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Lotus Says: The Industry Supports Censorship
Industry has no issue with online content regulation. The industry endorses content regulation.
The context is Australia's new system of dumbing the net down for children; here, the words "content regulation" mean simply: "censorship." An excerpt follows.
Senator Alston, Australia's Minister for Communications, is still working to sell Australia's censorship law, which was passed in June and takes effect on January 1st. Essentially the entire continent's internet will be rated like movies, with teeth. Unless something is done before January - which looks unlikely - it will be the worst trampling of net liberties by a Western democratic nation.
One of the compelling arguments against Australia's plan is that it will slow or halt the technology industry - halting progress means losing venture capital and slowing an entire nation's economy; nobody wants that. So Senator Alston has been looking for evidence to the contrary, and in particular he hopes to convince people that the industry itself supports the plan.
In the excerpted speech below, given on September 30, he recalls a conversation with Jeff Papows, CEO of Lotus, and claims Papows voiced support for the plan. (Note that Alston also claims support from Yahoo. Yahoo denies this, but Lotus has not, and had no comment at press time).
The industry itself accepts that there should be these codes of practice and this form of regulation. We have been trying to negotiate it for the last three years with the Internet Industry Association. Their problem is that there are these maniacs - these electronic frontiers outfits - running around stirring up trouble, using quaint expressions and feeding lines to that woman from the Civil Liberties Union [Nadine Strossen] who then gets out there, gets a good run and says that we are global village idiots. This is just a low-grade political campaign. I do not find industry opposing this approach.
I was fascinated when I was in Silicon Valley about two months ago. I waited for industry to raise it, because it was at the height of the furore. It was just after the legislation had gone through and I was doing the rounds of all the IT companies in the valley. I waited for them to raise it with me. The only people who ever raised it with me were journalists who were saying, 'Isn't this a big problem?' I replied, 'Why it is a big problem?' They said, 'It is because it is getting media coverage. It is coming out of Australia. Your Senator Lundy is faxing the New York Times and saying, "Isn't it disgraceful?" and Electronic Frontiers Australia is calling for the minister's resignation. Isn't this an issue?' It is an issue for the media, because it is new, exciting and a lot of fun, but it was not an issue for the industry.
The only people who raised it with me on that visit were Yahoo who thought it was a good idea. I recently saw the president and CEO of Lotus, which is a major player. He was out visiting Australia. Again, I waited for him to raise it with me and he did not. Over the years I have seen a lot of these people and none of them have ever raised it. I thought I might as well ask him what he thinks. His answer was, 'Industry has no issue with online content regulation. The industry endorses content regulation.' In other words, all of the responsible players - and most of these people have kids of their own - do not for a moment want to see the anarchy that is prevailing at the moment.
Lotus' support for this plan comes as a surprise to those who remember that the company was founded by Mitch Kapor, later a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
...that the next version of Domino or Notes includes detailed content rating, or even makes it mandatory (Go to click OK and get "You have not filled out the rating field" error).
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
...and in another coincidence, Notes/Domino becomes the new standard for offices in the Australian government?
As several people have always pointed out, companies will kiss up to anyone that has potential purchasing power.
[sarcasm]
I suggest anyone out there with a nice fancy title like "Division Management Director of Information Technology System" call up IBM, ask to get a sales pitch for the new Lotus products, then wait five minutes and call them back to cancel the appointment because you just read on SlashDot that Lotus supports Internet censorship and you believe that is bad business.
[/sarcasm]
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Remove everything dangerous to kids. War, disease, poverty, bullies, oppresive school systems, parents, cars, animals, adults, and the environment in general. Only in a complete vacuum can they be safe.
Or keep them tightly sealed in steel barrels until they're 21, and fully capable of dealing with life themselves.
Typical BS, people; the industry gives lip service to this kind of talk so they look good. Duh.
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
this government and it citizens will be interesting to watch.. first it banned all semi automatic weapons.. and now its trying to implement some type of censorship.. hmm..
Could you point me at a collection of software that offers calendar management, shared addresses, and general scriptable document sharing with *full* *distributed* *disconnected* operation?
I'd dearly love to have a free alternative to Lotus Notes, but I don't think there is one yet. And the Yoga project is clearly moribund.
--
Xenu loves you!
Accept this as a fact. Censorship sucks and always will.
So there I was, between a rock and a hard place, when suddenly I think "Wait a minute. . . what am I doing on this side
> I'm perfectly allowed to trash the country's name any way I like.
As long as you don't use the f-word.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
You said:
If you have something intelligent to say, you'll log in or get moderated up so I can read it. Otherwise, you're wasting your time.
This only holds true if my comment was meant for your ears alone. In any other circumstances the loss of you as an audience is relatively unimportant.
Ironically, this message is intended for you, and won't be read by you because it's below your threshold.
So the question is, did I just prove or disprove your statement?
Don't just say "Because that's immoral" or "Because I said so". Those are just saying "Go for more and stretch the limits"
Not every parent prints their moral code on a sheet of rubber. Not every child lives in a chaotic world where they get their way if they scream enough.
Claiming that the internet and eg a street are not the exact equivalent is not clever. That's like saying black people are different from white people
Well, actually it is more like saying that my Quake avatar is different from my physical body...
For example, I recently got Dino Crisis for my Playstation. My Playstation had been modified to allow me to play Japanese games, but when I put Dino Crisis in, it detected the chip. I got a bunch of Japanese text and one of those red cirles with a slash through it like you see on no-smoking signs. Now, I'm sure, a lot of new Playstation games won't work in my Playstation, because of this technology, so I had to go back to the drawing board to try to thwart Sony's latest attempt impose their content controls on me.
I am a bit surprised by the way that Lotus came out so heavily in favor of government sponsored censorship, I'm guessing their is something in it for them, either in regards to control or financial gain.
I wonder how long the citizens of Australia will put up with this nonsense.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
If I had a mod point I would bump this up to +1 funny...
Prohibited Content
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
1) The comments that the "information industry" supports net censorship is in the best light a distortion and more accurately an untruth of the highest order. Everyone from Microsoft to the smallest ISP has spoken out against censorship and the dangers it represents for the development of the internet and the industry as a whole
2) Even if the comment weren't completely untrue, the notion that "industry" supports a particular political stance should not be construed to imply that the stance is in any way morally or ethically OK, or even good for the populace as a whole. Much of Germany's industry supported and profited from Hitler's campaigns of atrocity through world war II. Much of the Serbian industrial leadership supported Milosevic's policies until recently (at least rhetorically). As another person mentioned, industry throughout the world vehemently resisited and actively circumvented the trade sanctions against apartheid, not to mention those against Iran, Iraq, and, yes, Serbia.
In short, if "industry" is defining our political and ethical agendas, we are not only in very big trouble, we are probably already lost.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Sex? Well, it's something kids need to learn about anyway, and if you ask me, sex ed. is the worst place (that class made me sick.. ugh..).
Well, I don't think that Bondage and Sado-Masochistic websites are the place for children to learn about sex.
"The Internet has come along in huge leaps and bounds since its invention two or three years ago" (this was mid 98).
This guy is the government minister of all things internet-related *cry*
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I work for a Lotus BP. We are in the Internet-service industry and one of our major markets is distance learning. Also, the fastest growing part of our business is Web-hosting.
Our biggest area of expertise is with Lotus Domino/Notes. Lotus's products are used in all of the areas that you cite, and in order for them to sell lisences (I hesitate to use that phrase here, but Lotus is a business and shareholder value isn't created out of nothing) Lotus has to remain competive in those areas.
Starting with Domino 4.5 and continuing through the current release (R5, beta available on Linux) Lotus has been making a very strong move into Internet technologies.
Last point, Internet censorship will affect Lotus BP's, which will affect Lotus. None of us work in a bubble.
In all things moderation.
The first wires were laid down for research.
The net is different now.
It's not "yours" anymore. It's "ours" and you can participate or not as you see fit.
Well, my government passed stupid legislation and we have an idiot whose head is in the '50s as a minister. The main opposition party, with a few exceptions, chose not to stand up on the issue (no one once to be seen advocating kiddie porn) and the minor parties made loud noises but were basically irrelevant to the debate because of numbers.
Situation normal, and hardly confined to Australia.
You US people had Reagan (cluelessness made America proud again!) and now you have Bill "keep it in your pants" Clinton. We have our Howard and Alston.
Politicians. Don't expect much.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
That's why ratings have always been better than censorship. That way, somebody will figure it out if the government is censoring stuff it shouldn't, while it keeps our kids good and naive in the mean time. I support government-enforced (or privately-enforced ones) ratings, but not out-and-out censorship.
Also, I know someone is going to say ratings == censorship, and that web content will be geared solely for diluted ratings, but this is the web, people! People still buy restricted movies, watch "viewer disgression is advised" TV-shows, and read dirty web pages that clearly say "THIS IS A PORN SITE, GO AWAY". So that statement is essentially false.
'Nuff said.
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
Actually, we will instead segregate you, and give you a net called "strokeNET."
Wipe the floor and the walls when you're through in there.
To say nothing for all those used bubblegum cards that the kids carry on about all the time. Even the new ones that have those PokeyMon characters oh them. Though they're all a major rip-off these days. No damn gum in the package at all!
Industry: `You have not been approved by Industry. You do not have the
endorsement of Industry. Report to the nearest liquidation center for
summary disposal. Do not speak to Industry approved children while
traveling to your nearest liquidation center.'
Ignorant Shill: `Excuse me, Mr. Industry. I know you're my $64 Billion
Buddy, but I have a question.'
Industry: `Yes?'
Ignorant Shill: `At what point did you become arbiter general for all
things social?'
Industry: `When your lawyers and your governments made me responsible
for The Great Pseudo-Child. Now get to the liquidation center or I'll
take away your mini-van and make you walk.'
Ignorant Shill: `Ok, thanks.'
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
What are you smoking? :-)
Since when does the industry dictate to the rest of us what we will, and will not, see and do?
When did it stop doing that? :-(
support gun control: take guns from cops
So - just why do you bother opening unsolicited e-mail? Could it be the "Free Russian SeXXX" subject line?
You say :
"It is a "crisis" that decent people are afraid to let their children loose on the 'net because there's so much filth online."
Hell, if you can't raise your kids to be responsible consumers of media why should I care? Sure - there's some sick-o stuff out there in terms of porn, but if I were concerned about something it would be the violence stuff.
And again you state:
"People aren't allowed to run naked or copulate in public on the public sidewalk, or in shopping malls. Why should they be allowed to do the electronic equivalent?"
Doesn't seem equivalent to me.
Just another "libbertardian" I am.
Lies about his military experience and education and much much more.
Did anybody else read it? I wish I could find a copy of it. Wait a sec. I'll search Google. Well here is one :
http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,10 14538,00.html
and http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990430S0026
And see a good picture of him here:u st1999/99JAp10_Papows/99jap10_papows.htm l
http://www.groupcomputing.com/Issues/1999/JulyAug
Does he look like a used card salesman or what?
This is not nearly as detailed as the WSJ article. And remember he is also the same who laughed his ass off when asked if there would be a port of Lotus Notes for Linux. And guess what, now he is a fan of everything Linux.
This guy is a con artist and will say just about everything to make people around him happy to gain favors from them.
lotus... who are they? didn't they once market the hell out of a DOS/Unix (yeah 1-2-3 ran on SCO) spreadsheet program? so... have i missed something??? *grin*
--bc
--------------------------
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
The Australian plan is a particularly insidious and unsettling one - while on the surface it seems to allow people to continue to do as they please without repercussions, in fact it requires the individual to acknowledge and accept the government's right to censor material which they view.
There is no voluntary component - under the Australian law, as I understand it, if users choose not to run filtering software on their computer, they are violating the law. Citizens are forced to choose between exercising what many consider a basic human right, namely the freedom to communicate with others, and breaking the law. Some may consider this a minor issue, but it isn't minor when a government begins criminalizing behavior which otherwise law-abiding citizens might reasonably indulge in.
It's a pity that people like Papows so take for granted the protections that their (U.S.) Constitution provides them with, that they forget how important such protections are. Unfortunately, Australia may need to learn firsthand what the disadvantages of broad censorship laws are before sufficient political will is mustered to eliminate them.
hate to say this but US laws do not apply here, if the *majority* of Ozzies (sp) agree to this then who are we to complain? judge?
sure i feel for you & i know this place aint much better (uk). BUT, just because the US constitution is against this, does it neccesarily mean it is wrong, at least for that place?
5% of people disagree, 40% dont care and the rest are pro, does that mean the remaining 95% are wrong?
this offends me, but as a self professed geek, my opinions differ from the norm - and i'm in no position to force my opinions on the majority.
stty erase ^H
Oh no! Won't someone think of the children
Mrs. Rev Lovejoy
Well the reason people want to establish trade with China is the popularity of Chinese food. Hardly any US business people appreciate Indian food, so the whole country sort of disappears from their mental radar.
For future reference countries on the radar are: China, Japan, pretty parts of Europe, Australia, exotic tropical islands, parts of South America where you don't have to see poor people and which have AC, friendly parts of the Middle East, Mexico, anglophone Canada, some parts of SE Asia.
Countries not on the radar: Former Soviet Union and satellite countries, India, Africa (except maybe Egypt. Maybe), hostile parts of the Middle East, places with lots of poor people, francophone Canada, the other parts of SE Asia.
Some of this is because of food preferences, but it's also strongly influenced by what parts of the world you might possibly want to vacation in.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Since the industry was given free reign to control the Internet. Case in point: Paul Twomey, head of Australia's IT policy body, the person pretty much responsible for this vile new policy, is also chair of GAC. GAC is the Government Advisory Council to ICANN. ICANN is the private sector company now in control of the Net. ICANN claims GAC doesn't set policy. GAC already has set policy. ICANN listens to large corporations, and ignores the wishes of individuals. In fact, ICANN makes a claim similar to .au: Nobody bothers to participate in our little get-togethers, therefore nobody cares what we do.
The corporations are even now using this very excuse to turn the Net into the next century's television.
I've ranted about this before, and I'll do it again: If you find this sort of thing distasteful, don't bitch and moan about it here, GET INVOLVED. Nothing's going to change if the corporations are allowed to continue down this path unimpeded.
To date, that's exactly what they've been.
.@.
I completely agree with your points *but* I was trying to use this as an example of US (and by extension all developed nations) culltural imperialism. (guess i did it badly)
:)
sorry, oz was the wrong example to use, lets get hypothetical:
some country historically has female circumcision, but disallows unfettered net access for cultural reasons. Of course western view points are offended by this, but that doesn't neccesarily make them more valid than this countries opinions - probably they are less valid because of the weight of culture.
i just saw a glimmer of this in the situation and it got my shackles up
stty erase ^H
what's to prevent the people who choose the ratings to be overly "influenced" by the "moral Majority"?
Why should it be prevented? The main thing with censorship seems to be choice. At least with ratings, users have the choice to be influenced by the "moral majority", or not. You suggest not giving them this choice, which could be considered just as bad as censorship itself.
Look at slashdot's ratings aka moderation.
That is a very bad example of how well ratings work. Browse at -1 for awhile and you'll understand what I mean.
So remember: Keep Fit and Have Fun!
--------
"I already have all the latest software."
telnet mail.dcita.gov.au 25
:)
...I don't care who Alston cites, he's just talking smack on this one. :)
If we consider the practicality of the situation, though, most of the "isms" tend to lean toward totalitarianism/authoritarianism, because all the forms of government (so far) involve a small subset of people to whom everyone else is responsible to. As the general education level increases, this subset increases in number, and power concentrations tend to be diluted, and weaned from some portion of the existing subset. Resistance to this dilution is a natural side-effect of weaning, and act is a specific case as part of the weaning.
Well, I wanted to explain my prior rant, and got into another one. Doh. I guess there are disadvantages to stream-of-conciousness writing. Namely, I can't make a coherent thought that doesn't blend into another one. hehe.
________________________
Why does everyone take my messages the wrong way ? I said it provides a starting point for parents. Any parent who relies simply on the government to decide what their child should see is an idiot
Upholding a high standard of ethics and yet trying to get China into the WTO?!?! And you bring in the population, too? I won't get started now on where these things emanate from, but I do suggest you check out an article about China and Microsoft. Hmmm..with all the hubbub about Pentium 3 problems and security holes in MS products, maybe now is a good time to get Linux over there. Everything so far shows that they are not pitching themselves in any sort of marketing to the China mainland audience.
Lotus is a maker of information servers, so what do they care about content? they'll sell servers no matter what kind of content is out there! and, my guess, probably there's few porn sites running on notes anyways, being porn's one of the primary underlying issues.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
On the contrary, bondage and sadomasochism websites are a place to learn about bondage and sadomasochism, obviously. :)
I got much better sex ed from alt.sex.* (back before they were spam-havens) and the relevant FAQs than I ever got in high school. Don't underestimate the ability of literate experts in a field, even one like sex or S&M, to produce useful and entertaining documentation.
Censoring "sex" will not just block out the "dirty pictures"; it will also block out the real, high-quality, grassroots-produced information. Why? Because a lot of the people who want to stomp out the dirty pictures also want to keep people ignorant.
(Notice that I didn't say "... to keep children ignorant.")
I personally will/do check all content my children veiw on the web, They don't know the password to log on, and I have taken the proper measures to record where they go if I am out of the room for a few minutes. I still state that a ratings systems is a good place to start for parents. I would still look at all content, but certain content would not need to be viewed. This could be done by country and simply regulated in each country. I see your points, all of them, But I feel that it can exist. How about we agree to disagree on this ?
Obviously Lotus does not work in the Internet-service industry, nor the Web-publishing industry, nor the education industry (which often runs its IT budgets on a shoestring and definitely can't support expensive filtering, and further has age-old political objections to censorship).
Lotus makes application software. Internet censorship wouldn't affect their business one bit, any more than regulation of the bicycle industry would affect airplane pilots.
The US has 250-280 million. How many does Pakistan have? I remember it was a lot.
What do you mean?(I'm actually curious, I'm American and just wondering what you mean you can't say "fuck". Do you mean just on TV or something?)
No.
It's that simple.
As one small part of the reason the answer is "NO", consider the ratings the US Government would put on the following, assuming equal violence, etc:
Our Heroic Merikin Troops Kick The Ass Of The Target Of Today's Five-Minute Hate
The Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
As a duly appointed representative of The Technology Industry (TM), I'd like to publicly state that Lotus has just been kicked out. It is my understanding that, as they will no longer be allowed to sell technology products or services, they'll be switching over to afalfa farming.
Thank you, and good night.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I cannot and will not stand idly by and watch as yet another thing in this world be perverted and twisted in political agenda. Censorship has been a hot topic for as long as I can remember. Whether it is books or music or theatre, no one is happy with what is available. Then along comes the WWW. It has no restrictions, whatsoever, except for the occasional password barrier. When it hit, I thought that the world as a whole was going to get past these trifling issues, but I guess we as a world community are just too immature. Sure, there is lots of content on the Web, good AND bad. You cannot have one without the other, I am sorry! Deal with it folks. Let the information speak for itself, and let the intelligent beings of the planet decide for themselves. /rant
"I used to be an agnostic, but now I'm not so sure..."
Because we can't read your mind. We can only read what you wrote.
I said it provides a starting point for parents.
You said it should be made mandatory. This is stupid and evil for reasons which have repeatedly been explained here.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Or, rather, the Industry doesn't care one way or the other.
The Computer Industry doesn't make it's money off of freedom of speech, it makes it's money off of computers that push data around. Whether that data is regulated is irrelevant, because regulated data needs computers to push it around just as much as unregulated data.
Since the industry makes money either way, they don't care. And if the industry doesn't care, it will always make nice noises at the powers that be, because then life is better for the industry.
Companies exist for one reason: to make money. Mitch Kapor may be very ardent about free speech, but he is not now nor has he ever been Lotus Personified. Even if he were still in Lotus that would be Lotus' stance, and he would be expected to back it up publicly or probably lose his job.
Companies only weigh in for rights when it affects their bottom line. That's why corporations are so gung-ho about loosening restrictions in encryption -- they want to sell it. That's why corporations are so gung-ho about whether or not the Govt should reign in Microsoft -- either they'll make more money without Microsoft, or they'll make more money WITH Microsoft.
That's also why Corporations are so hot on doing business in China, despite China's atrocious record on human rights -- they can make money in China. That's also why Corporations fought bitterly against Apartheid Sanctions.
Corporations see the green before anything else. It makes me sick, but that's the way it is.
So if Australia wants to censor the internet, why not? Unless you're an ISP, it doesn't affect your bottom line. So the Computer Industry is fully behind Censorship, as long as they keep making money...
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Yes... that struck me as a bit rough too - considering they simply broadcast the news bulletin just like they have every other week day for the past few years. Just because another countries news suddenly doesn't agree with ours, SBS is to blame? *sigh*
ok :) But seriously folks what about freedom of speech? Think about all the companies they may drive out of business! Porn industries, sure, but whatever. All I'm wondering now is why a country that was once full of criminals cares all that much. The Crocdile Hunter is cool, these people aren't. We should make the croc hunter head of Australia :)
now for my *real* comment.
Australia is pissing me off. I don't know what they want us to do... just make one huge proxie and enforce it worldwide?
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
The Internet is a live medium. No arguments there. The vast majority of internet users are adults. As a result, the internet contains a lot of adult material. But the problem is not the internet itself, but childrens access to it. Too many parents treat the internet like television. Sit the kids in front of the computer and they'll look after themselves... This is stupidity. The Internet is not television. Leaving a child unsupervised on the internet is like leaving them in a bar. Its a place were adults congregate. Now imagine if you were to sit your child in a bar and while they sat there they were indestinguishable from an adult. They could buy beer and get scored on by other bar-goers. Because this is what the net is like. Everyone looks the same whether they are an adult or a child. So the real problem is parents ability to control childrens access to the net. With the ubiquitous nature of Windows this is nigh on impossible. With 95/98, the whole OS is effectively running as root. Anyone can look at anything and modify any files. Thus any content control can be subverted by a techno-geek-child (and theres a lot of them out there.) All that is needed is a secure multi-user OS to saturate the home market. Linux or NT would suffice. Then a net daemon running at root level that acts as a filter for all the incoming/outgoing traffic. This puts the CPU load of content control on the end users machine rather than at the ISP where the bulk load would be too much! So if we boil it all down the problems are uneducated, naive parents, Microsoft and their wondeful OS!
It's bad enough that movies are de facto mandated ratings (theaters won't show unrated or NC-17 movies). As for video games and comics, are they rated (in the US, at least)? I wasn't aware of that. If people WANT to rate themselves, that's fine. If not, it's another matter.
One obvious problem with mandatory ratings of web sites is: who's going to do the rating? There are so many web sites and they change on such a continuous basis that there's no possible way that a centralized rating authority can assign ratings to every web page (or really every separately addressable object) in existence. That means that content providers have to supply their own ratings. There's obviously a conflict of interest here. The Australian law seems to try to get around that by requiring that the ratings coincide with what the central censorship bureau would assign the site. That makes it difficult, to say the least, for people to safely rate their own sites. This issue has been discussed in a lot more depth elsewhere, and I don't feel like a lot of typing.
As for this issue of parents vis a vis children, if you want your children to be that coddled, then you can bloody well find the time to research every single thing your child wants to buy/see/use. If you don't want to, you can buy filtering software to do the job for you. If you complain that it doesn't work well enough, then write better software yourself to do it. But don't ask the person running the erotica site to admit that his material is morally wrong and to do your work for you. If nothing else, it won't work. Mandating that every web site be correctly rated is impossible. Don't pretend that it will work -- it won't, and your child will be exposed to all the "garbage" (distinctly a value judgment) that he'd be exposed to anyway. If you think that "mandatory" ratings will relieve you of any effort, you're fooling yourself, I'm afraid.
Besides which, ratings are a very limited way of measuring something. I presume you're thinking about ratings for erotic and violent contact. But what about an Islamic parent who doesn't want his son to see pictures of women with their legs uncovered? Or a Jewish parent who doesn't want her children to get all caught up in Christmas? How does any rating system "protect" them?
Isn't it better to teach your children how to properly handle material that you or they consider undesirable than to pretend that you can magically stop it?
Of course industry supports censorship. "Industry" is, by and large, oligarchic in makeup. Is it any surprise to anyone that major corporations should not back policies which fit their largely oligarchic makeup and philosophy? Ever try and exercise "free speech" at work without going through a dozen managers to approve your posting on a bulletin board or inclusion in the newsletter?
Let's face it, not only are major corporations oligarchy-friendly, the growth markets for most technology companies are the non-western countries with governments that want technology but they don't want the freedom of speech and other annoying threats to their power that it entails. *Of course* these companies are more than willing to sell out liberty to make a quick buck. Ruport Murdoch will take news off his satellite, Bill Gates will add back doors to Windows and Lotus will help you censor web pages, and Hughes will help you build better missles.
The scary thing is, everyone always assumed that democracy and freedom were necessary for capitalism to work. Antidemocratic, antifreedom countries were socialist nightmares that American business was afraid to work with. As it turns out, if the state just lets up on the socialist rhetoric American business is more than willing to sell out to countries whose political systems are diametrically opposed to every cherished political belief we have.
that Yahoo doesn't really care much about the nature of content on the Internet, so long as they are able to get people to find it via their website.
Searches for off-the-top-of-my-head terms (i.e. beastiality and necrophilia) show that Yahoo will quite happily index content that most people favoring Internet censorship would want suppressed.
Of course, having their listings indexed by category makes it fairly easy for them to prune the database of anything they deem inappropriate, but the more they do this, the more they risk self-destructing, as the business model for your typical portal site depends upon instilling a mindset into your users that your portal is the best way to find anything and everything they want on the Net. If people were to start getting hit with tons of "No match found" messages when looking for even slightly-illicit things, I'd be willing to bet that Yahoo would tank faster than a Mars probe set with English units.
Not only is there money to be made in all of the resources to do this filtering, but then you can turn around and sell all of the data you collected while doing the filtering. "Don't worry, the child in this family didn't hit any porn sites, but they seem to be interested in baseball and race cars." I am sure the some marketing people somewhere can find that information useful. You are 100% correct, the industry is totally behind censorship.
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson
Does anyone have a SnailMail address for The Distinguished Gentleman from Australia? I'd like to disabuse him of a few misconceptions.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Well, a man named Flesh99. Sorry I am going to ramble, but here is what I question myself about. I must admit, I am at odds with myself sometimes about Free Speach versus Moral Values. As a parent, I can see that rating is a precious thing. But - rating is essentially the same thing as censorship. - Things which get rated as adults only, (example-NC17) tend to get regulated to dark corners. Content providers will always be pushing the envelope to gain larger audiences. - Does your Rated-G match mine? If someone gets hit 2 or 3 times in a story, does the work get a PG-13, when 15 hits gets a rating of R? What about existing published works readily available at the library. What about the Illiad?? Do you think the dragging of Achillies is too cruel for a 12 year old? Do you think Power-Rangers should be watched by 5 year olds?? If we have content-rating, then it REQUIRES content rating guides like this. No exceptions... else a NAKED LADY may accidentally peek through. What then? Does your child have the moral values to know this is _wrong_ and go somewhere else?? When something questionable comes on TV in front of your children, do you change the chanel?? If you're at a movie, and there are naked people on the screen, do you get up and leave with your children. People want others to raise their children. Rating systems enforce material as "safe" and parents believe they can trust it. The "Village" Moral ethic. I say that content rating systems for published materials are useless and only provide a political avenue to pidgeonhole and "name" particular groups as dirty, salacious, or unfit for human consumption. I would rather spend the time, give the love and values to them, and enrich my own life by learning together with my children. I would also like a cheaper ISP! These are just my thought. Thanks, Roger
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Well, a man named Flesh99. Sorry I am going to ramble, but here is what I question myself about. I must admit, I am at odds with myself sometimes about Free Speach versus Moral Values.
As a parent, I can see that rating is a precious thing. But - rating is essentially the same thing as censorship.
- Things which get rated as adults only, (example-NC17) tend to get regulated to dark corners. Content providers will always be pushing the envelope to gain larger audiences.
- Does your Rated-G match mine? If someone gets hit 2 or 3 times in a story, does the work get a PG-13, when 15 hits gets a rating of R?
What about existing published works readily available at the library. What about the Illiad?? Do you think the dragging of Achillies is too cruel for a 12 year old? Do you think Power-Rangers should be watched by 5 year olds?? If we have content-rating, then it REQUIRES content rating guides like this. No exceptions... else a NAKED LADY may accidentally peek through.
What then? Does your child have the moral values to know this is _wrong_ and go somewhere else?? When something questionable comes on TV in front of your children, do you change the chanel?? If you're at a movie, and there are naked people on the screen, do you get up and leave with your children.
People want others to raise their children. Rating systems enforce material as "safe" and parents believe they can trust it. The "Village" Moral ethic.
I say that content rating systems for published materials are useless and only provide a political avenue to pidgeonhole and "name" particular groups as dirty, salacious, or unfit for human consumption.
I would rather spend the time, give the love and values to them, and enrich my own life by learning together with my children. I would also like a cheaper ISP!
These are just my thought.
Thanks,
Roger
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
I really doubt it. Except for www.lotus.com and small parts of other sites, Lotus Domino is used almost exclusively for intranet applications.
(Which means that content regulation doesn't affect Lotus' market one way or another.)
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I'm not bitching and moaning. I'm ridiculing your elected officials for wasting your tax dollars by trying to do the impossible. They'd likely have more success building a warp drive than stopping people from downloading pornography online!
--
Image: A sheep, possibly viewed from behind, looking longingly into the camera.
Slogans:
Dolly says "Baaah!" to controversial speech!
For Dolly's sake - Register your website today!
Protect your marriage! Filter!
---Suggestions?
I, on behalf of All Members of the Universe, hereby kick Lotus out of this Universe, to any parallel Universes that may exist. (Go talk to some string theory junkies or something, Lotus.)
> Each nation has sovreignity over the actions of its own citizens,
Did the citizens create the government, or did the government create the citizens?
The US government RECIEVES its sovereignty FROM the people, as PEOPLE GRANT the government privileges, since you CAN'T transfer a right.
BILL OF RIGHTS
ARTICLE X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Good post BTW.
Cheers
PLEASE, not all of us. Just ban the .gov.au sites please. A software devolper working in an Australian ISP who is against censorship.
Dictionaries are incomplete when considering the implications of a concept. For example, your definition of censorship ignores the fact that silence is a form a expression. Thus a governmental demand that one speaks against one's will is censorship. When someone is forced to rate and categorize the ideas which flow from their mind, they are forced to express themselves in a way which was not ever intended. The content of the original message is the whole point of the expression! Reducing it to a rating is really disgraceful. And it is censorship, because it forces one to say something against their will.
Moderate this up, please.
This makes sense.
The proposed legistation attempts to rate internet content in a similar fashon to film & television. As Australia has a reasonably restrictive film ratings (note the term RATINGS) system quite a lot of content will end up rated R (Restricted 18+) or RC (Refused Clasification - view this & go to jail) books, magazines & newpapers are rated under a totally different system. The legistation goes one step futher and makes the linking to content illegal (if you link to a RC page your page will most likley also be rated RC) so in theory EVERY page on the internet will end up with an RC rating. Obviously this can't & won't work.
In addition things like publishing a newspaper on line will most likley have to be restriced - you will end up with things that are perfectly legally published out in the real world becoming illegal once you place them on the net.
As someone who works in the IT industry I shudder at the eventual cost of this legistation, all because some parents don't feel the need to supervise their children while they use what is obviously a adult tool.
I can understand your POV, but I submit that you are not taking the goal of parenting into account in your opinion. The purpose of parenting to adequately care for and nurture a growing individual, preparing the child for adulthood, when completely autonomous decision-making is required. Contrary to the desires of many government and industrial institutions, which would be better served by drone workers who ask no questions and accept direction from authorities, the desire of a parent who truly understands his/her calling is to produce a child with the abilities of deduction, induction and introspection... qualities that will allow the child-turned-adult to assess situations and make decisions independently. To that end, a parent must engage the child with material that is ever more challenging, both intellectually and ethically. Their bodies grow strong from exertion of the muscles. Their minds and hearts from exertion of reason and ethics.
Rather than look to anyone to provide content regulation for our children (and mine is not hypothetical, but a very real and computer-savvy 6-year-old), we should be involved to the point where our children will ask us for our opinion if they see something puzzling or interesting. And yes, that means exposure to nudity, sex, hate speech, violence and abuse. And that's just the Bible! We also have the Louvre, the Library of Congress, the Tower of London... All great places containing the many facets of what we are. Let's not hide it from our children, but teach them to weigh it and ponder it. They are, after all, adults in the making.
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
Somehow I am not surprised. Politicians lie, pure and simple. Perhaps the bigger question is who is supplying the dollars to get this legislation through Austrailia's government? I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but let's examine the bigger question...Politicians as a whole either represent the people who elected them or company(s) who are paying out tons of money to get what they want...I am sure he is not representing the people -- so who is he representing? Who so badly wants the net censored that they'll pay off a politician to make it happen?
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitler "One People, one Government, one Ruler" - Adolf Hitler (translated)
Thought the German-impaired might like to know that... :)
Posted by the Proteus
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
I will answer this post and the one blow it with this, I did not say a rating system would cure everything I stated that they HELP parents make informed decisions. I get up and walk out of movies with my kids, I watch television when they do. I also know that if a show comes on network television that has a parental warning I should at least watch it once without the kids in the room. I think ratings give a parent a place to start but are not the be all/end all of parenting and anyone who does should not have children. I think ratings should be for explicit content so that it is easier to see, not so I can let my kid surf the net without me sitting there. It is a place for parents to start.
As an Australian, I really must agree with the fact that the international "clever country" image is a sham. What the government doesn't like people to know is that the majority of our aboriginal population lives in conditions which make the shanty towns in South Africa look good, and frankly, no-one seems to care.
And high speed net access in Australia? Unless you're Kerry Packer (professional rich bastard), or one of a *very* and I mean *Very* limited number of people living in a few exclusive suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney which have cable internet access, you can forget it. It would be cheaper to fly to hawaii, rent a house and download stuff onto a zip disk from a @Home connection than it would be to get single channel ISDN here.
Heck, most of areas inside Australia's state capitals don't have cable TV, with neither of the people providing it (both of which who happen to Telcos.. *urg*) planning on a big rollout any time soon. It's not so bad.. we still have 6 TV Stations. Well, 1 is government run and generally not that great, the other one is mostly foreign stuff, another is a public access one, so we effectivly have 3 channels. woohoo. And if you're outside Perth, capital of WA, a state hrm, three/four times the size of Texas, there's two stations, including the gov't run one.
The one great thing about Australia I do have to say however is that I'm perfectly allowed to trash the country's name any way I like. We do have freedom of speech in that way. Hell, in Indonesia a few days back they were burning our flag.. the general response of people seemed to be "hmm, well make sure nothing that's actually important catches on fire".
here I have the biggest issue with content regulation is that the Australian government has decided to implement the content regulation on a nation wide level irrespective of who is trying to look at the content.
To me, this is synonomous to saying that since drivers aged between 18 and 25 cause the most accidents on the road, we should ban all drivers.
The brush is simply too broad and everyone is being tarred.
In my mind, this is the issue with content regulation - the fact that it is applied on a macro and not a micro level.
[[/quote]]
I agree with your basic premise -- that requiring all the people to conform to a law because a few are at risk is foolish.
There are, however, additional issues to consider here. Firstly, current filtering/rating software is grossly ineffective, cutting off sites with such topics as Bible discussion, the Quran (sp?), and Human Anatomy. This is a travesty because it forces such sites to "rate or be excluded."
Secondly, and perhaps more to the point, is that any Government -- especially one which claims to be 'free' -- does not have the right to censor information. (note: yes, there are some exceptions for classified data, but even this should be released when no longer sensitive) Should parents be concerned about what their children view on the Net? Absolutely? Should they install filtering software if they can't be with their kids all the time? Perhaps, I leave it to the parent. But that's the very point -- the responsiblity, and more importantly the choice, rests on the parent. By enforcing such a filtering law, the government is, in effect, saying that their citizens are so foolish that they cannot decide for themselves or their children what is "appropriate."
Is there content available on the net that I wish wasn't there? You bet. Do I try to stop it? Hell no. Freedom of speech is a basic freedom -- and to take it away from even one person or group is to hinder us all.
Just my $0.02
remove SPAMKILLER- to contact me.
Posted by the Proteus
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
after all, only kiddies and "small eyes" will be going there.
Then we can have our vast intellectual net to ourselves. Just so long as nobody figures out what they are really after - after all "protect the children" is and always will be a smokescreen. The "powers that be" are interested in $ and control, these are convertable terms. Censorship is desired for its power to impose the will (memo to the few thinking folk who have legitimate problems with p0rn: in the former USSR they defined the bible as p0rn - and, within context, they were right: the state was officially athiest, and was trying to "save" the populace from "ignorant superstition". Keep in mind, the definition of p0rn is "whatever the man with the gun says it is. )
you cannot make a deal with the censors - they are like a cancer, any it too much
By "education" I meant colleges and universities, which do have a tradition of "academic freedom" and resistance to censorship.
:)
If I meant public high schools, I'd say "indoctrination" or "alienation" or "degradation" maybe.
(Just to clear things up...)
Excellent observations.
I think he's playing to more than just Harradine, he probably feels like he will be treated like a hero in the conservative section of society, where the technology is also not understood and who do not understand the implications.
ISP's were e-mailed a disgustingly ignorant letter on the 20th April this year from a representative of Senator Alston. If anyone would like a copy I can forward it to them. It discusses the fine points of their justification, all convoluted and wrong with very sad anecdotes and analogies, and claiming as above that it has support from various areas that it probably hasn't even queried (or simply ignored their calls for common sense). It also says the time to discuss the matter is now, after several replies to the e-mail, there was no feedback from the senator or his representatives.
Also, the TIO (Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman) is an organisation that _forces_ ALL Australian ISP's to join. It then proceeds to dictate to the media and the public what the Internet industry members are thinking and feeling (completely made up to please the Government, no reflection of the industry at all). It is also illegal to then give any negative media towards the organisation if you are a member. What's an ISP to do?
Slashdot has moderators and ratings for posts. If that worked that badly it would have been taken off. But it presumably works well enough.
I really believe that there are some things that children or even people should not see before they are ready.
Look if it's true for physical stuff, why should it be so different for other areas?
You don't send people into a warzone before training and preparing them. That would be foolishness.
You don't stick a sapling in the open without any protection if you care about it, you try to let it grow strong and straight first. If things go well you only need some pruning here and there, (if things go very very badly the tree may end up totally chopped down).
The problem nowadays is
1) The Locusts want to be in every nook and cranny. They don't care about your "saplings" they just want to suck the max sap out of em.
2) Parents seem to have or make less and less time for their children, in pursuit of Global Competitiveness and Success.
3) Thus they have a smaller window of opportunity to prepare their saplings for the world.
Sure if you left everything on their own, some will survive. But why then bother with civilisation? Civilisation is "Human Selection" in contrast to "Natural Selection".
Why delegate some of your Selection/choice to someone? Well that's because hierachical systems tend to be easier to manage, and most people have better things to do.
If you don't like the Moderator or how things are moderated then all get together and change stuff. But that doesn't mean the need for a Moderator vanishes.
It's how it's done, and who you select to do it.
Cheerio,
Link.
Australians, we must act on this now before the law becomes as entrenched as our defamation laws. Inform your family and friends by sending links to www.internetcensorship.com and www.efa.org.au and write to and call your local members. Get political for once! Or you will wish you had. David --- www.australianbeers.com
But I can still make my own movies or record CDs of my own music and sell them without submitting them for approval; I just might have trouble getting the local theatre to show my movie, or the local CD-o-rama to stock my disk. And I don't have to say "This song may contain explicit lyrics" when I'm playing guitar on the streetcorner.
Sorry, but the fact that you negelected to use birth control puts no responsibility on me. I'm not obliged to shut up when your kids enter the room, or to give you some sort of warning that I may say something you don't want them to hear. Raise your own damn kids and leave me the hell alone.Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Extensive e-commerce support
Streaming support
Unlimited storage space
Excellent rates on bandwidth
And the clincher...
Entry into the Australian Pornédex, the premier source for access to pornography of all types!
Hey, if they're the premier porn gateway in Australia, they can determine who gets in! Isn't that blessedly easier?
Socialist != totalitarian; socialists and capitalists both come in libertarian and authoritarian flavors.
For more on Libertarian Socialism, see this.
As for me, though, I'm a Zenarchist.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Yes, censorship will fail. Kids won't be protected from porn, and small ISPs will go out of business. Soon the Australian Internet industry will be an oligopoly of a handful of giant interests (Telstra, Ozemail, Kerry Packer, &c.), who have the capital to install censorship routers and review content, and you can bet that there'll be strict guidelines against things like hosting your own pages on your Linux box at home.
However, it's easy to lie with statistics. The small ISPs going to the wall can be explained as a natural tendency to consolidate, or the result of other factors. The problem can be explained away, and the experiment can be branded an inspiring success by advocates of censorship in other countries. Expect this to inspire the Christian Coalition and miscellaneous social engineers in the US and elsewhere.
And expect the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to subsidise these pro-censorship groups under the table. After all, in this climate, censoring routers and filter software will become Australia's main high-tech industry. This industry will want to export their censorware, and there is only so much demand in China and Saudi Arabia, so they will endeavour to boost demand in the US and other countries.
They do not help parents make informed decisions, they make the decision for the parent, who rarely questions it, because "there had to be a reason for it", as stupid as we might find the reason to be. And they do constitute censorship when the stupid ticket people "cover my eyes" for me when they refuse to sell me a ticket. Or when the theater refuses to show unrated or NC-17 movies, even though that unrated movie might have made THE greatest point in recent history about a serious issue, albiet taken in a way someone found offensive to themselves. You should sit with your kid and watch where they go if it absolutely concerns you.
My theory, as is many others, is that a kid young enough won't be affected by something like porn, because they'll just be grossed out, or racism, as that takes some deliberately misguided high level thought to reason that crap out.
Theory: If they're old enough, they were probably looking for it. So no point in stopping them. But if you object to it, TELL THEM in a REASONABLE manner. Don't just say "Because that's immoral" or "Because I said so". Those are just saying "Go for more and stretch the limits"
Since it's never specifically mentioned which industry, V.I. (Village Idiot) Alston is "tipping his spin", to borrow the baseball term. Although, if he ever were to be removed from his post, I think he could easily find a position in Kansas or Beijing.
Really, though, the whole concept of passing such an act stands as a measure of how socialist Australia's government is: One thing that a socialist nation cannot deal with is overachievement. This concept is intolerable to a socialist. The idea that their population may contain advanced, free-thinking people that may not subscribe to their party scares them. I consider this trait to be a link between most (if not all) totalitarian forms of government. I was surprised to see this pop up in Australia, but I should not have been. They are the first nation to act on the concept that the Internet, and the self-development benefits people can obtain from it, provide a slim but growing chance that nations will evolve towards a more democratic society, at the expense of the current "ruling classes" (cheesy term, but it loosely applies).
I guess now we have to organize a response, an "Internet Free Australia", so to speak. I won't be visiting that country anytime soon, either, because I don't want my tourist dollars to be taxed to fund that abomination.
_____________________
C'mon... freenet.on.openprojects.net
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
They're not my elected officials. I'm an American citizen. But make no mistake, the politicians behind that move are influencing American policy via ICANN.
.@.
Sorry, but Senator Alston is just clueless.
When SBS (a publically funded TV station, dedicated to providing international content) did a live feed of an Indonesian broadcast that stated that Australian soldiers were going around beating and killing people, he gave SBS a slap on the wrist.
Maybe somebody should explain to him about why treating the cause works so much better than treating the symptoms...
First, I have a problem with the idea that having gone to some companies and talked to people there and never hearing them bring up a particular issue is evidence that they don't care or ever that they support a stance. I know that if one of my customers comes in, I don't talk to him about everything I have ever believed in. Moronic.
The problem that I have with the "save our children from everything" campaign is that everyone blames *new* things for the problem. "Our children are affected by scenes of war on the television." I can only assume that they mean as opposed to war in their backyard like children around the world have dealt with since ever. "Violence in video games causes our children to be violent." But violence in the home has nothing to do with the problem. Violence in the home is still considered healthy by many people. "My teenagers are damaged by images of sex." Until recently, young teens were already married and having children. In some places they probably still are.
Parents complain about their children being exposed to things that until recently were considered normal or even healthy.
Predisposition to violence has been handed down both genetically and socially for thousands of years. I'm not saying that I think these things are good or even attractive, but I think they have gotten significantly better in the last hundred years. People in this country are creeping towards brains being valued over brawn but that hasn't eliminated brawn. I don't even think that eliminating brawn is a good idea. If I could pin-point violence genes and zap them out of teenagers, all it would bring is stagnation. It is the capability for violence in human body that forces change. Formerly this required actual displays of violence, but the same energies focussed on something else, for instance a social issue, are the things that fuel change. Yes, these energies are also what fuel repression but that is changing, at least in this country. Because Americans believe that they can fight back.
Violence is the expression of emotions that have been bred into humans since man learned that fire could burn him -- or anyone else. These emotions are good. We can not let our culture lose our drive. Our children need to learn that they can fight back against injustice and the most effective way is to show them people fighting back. But the children I know understand fighting with violence, not with words. It is only when they are adults that they understand that violence is not necessary in order to fight for what they believe in.
The circumstances that our children grow up in today are pristine compared to the circumstances of even 50 years ago. People act ungrateful for this change. They want everything to change right now and be perfect, but our genetics don't allow for that. Right now, people want to watch violence on tv. Suppressing it will backfire, stiffling our children and adults. If the trend of valuing brains over brawn continues, in two hundred years, people may not want to watch violence for recreation. Instead they might choose to watch the stories of great thinkers of their time. We can't change in one or two or even three generations what evolution has made man.
And frankly, teenagers will always want sex. But by that time, maybe female teenagers will be allowed to admit that they do to.
Is this the same Papows who is compelled to lie extravagantly over almost every part of his personal life? Decorated Gulf War combat ace (was a radar operater in the reserves, and never left the states), Tai Kwon Do black-belt (attended three classes before he quit) and orphan (his upper-middle class parents bought him his own horse.)
The WSJ had a -very- interesting expose on Mr. Papows earlier this year...
Then again, it sounds as if the govermental turkey was fibbing more than a bit, too. Probably wanted to pick an industry figurehead who's denials wouldn't be believed when he fabricated his "indistry support" song and dance...
SoupisGood Food
In Australia they ban guns. Now they ban thought-crime. Not to mention that Australia was the only country to recognize Indonesia's occupation of E. Timor. They signed treaties to exploit the oil reserves there after Suharto invaded and killed off the population. They can't occupy the moral high-ground. The only solution to oppression is worker solidarity.
Address in Canberra (capital):
The Senate,
Parliament House,
Canberra, ACT 2600
AUSTRALIA
Ph: +612 6277 7111
Fax: +612 6277 3387
Address in Melbourne (home state):
2nd Floor,
4 Treasury Place,
East Melbourne, VIC 3002
AUSTRALIA
Ph: +613 9650 0233
Fax: +613 9650 0220
www.aph.gov.au/senate
richard.alston@dcita.gov.au
This all started because the government wanted to suck off the independant old maid who was holding the balance of power. Now he's been made irrelevant they are still doing it because they think it'll win votes from the Mum's and Dads.
Even though they've been told it'll frig up the net speeds, it'll be impossible to enforce, still they're doing it.
Why do these incompetents keep getting portfolios they know nothing about?
_______________________ I am the eggman, wooo! _______________________
Yes, that sounds fine... but what do you define as porn. What one person might define as porn, another might define as fine art. Who is deciding what is adult material?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
You ignorant slug!
-> Hell, if you can't raise your kids to be
-> responsible consumers of media why should
-> I care? Sure - there's some sick-o stuff
-> out there in terms of porn, but if I were
-> concerned about something it would be the
-> violence stuff.
Do you think an 8 year old or a 10 year old is old enough to qualify as a responsible consumer? A child shouldn't have to learn about porno at such an early age! Your mindless post assumes that the solution to the filth-laden internet is that every child on the internet have more self-restraint. That is no solution.
And if you think that electronic nudity is less offensive than public nudity and public sex - think again! If you run naked down a street how many people are likely to see you? Maybe 100 or maybe more... If you post nude pictures of yourself or others on the internet - how many people are likely to see them? Thousands - and maybe millions! Internet pornography is WORSE than indecent exposure in public - and I think that it DOES NOT DESERVE to be posted in public places on the internet.
The Minister is interested in your views and encourages feedback on the issues and activities in his portfolio.
If you would like to suggest to the Minister that perhaps he has misunderstood the "industry", or that the views of "industry" are not necessarily those of the people he represents please send an email to the Minister.
:wq
We already have rating systems for movies, video games, and CDs (and lots of other things, for that matter). I'm thinking most adults are pretty aware of how these things are used. Seriously, who here actually thinks that watching a rated-R movie is going to warp some kid's mind? Even if it did, which part?
Sex? Well, it's something kids need to learn about anyway, and if you ask me, sex ed. is the worst place (that class made me sick.. ugh..). Not that I know the best, but you know, kids are going to learn about sex no matter what, and if you ask me, it's probably better that they learn about it some other way than by having it at 13 or 14 when they probably don't know enough about STDs and whatever to be too health-conscious about it. However, if that's what they want to do anyway, it would be good if they learned about it in a healthy fashion beforehand so maybe they won't screw their lives over so early on.
Besides which, the "child" in question viewing the movie is either old enough that they've probably already had sex (surprise mom/dad!) or they're too young and don't even care.
Violence? I'd just like to say that after watching Nightmare on Elm Street, I went on a homicidal rampage and butchered my whole neighborhood. I'm typing this behind prison walls on Death Row. They treat us good in here. Good food.. Yeah, right. Get real. Kids in general think it's cool to see violence in movies, not to reenact it in real life. Those who are violent irl are fscked in the head to begin with, and not because of the movie.
Profanity? I'm sorry, but even in Catholic school will you hear more profanity than any other part of your life other than a real high school. The profanity found in movies will not be nearly as creative, either.
In short, I could probably give a fsck less what movies my kids watch when they get "old enough" (this being determined on a case by case basis, though I can assure everyone it will be at much lowers ages than the MPAA or U.S. gov. would like it to be), should I ever choose to have them (I just might, just so that more intelligent people roam the land =P). Besides, if you can't keep your kids from seeing movies you disapprove of, you're probably a bad parent one way or the other, and need to relax your death grip on them or actually spend time with them for once. Ratings are abstract, and serve no purpose other than to attach a stigma to "bad" movies (you have to stay under the dread NC-17 mark or else no one will ever see your movie.. well, or else over it, and even then only porn freaks will). An "R-rated" movie could be a total homicidal freak show, or it could just say "fuck" once too often. Real specific, guys!
Video games.. Pretty much the same thing, except there's not likely to be too much sex or profanity. And guess what? The violence isn't likely to be too realistic. But you get to control the violence! I'll sum it up right here: After playing Mortal Kombat for the first time, I ripped my friend's spine out! It kicked ass! Yeah.. I definitely see people's point when they say violent video games and role-playing games are the cause for why our children are fucked up. Personally, I think it's because our delusional parents are twisted renditions of the Antichrist painted in biggotry and ignorance. Grr.
Down with Big Brother and all his evils! CDs with sexual/explicit content.. Oh come the fuck off it already! I already said we'd have more profanity in high schools! You have to be 18 to buy CDs with "explicit content"? I'm not sure if that's the age limit, I thought I remembered my favorite girl mentioning something about that. That's straight up stupid. What do they expect kids to listen to? Country/western music? Ugh.. Not for all of us, thanks.
I'm sick of rating systems! I'm sick of censorship! I'm sick of regulation! I'm sick of "editing" for what-the-fuck ever content! All it does it make me angry, and make those cavorting devils in the extreme right all warm and fuzzy inside because they can sleep better at night knowing they've raped me so that parents everywhere can sleep soundly knowing their children have no rights to decide for themselves! Did I say rape ?? Yes, I did! Why? Because my freedom has been taken away from me by force ! My freedom, you say? Well.. yes!
Everyone has the right to choose for themselves (or should). It's my life. I decide who I'm going to be. I decide what I'm going to watch, listen to, play, whatever. Someone else wants to force their ethical/moral values upon me? They're going to get a clue-by-four upside their fscking skull! They should live their own lives, decide their own decisions, not take the "burden" off of the rest of us by deciding for us too. Those kind of people make me sick, and ought to be ejected from this country and sent to a true police state where they'll feel right at home. They don't want to go? We have plenty of electric chairs, guys.. *evil grin*
In short, Joe Public may not know much about computers, but even if he did, he wouldn't give a fuck. He'd still want the censorship to continue. Why? He's a lazy fucking idiot who shouldn't have procreated in the first place.
P.S. If my favorite girl is reading this, I'm not suggesting we have kids. Don't hurt me. =P
~ Kish
Australia has always been an early adopter of technology, the tyranny of distance and all that. There are many people working actively against this legislation. We don't have a Bill of Rights to protect us, but legal challenges are being mounted, and we know that technically this will not work.
Senator Alston has managed to demonstrate to the world his lack of understanding. The Internet Industry Association has sold us out. We will see a number of small ISPs close down who are unable to meet the new requirements, although the new legislation does have outs. Where compliance is not economically viable there is exemption.
Cutting us off would only serve to limit our capacity to get the message out and serves no useful purpose.
Cheers.
China: 1.28 billion
India: ~1 billion
USA: ~300 million
somewhat of a gap there...
All of Europe could probably be lumped in there somewhere.
Somehow I doubt that those 'Merkins who want to annex China to get more Chinese food have ever eaten Chinese food in China.
Snake, Dog, Rat, Donkey, Scorpion, bees, cats, worms and that was just dinner last night.
But worst of all, China has McDonalds!
Run for the Hills!!
dave, in the PRC.
"Western", "Democractic", "nation"
enuf said.
AutoCensor(tm) features turn 'shit' and 'fuck' into Australian Approved words as you type!
.02
Both 'shit' and 'fuck' have been declared "non-offensive" by courts in Australia. Shit & Fuck are "Australian Approved words" : )
The 'fuck' ruling came down within the last month after NSW police tried to charge a young aboriginal man with offensive something-or-other after he told a cop to get fucked. The local court upheld the cops, the appeal court decided in this day & age (and in the context of an Australian street) that 'fuck' could not reasonably be held to be offensive.
'Specially not when addressed to racist cops : )
Just my
"However, I cannot be around my hypothetical kid all the time and if content regulation helps me control when my kid is exposed to elements of society that are of the more unsavory kind, then so be it."
I really don't want the government setting limits for my child. That's my job.
There's no way anybody's going to keep kids from experiencing unsavory things -- kids are exposed to unsavory experiences in plenty of ways, the Internet being the least of my worries as a parent (you're more likely to be exposed to unsavory images in my neighborhood from the sexually explicit music blaring from the cars -- next these politicians will want content regulation there as well).
I've known a couple kids who were suspended from school for viewing sexually explicit images on the school computers. First, the filters are a joke. Second, the only one who thinks its the end of the world are the educators (one child actually got banned from using the Internet at school for part of one school year and all of the next for pulling a rather lame Playboy-esque nude of a woman). The parents on the other hand tend to be a bit more levelheaded.
We should have one in our Constitution too. There are too many idiots out there and they're the ones who are breeding (Probably don't realize what a tremendous resource drain children are.) There should be some legal way to weed those idiots out of the gene pool. Of course, I guess if we did that we'd then have to nuke Washington DC because the collective IQ there when Congress is in session is actually negative (Still don't know how they manage that...)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
At Lotus? From what I hear of their corporate culture, the grass is ALWAYS greener there. Guess this proves it.
I expect that Australia's experiment will fail, and its attempts at enforcement will spawn a whole host of new problems.
This will serve as an object lesson to those who would follow.
Honesty. Loyalty. Kindness. Laughter. Generosity. Magic!
I swear, the zero responsibility attitude of parents these days is dragging the world down into the bowels of hell itself. Would it be so bad if more people learned how to raise children effectively or were forced to give them up for adoption (or better yet, not have them at all)? This "pass the buck" mentality is driving.. me.. in.. sane..
OK, I'm only going to respond to this part, because I agree with all of it... I just wanted to add something. It just occured to me that the "zero responsibility" attitude, at least as it applies to internet censorship, comes from computer phobia on parent's parts. That is, the parents are too scared of the computer to monitor their children's access themselves. This may sound ridiculous to us, but I've worked in retail computer sales, and it's a very real phenomenon. People old enough to have children accessing the internet are, in general, scared to frikin' death of the computer. They don't want to touch it, they don't want to mess with it, nothing. The kids are 100% in charge of the computer. This is why these parents go and cry for external help in regulating it. Now, I'm not defending the regulation, nor am I defending these parents. Personally, this phenomenon makes me extremely angry. These people need to learn not to be scared of the computer. Then they need to learn to raise their own children. Of course, I'm not a parent yet, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about...
Of course, Jerry Falwell says the Teletubbies are evil because one of them is gay. Kept expecting to hear about some Teletubby hanging from the rafters after his forced outing when that story broke, let me tell you...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Idiot, just cut off the australian public (who do not support the law) over some stupid law one politian wanted.
You are fighting the wrong people, the australian public is not your enemy and attacking them will not get the law lifted!
Sigh, and I thought america was bad!
Orwell is an easier imagery to consider for those brought up in the West. An obviously intrusive government with its appendages of brutality and control is different enough from our nominal democracy to allow us to think in terms of a distant future, of not allowing something like 1984 to happen. We, on the other hand, is genuinely frightening in that this dreadful, soulless future is today, and most people not only seem not to mind but don't even realize that something truly insidious is happening while they are busy watching for signs of an impeding Orwellian cataclysm.
AC
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
The trouble is that a "CensorMate3000" would probably do that, even though both "shit" and "fuck" have been approved by the courts as acceptable words.
When did we decide that a bunch of pathological puritans should be our social yardstick?
-- Andrew
Rating systems enable censorship.. They are not synonyms..
Actually, they make the decision for all of us, as you clearly pointed out immediately thereafter..
Ayup.. I wish more parents thought this way. I mean, do you really want Big Brother deciding what is or what isn't good for you? Or your kids? If so, why do you bother even thinking about freedom? You've clearly shown a strong desire to give up your freedom in order to be "taken in" and protected from the "bad elements" of society. Once you give up a little bit of your freedom.. more and more of it will slip out of your grasp.. The only way to keep your freedom is to fight for it. Giving it up is like giving up life itself.
Precisely.
~ Kish
I get so tired of this, get a dictionary and learn how to use it:
rating: To assign value or grade to something.
censorship: the prevention of publication, transmission, or exhibition of material considered undesirable for the general public to possess or be exposed to. This can include the censorship, in the national interest, of military secrets, or of obscene material.
There is a complete difference between rating something, and censoring it (preventing its publication). If everyone who really believed that ratings were so bad because they were censorship, you would storm slashdot and demand they stop moderating (rating, censoring !?!) these comments!
>You ignorant slug!
Hee-hee good way to start off a intelligent
conversation. Anyway, let get on to the good stuff.
>Do you think an 8 year old or a 10 year old is
>old enough to qualify as a responsible consumer?
>A child shouldn't have to learn about porno at
>such an early age! Your mindless post assumes
>that the solution to the filth-laden internet is
>that every child on the internet have more
>self-restraint. That is no solution.
Hmm.. by looking for a solutions implies there is
a problem. This is strictly a family issue. If you
don't want your kids to see this kind of "filth"
perhaps you shouldn't let them use the internet.
The internet is not a provider for you. It is a
electronic global comunity and as a result not
bound, nor should it be, by any specific "moral"
code. You basically want to have the advantages
of the internet without dealing with negatives.
You have no problem using content that individuals
spent hours developing with out paying them a
dime. However you are up in arms because of
content other are providing. Just because you
don't like porn doesn't make it wrong. Now, if
you want to protect your children from the "evils"
of the internet maybe you should not allow them to
use it. If you want to filter the content they
see maybe you should start a provider or use an
existing provider that provides content filtering
services or for that matter learn enough about
your computer to filter your own content.. there
are products that will do that you know. Perhaps
you should spend more time teaching your children
and looking at solutions you can implement rather
than attempting to shove your "morals" down the
throats of others.
The industry is about making money. It seems to me that they'll lose nothing when censorship in Australia goes into effect.
It sounds like a way to sell more software, like imagine a new version of Lotus123, with Australian Approved(tm) CensorMate3000 (tm). "Austrialian Brand CensorMate(tm) keeps you legal: Intelligent word count features track the usage of explicatives and racial slurs. AutoCensor(tm) features turn 'shit' and 'fuck' into Australian Approved words as you type!"
I just hope the laws are enough hassle to those who actually have to work harder to provide "censorship approved" content. Maybe some companies would step up and do something about it.
The "industry" will say what whatever the govt.
want them to, in hope that their recently
abolished tax-credit for r+d will be restored,
and because this government has a habit of
vilifying those who oppose its policies.
Government will do whatever idiocy it needs to
in order to pass its main policies through a
hostile senate.
Recent example of Government doublespeak:
Govt: "We're going to asset-strip the country by
selling off the government-owned businesses, but
we will put half a percent of the profit into an
'Environment Fund'"
Public: "You can't do that!"
Govt: "Oh, so you're a slash-and-burn eco-rapist
are you?"
-- veni vidi nuclei deceri --- I came, I saw, I dumped core.
Gee... does anyone else see the relationship here to the book "1984" ...The party never admitted to changing the past through forgeries, at least, they never used that exact word... ...rather, they used "reality control"... Scary.
-- Love is Hate. War is Peace. Windows is stable.
When I posted the facts behind my upcomming lawsuit on my website, I was called a disgruntled employee. When I filed a lawsuit (based on those facts) over a year later, their filed a libel suit.
Even though there was a judgment for $125,000 entered against them (Mattel, who acquired the defendants), they still try to persecute me with their counterclaim. The only reason they persue this counterclaim is to extract a confidentiality agreement so as the public will not find out about their wrongdoings (mostly by the acquired companies, but now by them too).
Ain't it swell?
OOOooohhhh, wait, that's right! They make Domino, which powers nearly 10 entire websites.
But seriously, what does Lotus have to do with Internet business and censorship? I think if anyone wanted to know what "the Industry" really thought about this crapola they'd talk to companies like AOL, Microsoft, AT&T, MCI or whichever carriers/ISPs that service Oz and who stand to lose big dollars when the ISPs who buy services from them have to shut down from being unable to cope with the new requirements. (Not to mention if any of those megacompanies offer networking services in Australia directly and will be forced to implement continent-wide filtering software for all those services.)
No need to talk to the local ISPs themselves -- I imagine it's probably pretty unanimous as to which body part is being inserted into which orifice when some boneheaded Minister decides to pass along the expense of forced censorship for the entire country onto them.
Anyway, this is Australia, can't you guys just feed the fool to a croc? Isn't there was some sort of "Bleeding idiot" clause in whatever's your equivalent of the U.S.' constitution of have you guys actually started to succumb to this "P.C. behaviour" disease?
-=-=-=-=-
-=-=-=-=-
My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Of course they lie! And the media helps them get away with it too! This is a country (Ozland) that opens its arms to the US drug czar B. MaCaffrey when he came for a visit recently. This moron lies and lies and lies and keeps on lying on the drug issue as well as inventing offensive lies about other countries (according to him, coffeehouses in Holland have given rise to and increase in usage, crime and others, etc) and the Ozzie government uses this professional liars statements as THE truth. Politicians and other reptiles stick together and I presume Ozzie politicians are as prone to being slithery as others. We've seen that with the media all you have to do is lie often enough and people will take it for face value, then when a correction is made, totally downplay it (See Sarajevo bombings: when the French Prime minister came out 3-4 years ago saying that he knew as well as others taht the muslims bombed teh marketplace to create attention, did anybody do a mea culpa? Hell no! The story wasnt even covered in the US) Think about it: politicians lie and then the media exploit those lie for their own benefits. Yet people still vote for these liars and still actually believe CNN.
Back in July or August, at the height of this debate, when every sensible tech. company on earth was telling our (I'm Aussie) goverment how dumb this plan was, Cabletron (Swich manunfacture & Cisco competitor) wrote to the Alston and said what a wonderful idea it was, and how well their products would deal with it.
Surprise, surprise, Cabletron now have a nice fat government contract!
Can we expect Lotus to annouce some multi-million dollar sale of Dommino server sofware to the the Australian government in the next few weeks? I'd bet on it.
"Censoring the net will be bad for the economy"
"Open source development produces better quality software"
Phooey.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Stop insulting reptiles please. They have been around longer than politicians, and I've never heard a reptile tell even a single lie.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
My guess is the CEO of Lotus will say neutral or positive things to anyone with the power to give them troubles. Austrailians have money too.
The reality is that Industry stands to make a buck from such things, so they'll happily stand by and wait to see what shakes out. No one who is taking care of a large business is going to make a comment on a neutral issue if they are representing the company. That's considered bad for shareholder value, because someone might think you were doing something about it and protest, causing a stock drop.
On the other hand, what folks believe for themselves is another thing. It's the voters that should be protesting, not "Industry".
All the technology in the world won't hide your lack of vision, talent, or understanding.
Here is one thiong I disagree with. There is no reason to split up the internet, just as there is no reason to pick a second frequency range for certain TV channels. IMO the internet is a medium, like TV (but a bit different, but that's another discussion). censorship has no business on the net or anywhere else. You want to protect your children from the big bad world? lock'em up in a small room with some lego. but don't impose your values on me, mine are just as valid as yours.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Or, rather, the Industry doesn't care one way or the other.
The Computer Industry doesn't make it's money off of freedom of speech, it makes it's money off of computers that push data around. Whether that data is regulated is irrelevant, because regulated data needs computers to push it around just as much as unregulated data.
This is all true, but it goes beyond that.
The person who claims that "the industry" supports censorship is 100% accurate - it's not that they're indifferent to it.
The issue isn't "regulated or unregulated" data, it's HOW the data is regulated.
Regulated data requires more storage (to hold the list of what's accepted and what isn't,) more CPU power (to make decisions based on those lists,) and more software (to drive the CPU's.)
What dies this translate into? MORE MONEY that has to be spent on software and computers; which means more money for the "industry." Which, since that's what they're for, is why they support it.
Of course, for the ISPs (who have to put up the money to buy all of this,) this doesn't apply (I guess they're not "industry".)
Oh nudity..now that's filthy! lemme see.. when does a child get confronted with nudity first? hmm.. that would usually be at birth. (not always, granted.. but how many parents do you know who have a caesarian (sp?) section to spare their children this ugly sight? and then there's BREASTFEEDING!!
EEW!!! little kids nibbling on nipples! kiddyporn!
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
"One thing that a socialist nation cannot deal with is overachievement. This concept is intolerable to a socialist. The idea that their population may contain advanced, free-thinking people that may not subscribe to their party scares them. I consider this trait to be a link between most (if not all) totalitarian forms of government." Well you certainly hit the nail on the head there, as far as the UK is concerned. It's just a perfect description of the mindset of Tony Blair's government!
I think you guys are overreacting...
I like porn, and I'm not all that concerned.
Its probably, cause you don't have the full story.
As an Australian who has lived in the US for a couple of years I believe I understand the Australian and some of the American perspective.
OK. Here's the thing.
The law is almost effectively mute.
First, please understand why such a ridiculous law would get passed in the first place:
The real villain isn't Aston its a politican by the name of Brian Harradine who holds the balance of power in government. This guy is a real old moron whose voters are pretty much all Grandmas and Grandpas. BUT he has the balance of power! So in order to get anything done, the government had to give him what he wanted - internet censorship.
When I first heard of it I was totally outraged (I still am that our political system gives tiny minorities so much power to do these things) and I wrote to my local paper and stuff saying how F*&ked it was. But later on the details of HOW it would be implemented came out, and the Government turns out to not be as stupid as I thought. They certainly didn't give Harradine what he expected, but they did get the laws they wanted passed.
Believe you me, it does NOT mean the Australian people want Internet Censorship. But effectively it is the 'lesser' of two evils.
Why?
Cause as I understand it currently, the censorship doesn't take place at some absurd national proxy level, or at the ISP level - it takes place at the end-user-level. Before signing on with an ISP the user must agree to censor themselves!
This *appears* to serve no purpose - as that doesn't *really* prevent anyone from examining material - but it does impose a LEGAL responsibility.
This therefore makes parents legally obliged to censor material for their kids. Not that that means much. But they 'risk' prosecution by the state if they don't.
(this is perhaps in the same, [at first glace] absurd light of US visa papers - where migrants must check a box something like:
[ ] Are you affiliated with any Terrorist Organisation or plan to commit any Terrorist activities during your visit?)
Its absurd, yes, but if they answer falsely they have committed a crime - which carries a penalty!
But the kids aren't the only issue.
Now, I know you Americans hold freedom of speech as being absolute and necessary for a free society. Please try to free yourself from that belief for just a moment and see it from another perspective. You have to understand that there are consequences of staying in that Ivory Tower. Indeed, America does have laws that censor a whole range of material. You probably just aren't very aware of it.
Perhaps the most obvious is the international ban (by all developed nations) on Child Pornography. It isn't just a of people who want access to this stuff. Indeed there are blackmarket child-prostitute tours in some poorer nations. And think of the huge demand for 'barely-18' porn. Child Pornography potentially is a huge industry. The international ban on such publications attempts to limit this as much as possible. Society *can* and *does* tolerate the removal of the 'right' of people to view child pornography so that poor children aren't forced into such exploitation. Even America's Government understands that there has to be a limit.
You see, the road to censorship is a slippery one. I'm sure you've all heard the slippery slope argument - it is used time and time again to stress that the press must be freed. (even Larry Flynt does it)
Problem is, the slippery slope works both ways. It is equally slippery going in either direction - and it is clear that one simply cannot be COMPLETELY on one side. There is no clear answer, instead one must tread cautiously.
On the one extremity we do not want defenseless people to be exploited by the demands of the masses, on the other hand we do not want political or moral commentary to be regulated. There is a tradeoff to be made. And all countries, including the US, make this tradeoff. The US, however, has excluded (for now) the Internet in this. But it does impose its constraints on all other media.
Ultimately, though, I am sure that some form of censorship will permeate to the Internet, unless the US decides to legalize certain industries - which I highly doubt.
You guys would be amazed at what screens on public television in Australia - American TV is rather tame stuff in comparison - which are consequences of the censorship laws there. Each country makes their own tradeoffs.
Indeed, it is ironic that the US is trying to filter Online Gambling (a large Australian export), whilst Australia tries to filter Pornography (which are predominantly from the US). Who says the US isn't taking steps to censor the Net? Be it all gambling websites.
If you still think this Australian law is silly (I for one still do) please remember that most countries have really silly laws too (particularly England). Remember that in some US States sex other than in the missionary position is illegal.
So please, think a little more before you say you hate us and that we are fascist bastards, ok?
I happen to like MUCKing. While I MUCK I happen to like certain activities as an intellectual challenge that would likely be banned simply because they have sexual content. What is wrong with sexual content? The point of life and the goal as stated in most religions (particularly Christianity) is procreation, but the acts which lead to procreation are taboo. I find this highly hypocritical and disturbing.
My mind, also, would likely be censored. I have thoughts and feelings which many find objectionable but which are part of me. I can't change my very nature just to try to conform to the world, but because of my very nature I am immediately a sinner who can, at best, go to hell by the arbitrary standards setup by many ignorant Christian fundamentalists who are self-contradictory. (Not that all Christian fundamentalists talk out of their asses. I know several who know what they're talking about, and they don't have the same views as me but don't think I'm, by default, unsavable.) I'd also be censored because of my views about these religious groups.
I'm sick of people using porn spam as the example of what "free speech" is trying to protect, because it's not, and never has been. Freedom of speech in the United States of America is specifically to protect people with differing views, lifestyle choices (as long as they don't harm others, of course), and religious beliefs. Information on paganism and homosexuality would certainly be some of the first stuff to be censored after all of the so-called smut were cleared out. Also, my personal religious beliefs (or lack thereof) include that there's nothing wrong with people expressing their sexuality as long as it doesn't interfere with anyone else; getting, creating, and selling pornography is fine by me.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
An interesting and relevant article from the New Criterion points out that the backlash of censorship, at least in the US, often has an opposite affect of that intended:
"But the main reason why censorship has been discredited is that it is always stupid in practice, and whatever else it could prevent it could not, in America, prevent people from saying that."
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
I think it would be more appropriate for us to isolate australia from most of the net. We should setup our webservers and such to ban people from Australia from accessing America and Canadian content unless they remove this law. Imagine what would happen to Australia if they were basically banned from accessing content from the US, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Britain, Germany and Japan.... the most internet oriented countries in the world.
---Got Coffee?---
http://www.mediapod.com/getfiles.asp?2
People are going on and on about the iternet rating of porn as if it actually mattered. Sure a huge number of people think naked people are bad but so what. Our laws should be based on reasoned analysis and scientific data not delusional public opinion.
Reasearch has shown little/no negative effect on children from nudity. Hell in other perfectly functional cultures sex wasn't even consideed taboo. So the little kids see nasty por on the internet...we shouldn't care.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
There are more of us adults than non adults by a vast number. People want to rate things, go ahead, then parrents can install software that allows only sites that are rated kid safe.
The rest of the world isn't stuffed with the task of reorganizing everything for a part of our culture that can't even vote.
Sigh.
-- trolld
John Howard's argument of "you do not realise this is what middle Australia want" is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard. That statement is comparable to statistics. We all know about lies, damn lies and statistics.
Why wasn't I asked to vote on this subject, or the majority of Australians who also did not?
This law was rushed what seems quicker than our gun laws (which I commend, for good reason). Suddenly, we as a country have gone from "the lucky country" to "the backward country".
This subject obviously has a lot of passion for both sides of the argument, so it should be thought out very carefully instead of racing to decisions that affect every Australian without consent. We no longer have a choice. This is a sad moment in history that needs rebellion to correct it.
The biggest extent of this law I would ever like to see is the option of censored content. It is a parents responsibility to monitor the TV shows a child watches, as it should be for the Internet. Concerned families need to be provided the *option* of filtered content, not *forced* on other responsible adults without children who don't want it.
I think every ISP in Australia should completely ignore this law and refuse to pay any fines. It's extreme, but the government has to do something if the law is not being abided by. Then again, I suppose the law must be enforced...
Thanks Johnie, for jeapardising one of Australia's real assets. I see no technological future for Australia anymore, and I'm not alone.
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
Well at least I'll be able to say that I'm filtering objectionable content from the Internet. I've been running Junk Buster for ages :-) Frank Ranner
Quite successful... NOT!
Censorship is never a good thing.
Next thing you know... they'll be wanting to ban books.
Oh wait!! They already have... *sigh*
And here I was under the assumption that our society was
Umm... Somewhat enlightened??
There may be a way to shut it off for minors, I don't know.
What they propose is not the solution... *shrug*
Get a grip.
Friends don't let friends buy Compaq's. (Dell/Gateway... same same) You want a good computer? Build it yourself.
Francophone Canada used to be on the radar, but they keep demanding that they get moved to their own screen, so they got moved temporarily off the current screen while their new screen was being built. Then they weren't on the radar screen anymore so they got forgotten. (I would know. I used the screen that came in for them on one of the nodes of my Beowulf cluster and I keep worrying that they'll pop up again and somebody will want it back.)
Supposedly, the reason our right to the freedom of speech is being violated is because the childrenneed to be protected. Well, I'm 14, so I'd guess I'd be called a member of "the children". Believe me, we don't want censorship. All I ask is that the people who devise these reality control --er... "content control" systems show me these "children" who need so much protection. Or how about letting us, the children, voice weither or not we want to be censored (sorry, I mean, content controlled).Honestly...
-- Love is Hate. War is Peace. Windows is stable.
You haven't answered any of my objections, merely reiterated your original message. There's absolutely no way that "mandatory ratings" can be enforced; content providers can always disagree with your interpretation (intentionally or otherwise); and how does this help parents who have different ideas about what matter?
Remember that this is very different from the movie industry, where everyone's cooperating (many would say "colluding" or "conspiring") to make the rating system "work" after a fashion, or television, which is basically controlled by a few large corporations (and even with cable there are only a relatively few discrete channels). On the internet, there are MILLIONS of content providers who really don't care about your personal values, and some who would probably like to actively subvert them. This kind of thing simply won't work on the net.
If you really want to CONTROL what your children see on the net, simply arrange to be there at all times with them. There's no other way to do it. If that doesn't work, learn to live with the fact that the world is imperfect and find a better way to deal with it. There's no more gentle way of putting it.
As has been previously pointed out, it's not the majority of us Aussies agreeing, it's the Government pushing a political agenda. The current Govt was only just in the majority at the time of this legislation, and as such needed to pander to an independant moral crusader called Harradine. This was entirely useless, but they pushed the bill through anyway.
Our PM, John Howard, said about those opposing the bill that "they do not understand the mood of middle Australia on this issue," or something like that. What he failed to realize was that middle Australia is, for the most part, totally uninformed and gets all their information through the standard media channels (the 'net is the source of all depravity type things). Unfortunately, most of our PMs are part of that demographic.
Essentially, the attitude of "the majority wants it, so it must be alright" is far too simplistic, and possibly dangerous. There's a fantastic article by Mark Newton, When Democracy Fails (check out the domain name!). This addresses all of these issues, and is fairly relevant to the discussion at hand.
ÐÆ
|>
Here be Dragons
...and, for a lighter take on the whole business, may we present this satire.
ÐÆ
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Here be Dragons
I work for a company that is really pushing to do business in China which I find hypocritical considering we try to uphold such a high standard of ethics and conduct but we're more than willing to bend over backwards to get China into the WTO.
I can't understand the push for China but there is no push to do business in India which may not have as many people as China but still is very populous.
Human intelligence is constant. The population grows...
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Industry: `You have not been approved by Industry. You do not have the endorsement of Industry. Report to the nearest liquidation center for summary disposal. Do not speak to Industry approved children while traveling to your nearest liquidation center.' Ignorant Shill: `Excuse me, Mr. Industry. I know you're my $64 Billion Buddy, but I have a Question.' Industry: `Yes?' Ignorant Shill: `At what point did you become arbiter general for all things social?' Industry: `When your lawyers and your governments made me responsible for The Great Pseudo-Child.' Ignorant Shill: `Ok, thanks.'
The Aussies are going to have a hell of a time enforcing these rules. It is too easy to remote admin a server used for web publising. One can own several servers across the globe, employ colocation, etc. The only laws governing the internet that will ever really have "bite" are treaties. The internet is a global phenomenon and can only be governed globally, much like the open seas are now governed by international treaties.
The internet should be officially declared international space. Then we will get some sensible resolutions to the conflicting values inherent in international intercourse. Until that happens, we can safely evaluate all domestic attempts to govern the internet as ineffective. There is no international enforcement mechanism (nor should there be, arguably); but until there is one, moving from violative status to non-violative is a simple matter of pointing the DNS entries to different IPs (in a foreign jurisdiction where the regulations do not apply). This will remain the case for the foreseeable future.
China, India, and the United States. Yeah, sort of offtopic. So what? =P
In short, "very populous" is an understatement. :)
~ Kish
Not in my neck of the woods. There's never been a bigger group of book banners...
Since when does the industry dictate to the rest of us what we will, and will not, see and do? This isn't television - there are no marketing directors and stuff to tell us what's 'hot and what's not'. We set the agenda. If we want porn, goddamnit, we're gonna have porn and there's not a thing you can do about it. And if you ask me, I think if these politicians got some more often they wouldn't be so damned stupid. :^)
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated into the Collective.
This reality check brought to you by the makers of Reality, who choose to remain anonymous because the police are still looking for us....
--
How can you say that implementing a ratings system is even close to cenorship. We have ratings on movies, video games, and comic books. It help parents a great deal, they don't have to research every single thing a child wants to buy/see/use. The net is a nice place but can get filthy in a real quick manner. I am all in favor of a mandatory rating system. Not censorship but ratings, the content is allowed but rated. This is not a bad thing in the least, and if you can't se it you must not be a parent.
1. The Internet censorship laws exist for no other reason than to ensure the support of the puritanical Senator Brian Harradine in the Government's quest to pass legislation allowing the sale of a further portion of Telstra. Senator Harradine holds the balance of power in the senate, and can single-handedly reject legislation which the House of Representatives wishes to enact provided the rest of the senate votes along party lines. Hence this religious old Tasmanian holds a very big stick.
2. This legislation was universally opposed at the time it was debated by not only those electronics frontiers "maniacs" but the Australian Computer Society, every ISP, and numerous other professional bodies. Not that there was much debate - they not only rushed it through, they smokescreened it very effectively with "the republic debate" and the Olympic circus.
3. Lotus are now an irelevant producer of software which is almost universally reviled for its poor interface, sorry performance and general instability. Seriously, it's worse than anything Microsoft has done. It survives mainly because there are those IT manager types whose job security depends on nobody finding out about free, better alternatives, and there are those managers who still like to parrot buzzwords like "groupware".
Perhaps the minister was mistakenly talking to theatre groups or bankers on his recent visit - almost everyone I meet who is remotely connected with the net has a good laugh at my government's attempts to treat the net like television. It's not nice to hear my country compared to such freedom-loving nations as Singapore.
I could mention that Australian government departments use net-nanny software which blocks a seemingly random array of sites... I could quote the price of ISDN to residents in Australia... I could contrast some of the salaries that I used to earn in Australia to what software engineers typically make here... I could tell you that Australian companies do NOT give out options... but I'll just say that I am so happy I came to live in the bay area instead of staying in Melbourne. Australia is a great place - and one day I know I will live there again - but with just a little common sense it could be so much better. I look forward to the minister taking over the portfolio for say, agriculture.
Gotta understand our senators are none too bright, and won't take technical advise, and will ignore it if it is not what they want to hear. Our ISP's are spewin.. This stupid law came about when one senator (Harradine) said, you pass this here law and get nasty material off the net, or I won't vote for your bill on .. whatever, in an evenly split congress. So in typical fashion, a law was passed with the details to be worked out later (magic wands and hope land) rather than .. When told that you can just dial up an overseas ISP - words like - well we might be able to control that too gushed forth . What about if you got a reverse collect call -- something like - stop nitpicking - details I should add there is no porn transmitted on our TV or cable network of less than a dozen stations that now cost $55 a month and a $200 connection. In addition to TV network censorship, Australia has no free speech ammendments. Newspapers are tame numbers. Customs regularly opens your mail, and destroys Nigerian scam mail on contact (I agree with that), and the populance is happy and smug, protected by a goverment that knows best. Cocaine and Heroin is still cheap and plentiful, and we got laws against that too. Only right now, evil technology and naughty pictures is on a par. Australians are used to stupid laws, but this one is not funny. Our ISP's are setting up shop in USA, and Jobs have been lost. Our loss = your gain.
Every few weeks an article or comment is posted to slashdot lamenting the "controversial" Australian internet censorship laws, and every time hundreds of slashdot readers post comments to slashdot explaining (to the altar boy) exactly why this is such a bad idea.
Why post to slashdot only? Almost everyone here agrees with you.
If you think that the internet censorship is bad and can say so with reasonable intelligence - then please copy your comments to:
The Age - Letters to the Editor (print) and
The Age - Internet Censorship Feedback (online)
and check out The Age's Censorship Online section.
The Age is a leading national newspaper in Australia and if they think there is enough public outrage, both in Aus. and overseas, then they will make it a dominant issue. Other news organisations are then guaranteed to follow suit.
If you're going to preach about internet censorship, then you may as well be preaching in a forum that educates those with a limitted understanding of the issues.
M@T.
'sapientia potestas est'
Do not be fooled by the name "Liberals" . They are no more so than Benito Mussolini...
Now read on!
10/05/99 08:23 AM ZE10
Newswire
Government to revisit censorship bill .htm
This article is located at http://www.newswire.com.au/9910/stompcs
Roulla Yiacoumi
The Government has been forced to revisit its Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act less than three months before it takes effect, following a motion passed by the Senate.
In a motion put forward on Thursday by ALP Senator Mark Bishop on behalf of Democrat Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, the Senate called on the government to:
The motion was passed 32 votes to 29. The architect of the act, Senator Richard Alston, said that although the Senate's motion is "fundamentally misconceived", he will be "delighted" to table reports every six months. The act promises to crack down on illegal and offensive material on the Internet and will come into effect on January 1, 2000. It will be administered by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA).
The Senate noted recent criticisms of the bill, such as: its inability to achieve the government's stated objectives, its adverse impact on emerging Australian Internet-related industries, and its effect of forcing Australian businesses offshore.
Not having a bar of it
In another stinging attack on the civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), which has been actively highlighting the act's deficiencies, Alston said the group has "no interest at all" in responsible Internet regulation. He described EFA as a group of "low-grade undergraduate political activists who thought that they could get themselves a bit of a run on free speech arguments."
Alston said industry is not opposed to his bill, but that "maniacs -- these electronic frontiers outfits" are the ones "running around stirring up trouble" with the global village idiot tag. Once again, Alston cited Yahoo as being one major company which had endorsed his bill, but Newswire found this not to be the case (see story).
In the latest debate in the Senate, Alston claimed the bill is supported by Lotus CEO Jeff Papows. He quoted Papows as saying "Industry has no issue with online content regulation. The industry endorses content regulation". A spokesperson for Lotus Australia said the matter would be referred to the US office for comment.
Alston also said that a recent report, Building a Stronger Information Economy for Australia, by the National Australia Bank (NAB), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler (see story) was "fundamentally wrong". The report contains errors because the three organisations had been "sucked in by a bit of media hype" and had not done their homework, Alston said. "I am pleased therefore that they subsequently put out a media release congratulating the government." A spokeperson for Deloitte said she is not aware of a second press release.
Rejecting comments that current laws should be applied to criminal activity on the Net, Alston said "terrorist bomb recipes, paedophile lists and other things need to be dealt with specifically by Internet regulation."
Fellow Liberal Senator Jeannie Ferris took offence at the legislation being described as an "inappropriate" form of censorship. "We accept that there is no 100% foolproof blocking technology on the Net, that nothing will ever be 100% effective in this area, and that there will be hundreds and maybe thousands of people who will tunnel their way past the filters," she said. "Simply because a law is not 100% effective, should we do nothing?"
Senator Stott Despoja said the Australian Democrats do not advocate unsuitable material being made available to minors and that education of users is the most appropriate form of regulation. "The Democrats are not opposed to content control, but we are opposed to the heavy-handed and inappropriate way in which the government have pursued their policy on this issue," she said.
Pointing to a United States Supreme Court finding which rejected a child protection argument for censoring the Net, Stott Despoja said the reason for this is the "clear understanding that the Internet cannot be censored for children without censoring it for everyone".
The government's desire to control Net user behaviour has "quite eerie parallels with the content control mechanisms that have been adopted in some of the world's less free and democratic nations", Stott Despoja said, giving Malaysia and Singapore as examples.
"These countries have discarded this kind of legislation," she said.
Australia's emerging ecommerce industry is under threat by the current legislation, Stott Despoja said. Internet industries that employ large numbers of young Australians will be affected and Australia will no longer be an attractive place to invest in IT ventures.
Stott Despoja said a number of legitimate online businesses had already moved their operations overseas and that Australia's potential as a regional financial centre may be jeopardised.
So industry supports regulation...there is nothing new here. It has happened with the radio spectrum and then the TV spectrum and now its the bandwidth of the Internet that they are after.
When the issue of what to do with the radio spectrum was first debated, the world went one way, namely to nationalize the frequencies under the notion that they are a public property and the USA went the other. It sold off and privatized huge chunks of it which made transmission access to it restricted to those with the money to afford it. Then along came TV and the same issues were faced. Once again the world went one way and the US went the other further enhancing the power of the already rich.
Now we are facing the same issues with the latest form of mass communications, the Internet, and the same battle is shaping up. Many parts of the Internet are already being bought up and made part of the internal networks of large corporations firewalled from access by the public (intranets).
Some people may say that it won't be so bad because radio and TV turned out OK. The only problem with that argument is what are you comparing to. We don't even know what the alternatives would have brought us because we never got a chance to experiment with anything else but the current situation. It is interesting how the word "anarchy" comes up to describe the current state of the Internet. It is simply inconceivable to these people to allow a system to be set up without a top-down hierarchical structure. The Internet, after all, was created by the public sector (Universities and within the military) and it functioned more or less within democratic principles. It was accessible to most people and was a model for future generations to refine.
The corporate sector or any system of illegitimate power, is always concerned when they see democraticizing elements within large sections of society. They rightly see that this may be a threat to their very existence which relies on controlling the public mind.
As for the dangers of having it in the public hands (ie. government) take your pick: do you want a system controlled by unaccountable secret organizations or by one where the public has some influence over? We only have to be worried about the government if they are unelected and unaccountable. But as long as there is some accountability it seems to me that it is better than none and it is at least a start. We can elect a government out of office but we can't do much with a vote where it concerns corporate power.
Well Working at an isp and starting to bring my own online (getting financing sucks). I know that all of the isp's down here in sydney (Well cept maybe for the big ones like, Ozemail and Eisa) will just be adding a clause in the contract as of january first. Stating compliance with the new laws most be administered by the user using Client Side Filtering. If the goverment wants us to filter then they provide us with the Software, hardware and extra bandwidth so our users don't notice any slowdown. I'm still at a loss on how the governments going to enforce this though and what the punishments would be. A slap on the wrist with a ruler b/c the kid disable Net Nanny so he could look at porn to talk to someone using swear words. Or how about the BOOT from the simpsons episode. Comments, oblisk_99@NOSPAMhotmail.com remove 'NOSPAM' to email me
See Subject.
Official Notice
I, acting on behalf of Garbage-Collectors Anonymous (G.A.), hereby declare the permanent exclusion of Lotus from within our stinkin' ranks. That piece o' garbage ain't got no place here. Take your trash elsewhere.
Unanimously
-The not-Undersigned Anonymous-
Insert mind here.
Hey, I dont know much about censorship, and whether regulating the internet is a Good Thing (tm) or not, but I can tell you one thing: porn has been around long before the internet went public. Yup, I used to look at tons of porn when I was growing up, guess where I got it? from my Dads personal collection. Most of my friends also had dads with their own stash, sooner or later they managed to find where it was hidden. Big fucking deal. We didnt turn into rapists or murderers. We didnt turn into drug addicts or peodophiles. Hey, i learned a lot of stuff from looking at porn, like the basics of human reproduction for one thing (no, there were no sex ed classes then).
And to top it all off, i grew in a country where alchohol is very much accepted, there is no legal drinking age. Ive been drinking since I was 10 years old, and no, I didnt turn into an alcoholic. Sure I can drink a beer or 2 or 12, but when im out partying. I dont sit at home and drink. I havent had a drink since I moved to the US 4 months ago (im under the legal drinking age! heh). No I didnt turn into a braindamaged prune. No, im not a bank robber or whatever it is that children who drink alchohol are supposed to turn into when they drink alchohol.
Im still having a hard time understanding why americans seem so obsessed with preventing their kids from looking at porn and drinking alchohol. How many of these same people looked at porn when they were kids? Did it make them grow up to be bad people? How many of these same people had a drink before they were of legal age? Did it turn them into alcoholics?
I sure didnt turn into a green monster from my exposure to porn and alchohol. Im currently in college and majoring in computer science, and doing very well.
You're STILL entirely missing my point!
It's surely true that the vast majority of parents in the US wouldn't want their children to see what you described. Whether that would be true in all cultures is open to question. What's a web site provider in a culture that considers something like that normal to do?
That notwithstanding, you're also assuming that all web site providers are going to rate their sites in good faith and in accordance with your morals. Neither of these is going to be consistently true. There will be sites that intentionally misrate themselves, and there will be others that will be rated according to very different standards. The ratings on those sites will not even be useful as a starting point. Indeed, they will be worse, because they'll lull you into a false sense of security.
Part of my posting was explaining the DIFFERENCE between movie ratings and web site ratings. Movie ratings work in their own somewhat perverted way for several reasons:
1) There are relatively few movies made, by relatively few organizations, that achieve wide distribution.
2) There is a central ratings organization (in the US) that applies the ratings. This is possible because of the relatively few movies made, but also because relatively few places exhibit movies and they all have much the same policies.
3) The central ratings organization only rates movies for the US (other countries have their own boards), which is fairly homogeneous culturally (compared to the world at large).
4) Movies are static content (they don't change constantly -- if you see Titanic today, it's the same movie you saw a year ago).
NONE of these conditions are true for the web! There are probably on the order of six orders of magnitude more web sites than there are movies made in any one year. That's a factor of a million. It is not possible for one organization to "screen" all of these sites, so ratings will have to be applied by the site operators. Many of these sites are not located in the United States, so ratings will be applied according to the standards of the operators of those sites. And finally, sites change constantly.
You then have to take into account that there's no organized web site industry that can enforce this kind of cartel, as each web site operator is independent of every other operator. There are web site providers who are malicious -- who WANT to expose your children to pornography. What's going to happen when one of these sites is rated G? Are you going to relax your guard, since the G rating means that it's good for your children, or will you still have to prescreen it against these malicious operators?
And before you say that these folks are breaking ze law and must be put in prison, you first have to find them. Tracking these folks down is hard, especially when they live and provide service overseas. And speaking of overseas, what about people overseas who simply have different values from you and think that full frontal nudity is a normal part of life and that there's no reason children should not be exposed to it?
My point is that this "enforced ratings system worldwide" simply cannot work, so there's no use talking about any potential benefits or uses of it. It doesn't matter what you think the potential benefits may or may not be; since the system cannot possibly work as you intend, these benefits don't exist.
The ONLY way that filtering can work is on the client side. Whether you do it personally (which has the highest accuracy level) or you use software produced by someone you trust, or you rely on voluntary ratings (which can be subverted unless there's some real authentication behind it, which still requires what amounts to client-side verification), THIS MUST HAPPEN AT YOUR END! You CANNOT rely on the server to give you ANY useful information at all about appropriateness of the content. Period.
Now do you understand my point? What you're asking for cannot exist, so the whole basis for your argument is flawed.
I will put it on this level then since you only read what you wanted to. I think that all parent would agree that some chick sucking off a dog would be inapproiate. I am not saying that a rating system is a be all/end all simply that some site should have enforced ratings worldwide. I stated I am with my chilren even when watching television, and that I find the warnings on TV shows helpful, As for all the arguments about movie and NC-17 stuff, the theatre as a company has the right to decide what they show and what they don't, not you. There is no basic right to see a movie in a theatre that I can find anywhere so that is a moot point.
I saw playboy and worse at the tender age of 10. I don't think I'm screwed up any, and even though I'm sure my parents wouldn't have appreciated it, they could have sheltered me from the world a little more, as you're suggesting.
Karnal
I still am - but I have also thought about the issue a whole lot more without trying to jump on the 'censorship is evil and the work of the devil' bandwagon.
If I was a parent, I could see the benefits of content regulation. I would hope that I would be a parent who would take an interest in what my kid does and who would make sure that I knew what my kid was doing on the Internet. However, I cannot be around my hypothetical kid all the time and if content regulation helps me control when my kid is exposed to elements of society that are of the more unsavory kind, then so be it.
However,
where I have the biggest issue with content regulation is that the Australian government has decided to implement the content regulation on a nation wide level irrespective of who is trying to look at the content.
To me, this is synonomous to saying that since drivers aged between 18 and 25 cause the most accidents on the road, we should ban all drivers.
The brush is simply too broad and everyone is being tarred.
In my mind, this is the issue with content regulation - the fact that it is applied on a macro and not a micro level.
So, with regard to the Lotus CEO, I too agree with content regulation, just not how it is being implemented at the moment.
While every law that has passed congress and the president has been struck down by courts, once again, the US government is trying to censor online content. They are attaching amendments to the Juvenile Justice Bill to enforce net filtering.
This will probably have low signal/noise ratio due to the fact that I stayed out of the last censorship discussion (though I was a very active part of the one before that), and have some pent-up energy about it all.. You've been warned. =P
You know, after seeing all the crazy laws in Europe and Australia, I find it quite laughable when the true "intellectuals" from those parts of the world who post here on Slashdot talk about how horrible and stupid the U.S. government is.. Sorry, I just can't get it out of my head when people say things like "it's good to snub your nose at America". That said, I'm still above slamming countries and regions myself. I see little to condemn about long stretches of dirt, anyway. =P
Hmm. The "Bertelsman industry" (sp?) maybe. =P
If it's so widely accepted and agreed upon, why are they "trying to negotiate".. and why would it matter that:
What.. people wanting their civil liberties? They are maniacs! This is just slanderous. Certainly "low-grade".. Speaking of which!
Talk about a total fscking hypocrite! You'd think this guy could think of something more intellectual to say. Hell, I could think of a more eloquent way to put it, and I'm still blown away by how well-versed spokespeople from, say, the ACLU, are in the English language.
I've heard that it is often difficult to find something you are not looking for..
Anarchy!? That's really funny. If I have to deal with one more "save the children" campaign that is aimed at censoring the Internet (or anything else), I'm going to murder someone. I think it's interesting to note that someone said in a previous discussion that once Australia and/or Europe have workable laws in place concerning "regulation" of Internet content, the U.S. will follow suit.. What, like a cow being led to slaughter? I kind of doubt it. The one thing the judicial branch excels at is protecting the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens. =P
At any rate.. Isn't anarchy a political "structure"? This guy obviously has not a clue what true anarchy really is .. I swear, the zero responsibility attitude of parents these days is dragging the world down into the bowels of hell itself. Would it be so bad if more people learned how to raise children effectively or were forced to give them up for adoption (or better yet, not have them at all)? This "pass the buck" mentality is driving.. me.. in.. sane..
~ Kish
Oct 4 - Sydney: In an attempt to cool the strong public outcry following his statement that Lotus Corporation supported Internet cencorship, Senator Alston, Australian Minister for Communications, defended his position.
"These people say I have only two backers in the technology industry. This is a complete lie. I have three."
Alston has published his recollection of a discussion with highly-regarded members of the industry, at which he recalls W. Warner saying:
"...I, as a member of the IT industry, fully endorse content filtering!"
Warner was unavailable for comment at press time.
The internet was not built for children. It was designed for research. It was built for those who are 18 years of age or older. If they want GNET, they should build it themselves, and not turn our network into something it is not. I will not tollerate censorship. Many of us wont, and pages like www.disney.com will be altered by crackers just to show parents that their child does not belong here. They need to build another net for kids and call it KiddieNET.
Why would U.S. tech companies care what censorship laws the Australians pass anyway? How can it impact them at all?
Well, of course, they might try to extradite porn site operators when the visit Britain, but...
THIS IS PURE B.S......
.adult domain.... simple, effective, and democratic.
It is a purely political move by politicians (1984: inner party) to control the masses (1984: outer party and proles).
The real answer to protecting our children is to create new domains that reflect their content.
All porn (read: NOT educational/informative) should be put in a domain named '.adult' (and I mean all) and all educational information should be put into a domain named '.education' and then if parents want to censor/protect their children from gratuitus sex, they can filter the
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.