*
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - Poing!
Schlock Mercenary.
One of the main problems in .au is the "She'll be right, mate" mentality. The concept is, basically, if you ignore it, it'll go away. Unfortunately, with our little puppet of a Prime Minister, and his scheming cohorts, this isn't going to happen. We had a 'reasonable' show of people at our protests, and whilst the Sydney one was happening, our PM was on a popular talkback radio station saying 'They don't know what middle australia want' -- Well, to be precise, what middle Australia want is bloody RAIN.
This is the same prime minister who -refuses- to apologise (that's it, apologise) to a generation of Aboriginals who were stolen from their families by the government of the time (with, I should point out, assistance from the catholic church).
If they hadn't taken all our guns away, revolution would be on the cards.
Red Stars, anyone?
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - Poing!
Schlock Mercenary.
Re:I am an Australian ISP.
/., and that was about it.
by Python (python@freedom.gmsociety.org.NOSPAM-) on Wednesday September 01, @11:10PM EDT (#)
(User Info) http://freedom.gmsociety.org
I, personally, am reasonably bitter towards the US in this. Whilst you were having grief with your CDA, people -all around the world- were turning their pages black, and protesting quite vocally. Yet, when our moronic government brought this legislation up, which is -much much- worse than the CDA, you quite happily ignored us.
A total of 3 posts to
As far as what the IIA have done, I thank them. They've turned this legislation around, from something that would have totally destroyed the internet in australia, to something we're barely going to notice.
So what are you bitter about again? It sounds like you're quite happy with your censorship. Maybe the lack of response in the US of A has been because people like yourself have said "Well, its not going to be that bad". Make your bed, and sleep in it mate.
I do apologise if I've come across as liking it. If you read more of my posts further down, I was one of the most vocal people in sydney about this, I was intervied for 'Time' magazine, was quoted in several IT magazines, and did 2 radio interviews.
I hate it. But no matter how much I hate it, I'm not going to put myself up for AU$25,000 fines per day. Sorry, if I make that much in a YEAR, I'll be amazed.
The tone of my post was that 'Well, it's not as bad as it could have been.' I do agree with another post (I haven't been watching names, apologies 8-) who pointed out that email isn't explicitly excluded. That's definatley wrong, and should be fixed for Version 6. Hopefully.
When I say 'something we're barely going to notice' I mean it's going to be a matter of, when you ring me up, my staff are going to ask (something along the lines of -- I'm making this up now):
'The Australian government requires me to ask if you have filtering technology installed on the PC you are going to be using to access the net. We do not need to verify that you are, we just need you to tell us you are'
Something, basically, that makes them aware that they are -lying- because of the stupid laws our government has enacted. I don't -want- my customers to have censorware on their PC's. The internet is far too valuable a resource to censor.
--Rob
[And, to the other poster, yeah, sluggy is -very- cool 8-)]
Comics:
Sluggy.com - Poing!
Schlock Mercenary.
The "black page" movement didn't start spontaneously; it isn't some conspiracy against Austrailians that nothing happened.
The wheel is turning but the hamster is dead.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
First up, I am an Aussie.
.gov.au and religious web sites to ban lists...
Second, we didn't do nothing about this, we did as
much as we could, we had rallies, I personally visited my local polititions, and emailed the Idiots in Chief, and got no where.
The Government had made up thier mind, they wanted to use this to buy the vote of a senile independant senator, and trying to get them to change it was about as futile as convincing an American to shutup and listen for a minute.
The bribe didn't work, the senator didn't vote for thier new TAX system, so they snuck it in a different way. Unfortunatly they're going to let this thing drop, they're going to go through with it. But that's alright, we'll just ignore it, or go round it as is our way, and if they try to take
us to court over it, we'll prove just how totally unfeasible it is, and they'll be forced to drop it.
Meanwhile, I'll be submitting all
Necro-"Make the world a better place today, shoot your local politition and journalist"-Kyle
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
No I belive that that was an erlier law. This thing makes you tell your ISP that you'r using somekind of censorware. Giving false testymony about this is probably illegal somehow in Ozzyland.
(bad spelling is one thing but you just use the wrong birds.)
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
I shuldn't reply to this but... Just your typical american problem solvant: Add force and stir. If it doesn't clear out all the problems: add more force and stir.(great analogy since in this case the solvant itself smudges the stain and has to be cleaned out too(add more force...)).
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
Well it would sertanly do the Ozzy goverment some good...
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
Ok so this law doesn't stop people looking at what they want. But like the swedish PUL it makes normal people brake the law in everyday life. The effect is that authorities can "get" people when they have a reason to. BAD thing for human rights you know.
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
We may be the last wagon on the train, but were going the same way at the same speed.
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
I don't think the IIA (whoever they are) have done you any favors. If the law is as bad as it's been made out it should have been fully enforced in a draconian enough style to make people sit up and get it repealed.
As it stands now you have a law on the books that gives the Aussie gov't the power to do very distasteful things. Theoretically they could just impliment it piecemeal so no one will notice just how bad it is; the age requirements and the requirement for isp's to tell subscribers to use filters being step #1.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Whenever anyone says, "theoretically", they actually mean, "not really".
That's true, theoretically.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
It seems our government doesn't have the market on stupidity cornered quite yet.
This legislation is like requireing you to avert your eyes while watching an R rated movie. It's very un-enforcable (though make note that it's something they can use as an excuse to lock people up... 'He didn't have NetNanny! He's a HARD CORE CRIMINAL!!'), and a major infringement on basic human rites.
Such a sad day and age we live in where governments can pass this kind of crap.
Server side filtering is cheaper (just do it once instead of software for every user) and if ISP's have to filter anyway then this is what they'll end up doing.
---
North Korea has real oppressive censorship and it's an atheist country
---
Actually, several stories have been playing hide and seek lately. There was one that appeared about 7:30 AM one day marked as being posted at 7:30 PM (12 hours later) that same day. About an hour later it disappeared from the main page until about 7:30 that evening. (all times EDT) Go figure.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Posted by Hemos on Wednesday September 01, @10:10PM EDT
What chance do we mere mortals stand against the Slashdot Time Lords?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So you have to use filtering software - but what's to stop you from turning it onto 'filter nothing'?
Furthermore, no filtering software is perfect, whether it be based on manual blocking of web pages, or automatic detection of naughty words. You could simply do all your browsing through a 'web anonymizer' or gateway, and if that gets blocked, create another. Or you could run a web proxy like DeleGate on your own machine, and do all your browsing through that. I doubt that filtering software has any blocking rules for 'localhost' :-)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
shonk Sonk, sb. slang.
Etymology: Shortened form of shonicker.
An offensive name for a Jew. Hence 'shonky a.[1] (see quot. 1951).
1938 W. Matthews Cockney Past & Present v. 153, - I diffidently suggest the following words as the most familiar slang terms rarely used except by cockneys..shonk, nose, Jew.
1940 R. Postgate Verdict of Twelve i. v. 75 - Let's have a bit of fun with the shonks.
1951 Partridge Dict. Slang (ed. 4) Add. 1168/1 - Shonky, adj., mean; money-grubbing: late C. 19-20.
1981 W. Haggard Money Men xv. 174 - `Brighton?.. It's full of shonks.'.. `Which means there are hotels with night clerks.'
Of course this may mean something completely different in Australia. Well, I'd hope so at least, or the IIA just offended a fairly large number of people.
Free speech has only been implied into the Australian Constitution with regards to political speech. Even then, it was only done by a pretty narrow High Court majority that could be overturned in a subsequent case.
In other words, I wouldn't rely on it for anything.
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
If not, and as long as there's a free filter for every platform available out there, then is this really that big a deal. So you're required to run nanny or something. As long as you control over what (if anyting) you filter, then it's a stupid anoyance butnothing more.
The questions is: *DO* they require to you censor what they want? I haven't followed the issue but if that's so then, well, that's *S C A R Y*.
You should check your facts a bit better than that, my friend.
Believe with me, my saplings.
I've got personal guarentees from several senators that they will not support a banning of encryption. That's not going to happen (thank God)
Believe with me, my saplings.
I wish you dickheads would stop posting this crap. The problem is much more serious than that. That Independent DIDN'T SUPPORT THE NEW TAX SYSTEM. The party who did were _against_ the IC legislation. Get it right! The problem is more serious, because both Liberal AND Labor believe the leglisation is workable, despite significant uproar, particularly within the Liberal Party's own lay membership. That is far more serious than some simple one-for-one deal, because it indicates that the leglsiation has more weight behind it and is likely to be more stubbornly supported and thus damaging. If you can't get your facts straight than just shut the hell up because you confuse the debate.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Maybe I'll just install junkbuster - yep, I've got client-side filtering software, it filters content I don't want to see . . .
The whole sorry issue is just another reason I hdespise the current Australian Federal government - our current PM combines the bad qualities of John Major, Al Gore and Dan Quayle. . .
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Sorry, but I fail to see how they have declared war on anyone. They are not depriving you of the right to say anything, they are just taking away their citizen's right to read/hear it.
bye
schani
I agree. I go through the same process myself, but at the end, I go one step further and think about dropping out of society all together. For years I've been reading/studying wilderness survival info and this fall/winter I'll be learning how to hunt and butcher game. In all likelyhood, I don't see myself actually "dropping out", but I like to think that I could pull an "Eric Rudolph" (guy who evaded FBI by disappearing into Western NC wilderness) and just disappear into the mountains of Western North Carolina (or SW Va, or East Tn-it's all part of the same mountain range).
For those of you who think this is loopy, consider one thing, it's very comforting to know that I probably won't *need* Big Brother holding my hand to survive in this world. If it gets bad enough, I can take my toys and go home.
Chris
I had a job offer back in '91 to work in Austrailia, and I'm glad I didn't take it. These type of laws are *total* BS from the word go! I assume that the Austrailian goverment likes to suck up to NSA, (or add a US goverment agency here) so they can get more funding. Mandaory filtering, like Net Nanny or ANY other filtering software is actually as efficient as like saying that buying a new car is guarenteed for 5 years from *any* mechicical problems. ;) And yes, my spelling sucks. ;)
Here's a hint to the goverment officials "down under", form the clay like substance, insert that weird looking miniture aaa device and power up. POOF!
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
... or is this a totally ineffectual system? I mean really, what's to stop you from telling your ISP you use the blocking software, and then just not using it? Could you not then just surf playboy.com to your heart's content?
This just seems like a high-profile "blue law" to me. Correct me if I'm wrong.
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." -- John Lehman, Secretary of the US Navy 1981-1987
- cults
do.To remain a Scientologist in good standing, one had to install the Scientology net-nanny program, which blocks access to all sites critical of Scientology, or contain names of Scientology critics (like me). Check out this great Salon article
It's amazing that this can be held up to redicule when it's a cult, but accepted when it's a government.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Safe?! They were only in danger of being exposed to lights coming from a tube, not from being kidnapped or molested. You're making too big a deal.
The government has no right to go into the houses of people to tell them how to live. If the government wanted, they could pass a law that put NetNanny in every public library and school, but at home if parents have got the internet, it should be the concerned parents that take it upon themselves to install the nessesary software or if they don't know how not let their kids on the internet.
A law like this could never be passed in the US.
"Yes sir, Mr Manager, we'll just install this software and it will protect all our PCs from those nasty ads."
/. covered this, I'll just do what the Europeans do with stupid legislation - I'll ignore it.
JunkBusters is filtering software, does it count?
Or what about installing NetNanny with the filtering turned off. Or installing it badly, so people can just walk 'round it. Or only installing it on one PC that people don't use.
Like I said the last time
(All it will take is some managing directors being blocked from their stock portfolio pages and this will soon come to and end)
Chris.
I think it would've been better if they just let the gov't impose really stupid draconian rules that are completely unenforceable, because now, people will think that it's actually workable, simply because the symptoms won't be as obvious.
Not to mention that there were some stories not too long ago that at least one of the filter makers tended to put sites carrying articles negative to their product into their filters...
"The latest version of NetNanny now filters away misogynistic macho bravado, beer ads and incorrect English. As a result, all Australian sites are blocked."
:-P
For what it's worth, the Canadian system is a lot nicer than the US system. I spent most of my life in Canada, and that's one of the things I miss most.
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
No, nowhere near 90% of Canadians work for the government. As for taxes, they are certainly higher in Canada, but not by all that much, as far as I can tell. (I'm not paying significantly less in taxes in the US than I was in Canada.) Not having a massive military to maintain probably helps. :-)
I'd really suggest you do some real research on the system before dismissing it out of hand.
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
Yeah, I saw that after I looked closer. Oops. Well whatever it was it's fixed now.
/. anyway?
What the heck is javascript doing on
BTW, it seems to me that this article never made it to slashdot's front page. Last night (Australian time), the article on "The World's Smallest PII Motherboard" was at the top of the page, without the current article being there; this morning, the PII motherboard article is at the bottom of the page, and the current article turned up in yesterday's list. Or am I hallucinating?
There is something strange going on with the prefabricated pages. I can't link off to any story on the main page. I have been using the search page with no criteria to link to stories.
The prefabs are way missing stories too.
Something smelly is going on - maybe Taco is going to switch servers tonight or something, and things are starting to break.
In the lower left corner IE5 has been quietly giving me an error on the main page:
e x.pl,"+ tail + "\" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1 BR ");
Line: 26
Char: 76
Error: Expected ']'
Code: 0
URL: http://slashdot.org
Yep - Something is broken... Let me see... Yup, some commented perl code... it looks like:
now = new Date();
tail = now.getTime();
document.write("IMG SRC=\"http://209.207.224.245/Slashdot/pc.gif?/ind
IE don't like that. Make links break. Bad programmer! 'Whack!'
How about turning off images in netscape? Stops all those nasty pictures.
Oh, turning off this filter is easy, but that's true for every other existing (and future) client side filters too. Even the most sophisticated filter is easily bypassed by booting another partition where it isn't installed.
It's called Teledesic and Microsoft owns it.
Since NetNanny is on the list of approved software I wouldn't get too upset. I had a test version of it for awhile. You can set that so it doesn't filter out anything. You can set that so it only filters out www.microsoft.com . Etc. And you can set it so it only loads when you feel like it. Not that bad. You could set it to filter out anything from ZDNet.
And you get to set it. Not the ISP. Just count the cost of the program as a part of the cost of the ISP subscription.
Only thing is, to use it one needs to use windows. Know of any filtering programs for Linux browsers? That are on the approved list? Speaking as a Libertarian, this is the kind of censorship that I approve of. It's rather like the kill-list on a mail program.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
A lone individual armed with sufficiently capable weapons (I'm guessing at least a high tech knife and a composite bow [I'm not assuming compound]) in good physical condition to start with, and with sufficient training should be able to live reasonably well for a reasonable length of time.
However: This same person would be expending high-tech goods that were not readily replaceable with equals, would require many more acres/person to support themselves with even marginally equivalent comfort (i.e., not starving). And would be killing off the game at a faster than it reproduces rate. Hunter-gatherers work fewer hours/per day than high-tech folk, but thier lives are shorter, they are less comfortable, they need a larger range, and they are more endangered by accidents.
If one person does this, it's feasible. It's not feasible for even a large minority without cutting the population by a factor of at least 1000 (i.e., one person in a thousand left alive).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Anarchy is too unstable. That's why a minimal government is needed. The catch is trying to keep it minimal.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Chalk one up for Seumas...
Not to diminish the significance of this to our friends down-under, but think for a minute what Bill (the other one) and Al must be thinking.
"Look, the Australians have censorship, we can do the same thing here! They may have beaten CDA, but now there's precedence. I can make the ACLU look like they want an America that is the degenerate of the global community. I can ride the Magic Carpet of Morality and Decency into the Whitehouse.
And we can censor all internet sites related to guns as well!"
Yes, it's absurd, but it will happen. History is repeating, albeit in a new context. Poland has fallen - can the Berlin Wall be far behind?
"revelant" is a perfectly fine word... say "revelant" five times to your self, then try to convince yourself that it is meant to be "relevant"... it just don't work...
;)
(sorry for the slightly off topic comment
(bad grammar intended)
I go to school. We use NetNanny. Through NetNanny, I can not access Slashdot, Freshmeat, Wired, etc... BUT I CAN access whitehouse.com, marilynmanson.com, and various gory sites such as goregallery.com. Good thing they use IE. View->Preferences->Use a Proxy? (NO) :P
hee hee.
But I geuss proxies enforced by law would suck, and if NetNanny hasn't improved then the Australia coders will have a harder time than the Australian hornballs (who knows, maybe they're one and the same).
Wonder how the Crocodile Hunter feels about this
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
This is stupid, even for the Aussie blue-noses.
Can't we just cut 'em off from the net altogether?
"...they may harpoon us, but they ain't gonna pick us up on no radar screen!"
What is with Austrailia? They have always been 'with it' technologically (witness Samba and overall wiredness) and they've have had some intelligent laws (i.e. encryption) but then they have some mind bogglingly stupid laws (i.e. censorship). I just don't see how this can happen in the same political body. Perhaps someone in Austrailia can fill me in, it baffles me...
You don't really have to own filtering software, you just have to claim that you do.
Now, if they turned around and started trying to do something to people who weren't using filtering software, that'd be a different story.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Politicans and reporters who are not up on technology have a bad habbit of just believing what is spoon feed them.
Political action groups don't have to put forward much effort to convence such people that some computer thing is evil. Politicians are quick to folow any strange recomendations given by a political action group when they don't even understand the "problem".
When reality overwhelms ignore the little man behind the curten and do what the flamming head tells you to do.
I don't actually exist.
The australian law says that the internet should be censored if feasable.. well, since theres no feasable content censoring solution for *nix, i think the open source movement could have a big market in Australia.
Johnny Howard: "Why aren't you running a blocking software solution?"
Me: "its not feasable"
Johnny Howard: "Damn, i said we should remove that bit."
Or more to the point:
Johnny Howard: "there was a reason we put that litte feasability thing in there you know.. we only wanted it to LOOK like we were doing something about it to please that old fart in the Senate"
-CyberPuppet
So, you've got an O:Line? That dont impress me much du du da du.
it reveals web sites, does it not?
revelant software.
Indeed, it is a sad day when access to the
Internet, one of the greatest gifts humanity
has ever given itself, is being hobbled for
the sake of cheap, short-term political gain
and fear-driven attempts at mind control.
So, does Mr. Dobson recommend CyberSitter? You
know, the filter that blocks all those bad, bad
sites like the National Organization of Women and
any site (or even domain of a site) that
criticizes CyberSitter.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
What percentage of web sites, specifically ones that would have been affected by the CDA, are US sites? This might explain it.
Why do you need to look at porn? Only depraved child molesters need to look at porn, not "legitamate citizens." So why does it matter if you have to install content filtering software to block out porn, when there is *no* need to look at it?
I have filtering technology installed on my computer at home. It blocks access to some web pages and images when I surf the net. It's called Netscape Navigator, and its page and image blocking technology is called "caching".
Hee hee hee....
To those who seem to like using this really stupid censorship law as an excuse to make comments on Australia's recent gun law revisions as being a "loss of freedom": have YOU ever been less than a mile from the scene of a major gun massacre at the time it happened?
I have. Twice. It's scary.
So for this reason I take a dim view of uninformed foreigners who feel that the Australian community would prefer the presence of crazy maniacs running around shooting innocent victims. I would prefer not to be shot at, thank you.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I think I did. Then I must take the opportunity to plug the little technical essay I've just recently written about that particular software.
_The Reversal Of NetNanny_
It's a little heavy on the technical details in the beginning, but you may find it interresting.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
But I'm still not impressed. The people backing this scheme must still realise that this is bad legislation, and that the scheme itself, prima facie, is a nefarious one. It would oblige Australian internet users to accept censorship based not on the criteria decided by government (which would be bad enough, but at least allows for public scrutiny and a formal process), but by the private makers of censorship software. And the EFA's pages themselves provide an example of what happens when censorship decisions fall to private hands.
There is a long tradition in Australia of avoiding threats of government regulation by proposing a scheme of essentially unenforced industry self-regulation, allowing the government to wash their hands of the issue, which self-regulation the industry essentially ignores. But I can't help feel that this is a particularly craven approach for the Australian internet community to be taking, especially since it shifts the burden of dishonesty to all internet users, who now have to either allow (doubtless mostly US) proprietary software makers to censor their Internet viewing for them, or lie that they are doing so.
BTW, it seems to me that this article never made it to slashdot's front page. Last night (Australian time), the article on "The World's Smallest PII Motherboard" was at the top of the page, without the current article being there; this morning, the PII motherboard article is at the bottom of the page, and the current article turned up in yesterday's list. Or am I hallucinating?
No, free speech is not part of the Australian Constituation. But, free speech is "implied".
but you are not lying to them, you do have a filtering device, it's called "brain"!
Gnu is Not Unix / Linux Is Not UniX
Why do I suddenly have a primitive urge to crack some Australian government websites and replace them with, say, a message like "As a citizen of Australia, you're not allowed to look at this webpage, because it contains the word 'Scunthorpe'."? ;)
I mean, I know it wouldn't actually achieve anything towards getting this stupid law revoked (face it, very little I could do would, as I'm not Australian); but it'd make *me* feel better.
--
What I hate about this censorship deal is that the supposed 'majority' of Australians were never contacted for their expressed feelings on the subject. This 'majority' was from a survey - and we all know the saying "lies, damn lies, and statistics." This does not represent the majority in any way whatsoever.
I beleive a better solution is to make it law to provide the *option* of filtered content, not to enforce it upon us. Existing clients of ISPs in Australia should have their accounts suspended until the account owner acknowledges his/her account to be filtered or not.
It is parental responsibility to allow/disallow their children whether to watch particular TV programs - and this is how the Internet should be.
ISPs in Australia should *ALL* rebell against this law by completely ignoring the situation and never paying the fines associated with this. Clients should be informed of this in advance for anyone who requires Internet access during what would most likely be a down period and provided alternate access.
BAH! its not like my opinion is going to change anything but I think this suits everyone
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
you are wrong. censorship is a typical phenomenon of right wing ideology and not one of the left. (even thought there exist some governments who call themself "communist" where they are more like "fascist"..). to some extent totalitarian ideologies on both ends of the political spectrum are rather similar.
beeing anti-liberal/anti-freedom is one of the defining elements of fascism where on the other side the political left has intelectual openmindedness at the core.
greetings from vienna,
dermond.
Could someone please fill in the details for me?
If one were to obey this law, then how is the decision made as to what sites an Australian citizen can view? In other words, is the Australian Government publishing a list of sites prohibited to its citizens? Or, does NetNanny compile a mandatory list? Or, do you have to run the software, but you decide what level of filtering?
For the record, I am VERY troubled by this. It is one thing for China or Taiwan to throttle content as they have; their governments are authoritarian and there is not the expectation of liberty as we find in the countries with a shared legal history with England (i.e. US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, NZ). If one of these "peers" succumbs to this level of authority, then it will be very easy for other peers to succumb as well ("But, Australia does it, and they're a democracy just like us, so see, it's not bad.")
On behalf of myself, at least, if I as an American have not been supportive of my esteemed peers in Australia, it is simply because this is the first I've heard about this. It has not even made it into the Economist, which I read religiously.
We should all be frightened by this. Very much so. As Australia goes on this, so too might we all. And, to take an American perspective, the Religious Right would LOVE this: a chance to centrally dictate and control morality with technology. Next stop, implants which monitor behavior constantly and sends SNMP traps to the FBI alerting them to illegal/immoral behavior? It very well could be.
Yes. Indeed. All in .au knew about this months ago, and there was not much response at all... /.'s ha really been a reminder of how small many people's world's are, even when they may be part of a much larger thing.
.au have it at all? Because no-one gave a shit when it was being tabled. Now it's too late and ppl are only beginning to notice what's happening.
Seeing all the reasoning of many
What has developed of this situation has been a suprisingly good solution.
This could have been something awful, but I see having to say to my ISP that I'm running prevention software (when in reality not running anything of the sort. Net Nanny? WTF?!), is much better than having server side prevention, which is, of course, much much worse. Both of these options were being explored.
This is a good thing for australia, as far as near solutions are concerned. Why does
A revolution without guns? You need to join the real world.
Humans are not that far off the grassy savannah where might makes right. In the end, voting is just a carrot, but when things get bad you need a stick.
--Rob
The founding fathers were ahead of you on this one. In the Federalist Papers (#10 I believe), there is a long section on preventing the "tyrrany of the majority".
The point is that "majority rule" isn't enough for a democracy. There must also be protection of minorities and dissenting points of view. Its wise as well because ideas change and the people in the majority viewpoint today could end up being the minority in the future.
The Bill of Rights isn't there to protect the majority... the majority will always be 'de facto' protected. You can't lock up or kill 80% of the population.
--Rob
The morons in Australia who passed these restrictions probably figured they could get away without anybody elsewhere making a peep. Well, they are wrong. You know what? They are also very vulnerable.
You should all be able to see the big Achilles heel of this whole thing. It's called the 2000 Summer Olympics. I will be working with others to organize a boycott of the 2000 games mainly because of these human rights abuses by the Australian government. If Australians aren't free to surf the Net in any way they see fit, how is Australia any different from China?
So, Boycott the 2000 Olympics!
Chuck0
Mid-Atlantic Infoshop
www.infoshop.org
I, personally, am reasonably bitter towards the US in this. Whilst you were having grief with your CDA, people -all around the world- were turning their pages black, and protesting quite vocally
All of which, while quite nice, really meant squat in the legal arena. The CDA was defeated because the US has constitutionally protected certain forms of speech, and because we have groups (such as the ACLU, EFF, and ALA) who will fight to defend that speech. It may seem like a never-ending fight at times, but we have legal and constitutional recourse.
Fact is, some people in the US have been and are now supporting the Australians (those who care, anyway) in their fight against net censorship. Your bitterness serves you poorly, and only alienates potential allies.
-- "God, Root, what is difference?" - Pitr, "User Friendly"
Why do you need to look at porn?
I'm a pervert.
Why do you need to own a gun
because I'm paranoid and feel that by not owning one I'm just asking for trouble...
OK, I'm a foreigner to Australia, and unfortunatly I have never been there... bit of a long flight from England (never mind the prices), but anyway my views on the matter...
The Australian Government has taken the decision that it has a right to decide for its people what they want them to see. *Hmm*. So, the democraticly elected Government suddenly wishes to impose its own ethics upon the population. Is this democracy ? I think not.
Trying not to stray not too far off-topic, some people are talking about the gun laws being changed and this then leading the way to more freedoms being taken away... *arse*. I don't feel a need to own a gun. I've shot them, and I enjoy using them, but I feel no need whatsoever to let everyone be able to own them.
Leading on from this, the Australian Government probably thought the same as me on this point and so enforced it. Now, I agree that there are certain things that should be shielded from minors and the public in general - One of my neighbours is a real pyromaniac and so I'm not *too* keen on him reading up on the latest home-grown bomb making methods. So in principal I think I agree with the Australian Government.
My only grievence is that I don't think that their aim of true censorship can ever be enforced... it's just not feasible. If someone really wants to find out something they can turn off the blocking software or be clever through other means, no doubt...
OK, short but sweet :
Why do you need to own a gun.
If you're a legitamate citizen not involved in underworld dealings (which if you are, I hardly think you're going to have a problem getting guns) then there is *no* need to own a gun.
I'm English. Our Police officers still don't carry guns I feel safer for the fact that they don't. There are special forces which do carry guns, but they are highly trained and few in number thus of a high quality.
The question remains - WHY ?
As an Australian, I have to say I am honestly embarrased by all this. I read the comments made, and cringe. How can our government be so stupid? How can they not know how ineffective this will be? I think of situations like Utah, where filtering software blocked access to breast cancer research web sites and copies of the King James Bible... We're not all like the brain dead politicans, do please don't judge us all by their actions. I am a Christian, the type you all love to hate, but I don't know of a single computer literate member of my church who agrees with this.
Freedom of choice and free will, baby!
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
I only skimmed the article, but it seems to me that it is not necessary for the ISPs to join this agreement. or maybe i need more coffee -- yawn
----- --- - - -
jacob rothstein reed college
'nuf said
----- --- - - -
jacob rothstein reed college
If I read this correctly, then you have to use one of a list of 'accepted netnannies' whenever you access the net.
To my mind this raises 2 very important problems:
1. It effectively makes it illegal to connect any system using an OS for which no such software exists, to the net. While this is not a major obstacle for OSes with large support bases (Windows et al, Linux, FreeBSD, etc) it will be a pain for smaller OSes and stranger machines. Also how will the 'acceptance list' deal with open source. If I download the Bad-Aus-Net-Nanny source for my Linux machine and then edit the source to make it 'run' on my machine - is it still acceptable ?
2. The Australian government is effectively telling Australians what software they may run on their machines. And quite frankly, if I was Australian I'd tell them to !ffo ckuf . If someone passed laws telling me whether to run Enlightenment or Afterstep I'd be just as indignant.
Besides the above, client-side censorship is completely pointless. Either it involves blacklisting whole domains, which will fail unless the list of domains is updated at lightning speed. Or it involves scanning page content as it comes in, which is easily circumvented by encrypting the relevant pages.
Caio.
Simon.
[WebPage currently down due to selling of the server]
/-\-/
I'm a former Aussie living in America - I'm more than a little jaded about the Australian government given my recent experiences. It has to be one of the only countries in the world that will strip a naturally born citizen of their citizenship against their will. (Complicated immigration story.)
I tend to agree with the statement about complacency of the citizens. It's kind of similar
in countries where the British system of government prevailed. There was such a history of the government ceding its rights to citizens through the political process that the citizens seem to come to trust that the government will not treat them improperly. Perhaps not so much trust, but there's less vigilance to jump up and fight restrictions on liberty.
You have to look at the parallel between the banning of guns in Australia and the banning of guns within Australia. Once your population abrogates their responsibility and capability to physically protect their liberties, you have to question their gumption and capability to even politically protect their liberties.
I wish them luck... the frog's water is getting hot...
man.. sarcasm overload :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
yerp.. and all my pleas for people to take their guns and shoot the politicians didn't work.. but seriously, some politicians were urging citizens to bury their guns.. we can still go get guns though, don't worry about that.. just like we'll be able to go and get porn still.
How we know is more important than what we know.
packet sniffing at telstra or 24 hours access to the logs of all ISP's.
How we know is more important than what we know.
yer and I kind of think that ozemail counts as a "large corporation".
How we know is more important than what we know.
The words "Prohibited Content" is what we have a problem with. We have all been living happily in a world where we have not had to put up with prohibitions on what we can read or see and now there are threats to that liberty. The fact that they are even talking about "Prohibited Content" means that they havn't come and talked to us. If they wanted to they could have put together a code of conduct that said "ISP's must supply filtering software (free or otherwise) to their users if they so desire it" but it doesn't.. it says "Prohibited Content".
How we know is more important than what we know.
These are people of particular influence in Australia. For example, OzEmail is Australia's largest ISP. These people are deciding policy outside the democratic process and presenting their views to the Australian government as the views of all Australians.
*Quick Political Ramble*
Not that I think the Australian people have any say over what I can view on my computer or in what way they can participate in the Internet. The Internet is an Anarchy.. you are in or you are out but if you are in you agree with the philosophy, no authority. The problem is that the society of people on the Internet are not rejecting the spewtum. If you have a society based on a philosophy (like, say, liberalist societies that most western countries almost are) and you have a group of people who are violating the philosophy (like, say, nazi groups) then you eject them from your society. "If you guys wanna do that stuff, go do it somewhere else". In an anarchy, each individual must reject those who violate the philosophy, so that in a distributed and decentralised way the trash gets put out. The Australian government is trash and so is this group. Reject them.
*Political Ramble Ends*
I worry when the government makes decisions that affect me without asking my input, but I REALLY worry when a collection of corporations create laws and get them rubber stamped by a government that doesn't understand or is ill informed (there's gotta be a reason for this stupidity) about the issues.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm talking about the Internet. "we" = all netizens and "a world" = the Internet.
How we know is more important than what we know.
We live in a society where the people have no say. We can complain and rally and throw rocks at parliment and we get ignored or put in jail. I agree that it is wrong and personally I would have prefered that they implemented something draconian so that people could see how wrong it is (and crackers had obvious targets) but now the isp's don't have to do anything.. they just have to sit back and go about their business "oh.. you've installed a content filter, good for you".
How we know is more important than what we know.
well I'll tell you what a "cowboy" is.. anyone but telstra.. I have heard many people describe isp's as this. "When the net goes down you know you are using a cowboy because telstra never goes down" "hey, was that just telstra's connect going down?"
How we know is more important than what we know.
No there isn't.. there's just "The Web" and "The Email" and I won't here you telling our scared little men in canberra any different.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The australian government, much like the US, Chinese (add your own countries) governments have declared war on the Internet.. The Internet itself.. not some other country, not their citizens.. they have declared war on the Independant Anarchial Society known as the Internet. Because it supports free speech and free thought and co-operation and isn't very safe for business and pilgrims. This legislation is just a form of defence.. if they centralized the proxying (which server side would have done because the onus would have been forced onto telstra) then there would be an easy target for the citizens of the Internet to attack. Waging war is never fun but neither is watching your society get raped and pilledged. I incite you (yes, I incite you.. those with the power know who I am and can feel free to come and get me) to attack external presences on the Internet who are detrimential to its citizens. If someone wants to backdoor the latest versions of net nanny, that would be a good start. [ps.. I await the flame]
How we know is more important than what we know.
Our society supports the stupid. "No no.. don't learn what a computer is.. just click the mouse" "what's a mouse?" "That." "oh.. what's a click" "can't you guess?" "What?" ok Keauno Reeves, you can go back to your trailer now, "What's a trailer, I don't understand". sorry, just couldn't resists the keauno reeves stupidity link.
How we know is more important than what we know.
shya.. like this would get on the news. No, this is middle of the news paper, boring, no one cares type news.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This is just hillarious... Forcing people to force themselves to uphold moral codes. Not only does this cost the consumer who probably doesn't want or need it.
Why don't they just outlaw the visiting of "immoral" websites? I mean, the whole idea is stupid, but forcing people to use filitering software ON THEIR OWN COMPUTER not only sounds like 1984 but also echos the fact that these new laws have been written by people who plan to enforce them in an equally stupid way.
The stupid thing: its on your computer, you know the password, you don't need or want it, but still you have to pay for it. I can't understand how they plan to enforce this but the method they have chosen is simply hillarious.
While I'm not happy with you and others lumping us all together, when there are obviuosly as many viewpoints in the country as there are Australians, your comment is pertinent: this nonsense has made us all look like rubes.
Being forced to run 'doze 98, indeed.
Give me linux or give me dea^H^H^H a really tough time of it.
I think most people did nothing about this because the idea was so stupid that nobody actually thought it would happen. This really scares me, as now I'm thinking that "digital-recording media tax" here in Canada might actually happen.
Also, so what if I'm running NetNanny? NetNanny allows me to remove all the blocks, essentially making it a transparent proxy. Annoying, though.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Australia, by most accounts, is what we Americans would call a "free" country, compared to, for example, Myanmar.
/. to be the Australian Civil Liberties Union. It's especially not on Americans to protest and act out for Australians EVERY TIME an issue threatens their freedoms. It's on Australians to change their government to suit themselves, and they're lucky to have a government where they can do that much more easily than, say, Cuba. Australians also have as much moral support (and workaround expertise) as /. can muster, better late than never, and they should feel lucky for that, too.
./ knew about it.
If a majority of Australians were sufficiently liberty-loving to get politically active when issues like this threaten them, you wouldn't see things there like mandatory client-side content filtering, or Tasmania's outright ban on homosexuality.
It's not the responsibility of
So pointing out that Australians knew about this months ago doesn't say anything. If Australians were inclined to act like they had a pair when it came to defending their freedoms, this wouldn't have happened, regardless of when Americans or
FWIW, this is most definitely NOT a good thing for Australia, because it's just a tiny step away from the law that would HAVE teeth and REALLY ruin your day.
Australians, what if the government wrote the client? What if it pinged your client to see if you were actually running it? What if they ran it server-side? Don't think that same wave of paranoia couldn't tweak the new law just so -- it happens more often than not here in the States.
No, it's best to nip these kinds of things in the bud AND act as often as called for. You're not prevented from doing both.
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
Unfortunatley, Australia does not have Free Speach in its constiutition. It is neither states nor implied. The only time "Free Speach" is stated is regards to political matters about getting elected.
For your average goon, [read: us], we have no free speach rights.
So how does this work when Net Nanny or whatever blocks the source code to free software? I for one have seen several linux and GNU comments that any of those filtering programs would pounce all over. Are GNU, linux, and apache all illegal in Ausie, now?
That idea concerns me no small amount...
I'm a gnu world man.
If a government abandons all commitments to personal freedoms, the people must have a means of forming a malitia. It's true that guns are nothing compared to the firepower any modern military has, but they are enough to keep the government from suppressing it's people if say... 75% of them are unhappy. No sane military man would be willing to carpet bomb their home town (and hopefully not any town filled with civilian countrymen).
;-)
Every successful dictator in Europe has had to first disarm his people. I for one don't want that. Also, as a side note: many, many studies show that restrictive gun laws increase the proportion of criminal to civilian gun holders, and increase violent crime rates. At least that ratio has held very true in the U.S. (though I know we're more violent than quite of few others). But I guess what I'm getting at is that no vandal would ever want to intrude in a Swiss home, knowing that the owner would have a gun and possibly blow him away. You Brit's on the other hand would be easy pickings...
I'm a gnu world man.
They'd do the same for us. We need an international effort to kick some sense in the Australian legislature.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
To the Auzzies, I would say "stand up" and fight the government for what you feel is right, but how the hell can you have a revolution or fight back when you DON'T HAVE GUNS to fight back with?
So what are you going to do? VOTE? HAHAHAAHA!!!
Ohhh. EEEhhh. Ahhh. What has that gotten you? All it's gotten you is the government that is cramming this up the old Charlie, and all for what? In the "name" of saving Children? In the "name" of protecting kids from porn, filth etc? Who's "doing" who here? I feel sorry for the poor Australians living in their totalitarian Government.
So what can you do? I guess there's nothing you can do NOW to stop your government. You've already let them SCREW YOU again and again and again.
Bye bye to all your freedoms, one brick at a time.
From AmeriKa, with Love.
You obviously aren't from America, are you boy? There's two reasons for owning a gun. 1. Hunting. 2. Defense (there's a reason no one has ever attempted to invade the U.S.) And don't tell me about nukes, because if it gets to that, then you can kiss this whole planet goodbye and this whole conversation is irrelevant anyway. It's also a different culture. Agree with it or not, the fact remains that it does exist. Also, in America, we still have large areas of rural populations (countryside, etc) where owning and using a gun is a way of life. You use it to hunt and defend youself. Plain and simple. You don't rely on the police to save your butt when you get in trouble. You rely on yourself - self-Reliance. Independence. Freedom. Kinda boils down to why America is America.
BTW: This discussion should return to the discussion at hand - censorship.
I love it!
I mean COME ON, Not one Aussie ISP wanted this, so they've found an interesting way of putting the responsibility back in the hands of the ones it belonged to in the first place. Once they ge t the picture about how nearly impossible it is to filter the Net of "bad stuff", they may just vote the morons who created this law right out of office.
Good luck my fellow ISP mates!
Err.. At least one ISP had the day off to protest.. Connect InfoBahn Australia
It appears that this ruling criminalizes the use of Linux as a home operating system. This would be true if every approved filter ran only on W95/NT.
Looking at section 12B, all that an ISP is required to do is to "make available to those subscribers, whether for a charge or otherwise, at least one of the facilities, products or services as set out in Schedule 1 of this Code."
[Schedule to be entitled "SCHEDULE 1: Content Control Options". This schedule will include a list of alternative content control measures including client side filtering, optional differentiated services, password controlled limited access systems and other like products or services, provided that those measures are capable of periodical updates so as to cause the exclusion, where practicable, of Prohibited Content, according to information provided in confidence to the suppliers of such measures by the ABA.]
You do *not* have to promise to use it, and there is *no* legal requirement to use it. You are not committing a criminal offence if you don't use the filtering software.
Your ISP doesn't even need to include using the software in your terms of service.
ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS MAKE IT AVAILABLE TO YOU!
If you tell your ISP (truthfully or otherwise) that you already have and use a filter then they don't have to make it available to you.
So the worst case is that you get charged a few dollars for a bit of software you don't use. I think that most ISPs will either absorb the cost or find a free filter. Remember that the filter doesn't have to be sophisticated. It doesn't look for keywords or use rating protocols, it just blocks a list of URLs supplied by the ABA.
Sorry to make this seem less exciting, but I think that the IIA has done a good job -- as long as the ABA agrees to register the code.
And if it discourages seppos from settling here, perhaps we have something to thank Alston for too! :-)
I have discovered a wonderful
(c) any other user who has advised their ISP that he or she already has installed and has operational a Content filtering or other control measure listed in Schedule 1 of this Code.
Also, notice that this does not say WHERE you have to have it installed.
Gov Guy: 'You told your Isp you had filtering software installed and operational. How come we don't see it here?'
Me: *Points to headless box in corner, plugged into cheapo power strip* 'It's installed on that box there, and operates perfectly. In fact, no one has ever accessed an offensive website from that PC'
Heheheh. All Hail SEMANTICS!
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I think it is an intelligent idea. It keeps the government plebs happy (probably because they are half brain dead about it), allows those that want to view porn etc to view it, and allows those that want to filter it to filter it. It puts the reponsibility in the hands of the consumer, where it should be and ensures that they have taken the responsibility to block stuff - if they care to. Because only a small percentage of people are actively worried about blocking stuff, they can stop whinging about it and actually 'protect their 19 year old sons'. :)
If I decide to install a filter, it will be an ad filter.
The name says it all; Search For ExtraTerrestial Intelligence. Why? Cause we 'ain't gonna find it here on earth! ;-)
I can't for the life of me believe someone would seriously consider this. I was dumbstruck when the original proposal was made, but to force people to run "approved" software on thier PC's? This takes the cake!
I run a firewall on my link as it is, and sure I *could* install filtering, but why would I?
I'm an adult and as such quite capable of deciding what I should and shouldn't see.
Sure, if you have children, do something if you're worried, but to force such a solution on the whole population, is lunacy!
I'm almost disgusted to be called Australian!
David de Groot Snr Systems Engineer
First the government took away the peoples rights to own firearms and had all of them destroyed (at a loss of thousands and thousands of dollars).
;-)
Now they're actually enforcing stupid laws such as these, knowing that there's nothing the people can do to stop them.
What are they going to fight with... protests?.. seems like free speech is likely to go next.. guns?.. (oops they don't have any!) sticks and stones?..
That place was originally an english penal colony, it looks like the people are just trying to get back to their roots. (and I don't mean the good ol' *NIX kind either
"..a civilized nation will have full gun registration. Our streets safer, our police more efficient, the world will foll
Just say, that through forces not yet fully understood by modern science the .gov here actually stops us looking at what they don't want us to see on the net, do they realise that we can just leave our keyboards and get as much drugs/porn/weapons etc from our local representative of the respective flourishing industries on the street?
;)
/dev/null ;)
Everyone repeat after me:
"Lets all *pretend* that we are adults." (for those who are that is
Proposed soloution: mv *.gov
Two points from an Australian...
;)
1) I will not install anything that I don't want to on my LAN. (my next post will probabbly be from jail tho
2) This is what you get when you let people who can only just identify a computer by sight make your computer laws!
Yes, indeed. The day I pay money to Verisign is the day I drop dead.
Thanks for asking.
[
Well, I'm starting to get a good number of mirror offers. In a month, who knows?
[
Secure proxies (https://lm.lcs.mit.edu).
[
See https://lm.lcs.mit.edu. I can't help but think that solutions are possible via technical means. Technology's problems are often technology's to fix.
[
I yelled about it, the cypherpunks ranted about it, everyone with an interest in privacy and politics mourned on the day it was passed. I wrote revelant software and wrote to cypherpunks-australia offering to help find US proxies for every citizen in .au to use. We were making noise.... you just weren't listening, that's all.
[
(gosh, the one time I don't hit 'preview' before 'submit' i make a huge typo. please substitute 'relevant' for 'revelant' above. My software does not perform acts of revelation... yet.)
[
I believe you are free to make the ISP server-filter for you. Then you can just bypass the filter.
[
I'd personally love to be banned. It would be such a charming thing to tell guests...
[
Yes. My software is already GPLed. Write me and I'll send you a copy of it.
[
What are people who are running *nix, PalmOS, BeOS, VIC-20 and other platforms which have no commercially available censorware going to do? I suppose lie like the rest of the poor sods who've been shat upon by their own government. At the risk of showing my ignorance - does Australia guarantee free speech as part of its' constitution?
Just don't turn into the next Chris McCandless
Canada has a similar set of Constitutional guarantees via the Charter of Rights ... sort of. Any government can choose to overrule them through a Notwithstanding Clause whenever they feel like it.
...
AFAIK, though, it's only been done once, by the Quebec government, to overrule a court decision that said their French-only sign law was unconstitutional. Which is actually funny, since Quebec never signed onto the new Constitution anyhow
A few months back, a BC court ruled that it was OK for some guy to have kiddie-porn on his computer (which sent basically everyone else apeshit), and the federal government was encouraged to use the Notwithstanding Clause, but they wouldn't do it even for something that would have had pretty much no opposition. The point being that the Charter rights are well respected and are as close to "guarantees" as we can ask for.
Do you have a plausible explanation for the fact that all your scores (less 1) are higher than 1?
Am I missing something here??
Thank you.
I was unaware of this.
I'm sure it will, and yes, I would consider that a badge of honour. Someone should make a "Banned in Australia" logo quickly, and trademark it.
There are some truely amazing stories about the technological stupidity of the overly-influencial 6:30 "'"News"'" shows. And they'll be champing at the bit over this one, which the ISP's seem to have forgotten about.
My favorite would have to be the story about people using the ccmaster.exe Credit Card generating program, where they had a actor in a *balaclava, black jumper and gloves* typing on a computer, supposedly generating credit card numbers.
If you looked closely, you could see something like
C:\1237182638740723469012374691234
Bad Command or file name
C:\234892093487209478
Bad Command or file name
C:\204982034982034982034
Bad Command or file name
And to top it all off, the 'reporter' ended the story with something like "And your credit card may not be safe", as he posed, holding his card up to the camera, in full view, all 16 numbers and expiry date.
I understand he got hit for about $20,000.
This is the enemy - not the politicians. Here the politicians watch these shows and talkback radio as a gauge of public opinion, not understanding the concept of unbiased sampling.
And you think this is a victory ?
Why not have a "I am over 18 and will not allow any under-18's to access this computer" as an option ? Why must I be forced to lie to continue using the internet ?
All I can think is that the ISP's wanted this all along.
When I went to the anti-censorship march in Sydney , I was amazed that no-one from the ISP's were there. We were, what, 800 people and the vast majority were, to not put to fine a point on it, Hippies. We even had that stupid painted pro-dope bus down from Nimbin in the march. Us black-trenchcoated short-facial-haired-Quake people had to form up in a small phalanx at the back to avoid being identified as pro-hippie.
Where were the employees of ISP's ? If you cared so much about it, why were the ISP staff not given time off to march on it if they wanted ?
The only answer is that for all the chest thumping, ISP's realise that Porn uses up a lot of Bandwith, and as Australian bandwith charges tend to be on a cents-per-meg basis, and they see this is an opportunity to reduce their costs.
You can be jailed for not voting in Austrailia, so who voted these clowns in?
the simple fact surrounding this is that the government needed to gain the support of 1-2 senators in the upper house to pass certain bills pertaining to the sale of telstra. To do this they bought these guys off (thanks a lot) and since one of the senators is an absolute fool it ends up that he wants A) mandatory internet censorship (to protect the innocent little children no doubt) and B)he's also managed to get the TV stations to censor a LARGE amount of what used to be allowed on.. My thanks extend to Senator Brian Harridine for these well thought out policies. I dont know how much its going to cost to censor the whole of the info filtering in and out of Australia (thats what he wants .. Great Wall of OZ neone?) but i intend to wait the few months it will take for someone to crack a program.. d/l it and continue searching for whatever i want to search for.
The over 18 years old requirement is a major error on the part of the government. I was 16 when I first got access to the Internet, and I basically had to get access for my academic work (the account was a shell account on the University of Adelaide's Computer Science Department computers). If someone is not 18, how can they start a degree in anything which requires them to get Internet access?
The Federal Government's "clever country" stuff is going out the window.
...but too damn chicken to come out and directly do it. ('cause if they did it'd likely die faster than you can scream "1st amendment" ;) Naaaah...the slow, mind-numbing, sly-backstabbing, left-hand-can't-see-right-hand way will work good enough anyway.
:)
I gotta give those Aussies some credit for brass balls though.
Even if they don't 'check', I'm sure if you happened to be someone they don't like (i.e. opposite political views) then you'd be a nice lil exception a la many laws here is the US of A in the past...
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
Umm, since when is a government going to tell me what to put on my computer?
Once again, the freedom loving people of the world take it up the tailpipe.
Well i live in australia and i know this is never going to go through...firstly...you can attempt to filter the internet...but you can never filter out everything...and so they are going to fail miserably on that front...and there will be so much protesting and so many violations of laws...such as freedoms speech that law suits will cost the government a hefty bundle...so...i hope that we have some intelligence to quit this exercise in futility
Well i live in australia and i know this is never going to go through...firstly...you can attempt to filter the internet...but you can never filter out everything...and so they are going to fail miserably on that front...and there will be so much protesting and so many violations of laws...such as freedom of speech... that law suits will cost the government a hefty bundle...so...i hope that we have some intelligence to quit this exercise in futility
What this does, as its been establish, is requires the END user to inform thier ISP that they ARE running a filter of some kind. As others have stated this is not a problem. Simply lie, or simply configure a filter with no blocks on it. That may be an inconvenience for some people who wish to comply with the law. But most people will just say "What? Filter? Oh sure.". Now for the good part. :) And why I hope they impose the same policy here. This ENDS the bullshit legislation. This transfers the responsibility for web content from the site owner/ISP to the individual and takes it out of the governments hands. you cant say "This site is offensive please pass legislation to put an end to it" The government will simply say "Hey remember those filters you said you had installed? USE THEM!" or "Your website made my kids build bombs and test them in their backyards for 6 months and we didn't do a god damned thing about it until they were killed while trying to blow up thier school, im gonna sue your ass for being the cause of it all by having bomb recipies!" again Government: "Hey, FILTER? USE IT!". So im for it. Im ALL for it.
This is, IMHO, a very distasteful law that needs to be fought against. However, you don't need guns to have a revolution. A revolution can be started by contacting people in the news, your local news paper, the local tv stations, internet news providers in your area. If your ISP has a homepage where their users go, get them to put something up. Write your elected representative. Make yourself heard in the government. If enough people do this, change can happen. It is not necessary to shoot things or run over stuff in tanks. Public forums and debates work, protests in front of government buildings work (pile discarded & broken computer in or outside Parliment?), letters work. And best of all, don't re-elect the people who made this law happen (re: PC party in Canada after the GST came in). There are ways to have a revolution without guns.
I have read through the posts and most of them talk about how dumb the Australian government is, or how pointlessly ineffective this legislation is. Personally, I'm of the opinion that whoever came up with this is a GENIUS! Think about this for a moment. This could have gone much much worse. They could have required ISP's to do filtering for you, they could have forced every connection through government proxy servers, etc. But no, they did an amazingly clever thing. All they did was say each ISP is required to ask you whether you are using filtering software, and you are required to answer "Yes". That's it. There's absolutely nothing there to enforce your usage of the software. There's no reason for you to tell the truth, and nobody is going to police it. So now, they've managed to shut up the right wingers by implementing a law that "protects the children", but have guaranteed that anybody who wants to surf porn sites all night long can do so at their leisure with no government interference. The existence of such regulation bothers me a bit, but all things considered, they dodged a bullet here.
You know, about once a day I can't believe the US government could be so unbelievably detached from reality to do the things they do. Then I try talking to people I know (that aren't the /. reading type) about such subjects and realize that most people really are completely ignorant and don't give a damn about freedom. They just want a comfortable standard of living for them and their kids. After I've spoken to enough such people, I start to desperately wish I could emigrate to another country where the average level of common sense is greater.
Right about then, an article like this comes along and convinces me that the only common denominator is human cultures is brute stupidity.
While you silly /.'s babble on about "freedom" and other bularky, you forget that the innocent and helpless children are finally safe! Over the years I have seen my family destroyed by this vile "internet" beast. It just tears a poor homemaker up! Why just the other day I caught my youngest daughter masturbating to the Starr Report with the family's brand new Microsoft Mouse! Needless to say my redneck husband took her to the back room and had a talk with her! And just this morning in my bastard son's backpack I found some marijuana and a receipt from Ebay! Thank god he was just "selling it to the other kids" and not using it himself. Anyway I am very happy that our strong and watchful government has passed this law which allows ultra-conservative, fat, and useless homemakers like myself more time to make bread and watch sitcoms.
If they start checking up (by checking mandatory blacklist download logs and subpoenaing ISP records in tax-audit-style swoops) and making examples of selected offenders with highly-publicised fines amd the odd jail term, the rest of the public will cave in. Or so the theory goes.
And this law's also useful for selectively getting rid of whistleblowers, civil libertarians and other troublemakers.
I was there. I even got up and spoke on top of the bus at the end of the march. I also saw Nick from Zeta and Vic from CIA. We were there. All of CIA's staff were on the march too. Antony Healey from healey.com.au (I'm going to stop the href's 8-) and his staff, um, a few guys from OzEmail (which surprised me), Scott Golby from ar.com.au and his staff. There were lots of us. I was the guy in the white Mazda 929 with the 'THEWWW' licence plates 8-)
I do agree that the hippy-bus was a bit lame 8-)
Comics:
Sluggy.com - Poing!
Schlock Mercenary.
Does Australia have any form of Judicial Review? I mean, some sort of recourse if laws are passed that violate its constitution? I'm afraid I'm not really up on Australian governmental matters.
Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from
Kythe
are u kidding? the LAST thing we want is
filtering software that _actually_works_!
:)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Having the government censoring what you read, see and say is bad enough. Making you censor yourself according to their ideals is simply rubbing your nose in the stinky pile after you've done your business.
Next session of congress, I assure you that we'll see a host of idiots citing Australia as a role-model for net-censorship the way they idolized the Canadian health-care system a few years ago.
As soon as they start requiring us to fill out a diary and turn it into our assigned personal-government-counselors, these laws will be passe. You can just tell them when you've done something bad, read a dirty word, seen a naked woman, or gone down on your boyfriend in the back of your car and await 'personality alteration'. Orwell and his crystal ball . . .
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
MHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA..
i mean.. *snort* *snicker* um, i'm sure that it will be a very *giggles slightly* effective way of handling it. in all seriousness, i think we can all think that left to their own honor, we can trust the people to actually install software esigned to restrict their rights on their own computers without trying to circumven.. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
heh.. oh, GOd.. eeh.. never mind.. HAHAHA..
(P.S. so that covers the web. what about FTP? newsgroups? telnet? shells in foreign countries? lynx running under shells in foreign countries? There's more than one way to get pr0n, you know)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I am always one for self regulation but the emphasis on "self." Forcing someone to actually use the software is no different then Taiwan running their huge proxies keeping everyone from reading porn and such.
For those who haven't read it I would suggest one of my favorite books of all time Fahrenheit 451. F451 in its day was a great groundbreaker however it has become even more pertinent now then it was in 1954. The world is a very dangerous and not so nice place sometimes but we can't put kid gloves on every little thing so Junior doesnt see naked boobs, heck thats what Dad's old Playboys were for anyhow.
I urge everyone to help out our friends Down Under and just tell someone, get the word out. For those that read it for a book report or rented the movie take another look back at the book and tell how far we are from that society. Live by the quote.
Hangtime
I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace; that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a Congress. -- John Adams (1776)
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Political leadership in all countries and especially in developing countries merely need a precedent to impose similiar or worse legistation in their own countries. In this regard, the Australian law open new, although unwanted, doors.
I agree with the posting by an Australian ISP: why was not enough noise made about the Australian net censorship bill?
The truth is, Internet or otherwise, we still think in terms of the physical boundaries of our countries; if it is'nt a legislation in our country why should we care?
Regards
Vinay
"It's only the shonks and cowboys who will have a problem." - IIA Executive Director Peter Coroneos
Well, that sure sounds complementary to libertarians. WTF is a "shonk" anyway?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I aggree that this is a bad law.
However, it is perfectly fine for the citizens
of Australia to decide what content they wish
to allow down their internet connections from
overseas. They aren't restricting your right
to speak, the majority are just choosing to
ignore you. Perfectly right and proper, and
most definitely in keeping with free speech.
You have the right to speak, just not the right
to force people to listen.
Several countries use local content legislation
to provide funds for local culture. This isn't
seen as a restriction on speech, so why should
saying "We don't want to see X?"
The way I read the proposal says that they have
to offer it to their customers, not that they
have to use it. You are still able to "yell"
about porn as much as you want (maybe not on
Aussie sites), you're just more likely to be ignored.
It most definitely isn't an act of war. If
it were an act of war to limit the presentation
of speech by people not in the country, everyone
would be at war with:
Canada - Canadian content broadcast legislation,
Kiddie porn laws.
USA - CDA and Cuban property appropriation laws.
Australia - Content legislation.
China, North Korea, and many many others.
I feel it is perfectly acceptable for people to
decide what they do and do not want to see. What
isn't acceptable is attempting to force your
views on other people. That you feel they are
correct/proper is generally irrelevent.
Jason
"Citizens of Australia, shortly you will all be supplied with a pair of scissors and a bulk amount of liquid paper. Under new laws, you are now forc... uh... required to use the liquid paper on all undesirable words in your dictionaries. The scissors must be used to remove any and all images of suspicious wizards who may be smoking unindentified herbs in works by JRR Tolkien.
If you choose not to comply with our dema... uh... restrictions, a government official will be at your residence momentarily to remove your eyeballs from their sockets lest you accidently find yourself gazing at some young girl's exposed ankles.
That is all, now return your usual, sheltered, naive lives."
Froz
joelesler@optusnet.com.au
ICQ: 532856
Yup, what I thought. All the "decent" i.e. small, independant ISP's were there. The ISP's you name would collectivly hold less then 5% of the market, and that's being very generous.
Bigpond ? (200k users)
Ozemail ? (200k users)
Optus ? (Aiming for the @home broadband market)
IHUG ? (Actually, they were probably going, but it took 4 days to get there) [1]
If they cared about it, they would have included it in their weekly mailings to users, which I can't seem to unsubscribe myself from. And I can't recall *any* of them doing anything about it. Ditto on their homepages - I checked.
The attitude seemed to be "Oh, it won't pass, we won't worry" which leads me to believe that they think it will benefit them.
I have accounts with Bigpond, Ozemail, Optusnet/Magnadata and quite a few friends on Ihug/Tig. And they all let it slide right past. They didn't even inform their users, or if they did I missed all of it.
Oh, and if that was you up on the bus down at Darling Harbour, we have no idea what you said. We were in the front 1/2 of the crowd, just on the Monorail side of the center, and the sound system was completly crap.
Thinking back, of all of the speeches, only Danny Yee's speech in Hyde Park was audible. I came away from that march shaking my head at the low-tech low-impact effect. I mean, cardboard hand-painted hippie signs ? Only the banner was any good - kudos on that. I'm bloody suprised it made it to the news at all.
Let's not blame the US - It's the lack of activisim here in Australia that has landed us in it. And that apathy exists because little attempt was made to counter it, and that no-one wants to step out and risk being seen as pro-porn in the current political environment.
[1] Bandwith Speed Slam RE: Ihug
At least there's a hole: you can always lie to your ISP and tell them you're filtering it when you're not. So I suppose it could be worse then it is. But this is still a Very Bad Thing.
You know, there's a hole in the whole philosophy of this mandatory censorware thing. Consider: essentially censorware is a method of filtering out another's speech. The Australian government (indeed, most governments) have a legal right to do this to their own citizens, immoral censorship is. However, the Net is a global community. Governments have no right to do anything to people not under their jurisdiction. To attempt to do so is, if I'm not mistaken, an act of war.
In other words, Australia has just declared war on everyone else. I hope someone in their government figures this one out fast (no doubt they don't read Slashdot, seeing as it's too supportive of such "anarchistic" rights as free speech, so they'll never see this post). No doubt the boneheads who made this law up didn't think of it.
Here is the -exact- wording from the draft code of conduct - available at http://www.iia.net.au/Code5.html
12B.4 The preceding Clause shall have no application in respect of the supply of Internet access services by an ISP to the following classes of users:
(a) commercial users who already have in place some form of Content filtering or control, whether by means of firewall technology or otherwise, such as is likely to make the use of the measures listed in the Schedule unnecessary or redundant;
(b) schools, educational or other institutional users similarly protected; or
(c) any other user who has advised their ISP that he or she already has installed and has operational a Content filtering or other control measure listed in Schedule 1 of this Code.
Advised. Not 'proved'. Advised.
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - Poing!
Schlock Mercenary.
The IIA has done something very interesting. The intent of the legislation was to put responsibility for filtering at the ISP level, making life difficult for them and easy for everyone else. This made it especially hard for small ISPs, while relatively easy for Telstra (which the govt owns a stake in, hmmm).
With this move, the IIA has squarely put the responsibility on the end users, who will either a) ignore it b) get up in arms about the fees, inconvenience, etc.
It's a brilliant way to put the pressure on the government by keeping it in the minds (and wallets) of the average AU consumer.
...and made as much noise as I could.
Moreover, I provided this.
[
Ah, yes, you are under no obligation to check. Now. But in the long view, its just delayed the inevitable.
6 months from now, the Telegraph or Today Tonight or A Current Affair will use it to take the next step :
"Your children can still see porn on the Internet - ISP's purposly bypassing the law in order to keep making profits"
"ISP's - Supposedly in the front line against smut on the internet, but a government report shows that not one of them enforces it"
"A child of 14, shown here getting all the naked pictures they want off the internet, simply by clicking on a box here, and using his mothers Visa card to sign up"
"Boy, 16, dies after building a pipebomb from information on the internet. Mother says 'Why wasn't this blocked under the Colston-Harradine laws like we were told it would be'"
Which means, the next law will be even tougher.
And we'll see the mandatory installation of filtering software that has to report it's installed before a download begins. Nothing like making the Users Pay for their own censorship.
Or Log checking and comparing, with questions asked "Why are you still getting 600 meg of naked pictures when you said here you have filtering software installed ? Please reply to this mail with the serial number & receipt number of the software you have installed or your account will be terminated"
Oh, yeah. This is great news.
Does your wonderful draft code of "pornographic content must not be hosted in Australia" address the concept of news and mail servers ? 'Cause I saw nothing about it in there, apart from 13.4
13.4 When an Internet Content Host is notified by the ABA that it is hosting on a web server or other content database within its control, material which is deemed by the ABA to be Prohibited Content or Potentially Prohibited Content
(a) the Internet Content Host must promptly remove that Content from the Web Site or database;
(b) upon doing so, the Internet Content Host must inform the customer that the customer's conduct
is a breach of the customer's service conditions and, if applicable, an offence under law, and further,that a repeat occurrence will result in the termination of the customer's account;
(c) in the case of a repeat occurrence of offending conduct by the customer, an Internet Content Host, having informed the customer that his or her conduct is a breach of the customer's service conditions and, if applicable, an offence under law, must terminate that customer's account.
OK. I'm on a Naked Penguin Pic of the day mailing list. Someone subscribes a wrong address to that mailing list, and a complaint is forwarded to the ABA.
Based on my reading, and of the original law, and of listening to the senate discussion on the radio, you then have to make sure that that picture is not hosted or mirrored anywhere. Which means you have to then go in and delete it from your mail spool so it isn't hosted in Australia. Which means you have to delete it from anyone else who receives it.
Which is *worse* then the original law, which purposly bypassed email. And, as I've said before, after you apply this law to Usenet, we can go back to flying in Usenet on a tape spool once a week, because by the time the Howard definition of Pornographic is applied Usenet News Servers in Australia will be 1/1000th of the size they are now.
And I should point out that the above article is -incorrect-. You do NOT have to guarantee that you're using a filter. You just have to tell us that you are. We're not under any obligation to check.
/., and that was about it.
The major bad thing with this document is that it requires us to ensure that all our customers are over 18 years old, or have parental approval.
Personally, I think that this isn't anywhere as bad as it could have been, thanks to the IIA's attempt to soothe this.
I, personally, am reasonably bitter towards the US in this. Whilst you were having grief with your CDA, people -all around the world- were turning their pages black, and protesting quite vocally. Yet, when our moronic government brought this legislation up, which is -much much- worse than the CDA, you quite happily ignored us. A total of 3 posts to
As far as what the IIA have done, I thank them. They've turned this legislation around, from something that would have totally destroyed the internet in australia, to something we're barely going to notice.
--Rob
Comics:
Sluggy.com - Poing!
Schlock Mercenary.