DRM just makes pirate copies more useful than the originals, so even honest users who pay for the games/movies/etc often end up breaking the DRM or obtaining pirate copies anyway.
No unskippable "piracy is stealing" promos on DVDs (which the pirate copies obviously don't have), no phoning home every time you run a game, no access being denied to a single player game because your internet is down (and therefore want something to do while it comes back up), no scrambling around for half an hour looking for a disc when there's no valid reason to require one, no "you've upgraded three times since you bought this game, sorry, you have to buy it again".
Yes, it is a problem that pirates are offering a cheaper product but for those of us who want to pay for it, the answer isn't to ensure that they are also offering a superior product.
With any other country I'd be prepared to laugh it off, but the current Australian government is stupid, technologically ignorant and authoritarian enough to try this.
They're pushing for enough control of the internet as it is, a license to communicate in the first place is just begging for abuse.
That's assuming they don't have the support of the Liberals - the traditional social conservatives in Australia. They've known all along that the Greens aren't on board, so it's the Liberals they're relying on to back the government.
Labor is much stricter on crossing the floor than the Liberals and the threat of an early election might push them into avoiding any double-dissolution triggers.
And if an early election is held? Labor likely takes the Senate and pushes through the changes anyway.
Just remember - this is the senator who said that the previous trials were a success as well.
Those previous trials showed an average 30% slowdown (87% for the most accurate filter), and still managed to block about 1% of the internet by mistake.
The current trials are a farce - everyone knew they would be rigged from the start (one ISP - iiNet asked if they could perform a comprehensive double-blind test and Labor told them to go jump in a lake). We have an extremely tiny proportion of the population testing the filters, on a purely opt-in basis (scalability and selection bias are obvious concerns here) - and they can't possibly test the potential for over-blocking (there are over 1 trillion urls on the internet, and there are only 15 users trialling the filter in some cases). They've also got nothing to do with what Conroy now claims the filter is going to block (halfway through the trial when the blacklist leaked he actually realised what was on it and promised the real blacklist would be different).
As for redtube being blocked by mistake - it's not a mistake. It was on the leaked blacklist from March and the user who submitted it has the official response from ACMA confirming it is prohibited in Australia. Virtually all pornography on the internet is technically prohibited here, even "simulated" sexual activity and "adult nudity" (check out ACMA's homepage linked to from TFA if anyone doesn't believe me).
Haven't been keeping up with the developments, have you?
This "laughably insane" idea is alive and well, as of two hours ago.
And with precisely the same reasoning - any time you disagree with the government... "but, child porn!". The filters won't work, they'll be trivial to defeat. "Child porn!". This is a top-secret blacklist without a scrap of accountability, confirmed to contain mostly adult pornography... "CHILD PORN!"... and multiple political websites "you don't support child porn do you?". Your top-secret list of the most evil content on the internet leaked, exactly as we told you it would "kiddy fiddler!". Even PG-rated material is on the blacklist... "PEDOPHILE!".
We've been writing to them, trust me. Unfortunately, it's been decided regardless of public and technical opinion - those in power want our intertubes filtered, so that's the way it's going to be.
One of the reasons it isn't getting much play here at all is that the media companies want the filter to go through so they can add torrents/etc. to the blacklist. At the moment they just have to satisfy themselves with suing ISPs because they don't cut their users off when the film industry tells them to.
Maybe downloadable content will be the winner much further down the track, but for the moment I think the problem is that Blu-ray hasn't done enough to dethrone DVDs as the standard format.
Think about what DVDs had to offer over VHS - much smaller form factor (you can get about three TV seasons worth of content in a case the size of a VHS tape), significantly increased quality (both picture and sound), the ability to choose subtitles in dozens of languages with a click of a button, no rewinding, multiple soundtracks on the one disc, selectable camera angles, chapter selection, usable menus, special features, audio commentaries, no degradation of the signal from repeated use, etc...
Blu-ray offers... a slightly better picture. If you fork out ridiculous amounts of cash for the new discs, players and a HD Television to go with it.
Sure, I can tell the difference, and so can most people, but DVDs are actually reasonably good quality to begin with, and good enough for most people out there, myself included.
I'm not sure if the original poster was aware that the mandatory internet filtering proposal in Australia appears to be going down in flames, but even factoring that out, we still have much more restrictive internet censorship laws than the U.S - it's just that they only currently apply to material hosted in Australia.
For instance, anything that would be rated R18+ or higher (that's not just explicit pornography, movies like Pulp Fiction fall under that rating) cannot be hosted in Australia unless they can confirm the user's age with a credit card or equivalent. Any video game that is found to be unsuitable for a 15-year-old is also banned outright. Many of the other controversial sites on the blacklist (e.g. euthanasia advocacy) have been forcibly removed from Australian servers, and if you even link to one of those sites (e.g. wikileaks), you will be threatened with fines of $11,000 per day until it the link is removed.
That's pretty damn serious censorship, if you ask me.
This is probably similar to Jew Watch being the top result on Google for "Jew" - not necessarily the result of a hack or Google policy, but the fact that "Jew" is more often used as an insult than "Jewish" or "Judaism" and the vulnerability of searching/indexing to external influence (e.g. Googlebombing).
That said, I don't think "It was a glitch and we fixed it" is a sufficient response from Amazon for the other allegations. We need to know exactly what happened, how it happened, and how they're going to stop it from happening again. Whether intentional or accidental, the large-scale blacklisting of anything with gay themes in it (unless the gay themes are "how to stop your son becoming a homo") is absolutely disgraceful and Amazon should be boycotted until they give a better explanation for this mess.
There's also the fact that one of the biggest problems with the concept remains - it is still a top-secret blacklist that we aren't allowed to see. We're not allowed to know, or talk about, what exactly is being censored. We were assured by Conroy that no political content would be blocked, but we have no way of confirming that if the list is a secret (unless it leaks... which it did, clearly showing that political content was being blocked).
Time and time again, experience has shown that these lists WILL leak, and they WILL be trivial to defeat (particularly for those with the greatest interest in defeating them). And these people want to keep adding child porn to some of the most widely released documents on the internet?
Fucking imbeciles, I tell you. You're not helping the children, you're harming them, and you're pandering to fundamentalist wowsers who have about 1% of a clue about what they're talking about between them.
For obvious legal reasons (i.e. the fact Australian government no longer even pretends to believe in freedom of expression), I'm not going to post a direct link to the list, but wikileaks now has the blacklist - updated as recently as of two days ago.
I expect the site to be under very heavy load, but it's there for those who know where to look.
Nice catch... presumably if it had nothing to do with the government blacklist, he would not only say "they have URLs we don't have", he would also say "we have URLs they don't have".
It's not the government blacklist, but it is likely a superset of it - it's possible some of those sites were added by the filter vendor who leaked it.
I think I should be pretty safe, though... the last step before getting to the list? The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Oops.
(Props to the Whirlpool poster for discovering this hilarity).
I think you might have him confused with the independent Senator Xenephon - who initially supported the filter because it could block gambling sites, but who now realises how stupid the plan is.
Not only does Fielding strongly support it, but his senate vote with a Labor minority is likely a factor in the proposed filter.
They're going to need more than Fielding, though. Labor needs either the support of the Coalition (which they don't have), or the support of everyone else (Greens are against it, so they don't have this either).
To be fair, the fine is for ignoring a request for deleting links to prohibited content. It would be stupid to significantly penalise someone for breaking a law they aren't allowed to know about... but if I had a dollar for every time I thought "That would be stupid, there's no way the ALP will possibly incorporate that into the net censorship plan", I'd be able to forget about this whole financial crisis and retire at 26.
What's just as concerning is the apparent recursive nature of the blacklist. Link to prohibited content, and your website becomes prohibited content. Therefore, any links to your website become prohibited content. Given the nature of hyperlinking and the internet, the whole web is probably only a few steps away from being banned. At this stage, I'm not even sure that's not what Labor wants.
It's actually worse than this - the blacklist doesn't just deal with "prohibited content", it deals with "potential prohibited content". In other words, material that has not been found to be prohibited, but which a single bureaucrat thinks has the potential to be prohibited if it was investigated. Given that even MA15+ (i.e. material that is legal for a 15-year-old to view) content can be prohibited, and a significant proportion of the blacklist is legal for 18-year-olds to view (i.e. R18+ and X18+), that's an extremely low threshold for something to be considered off-limits to Australian web users by our government.
Ugh... the whole thing sickens me. I was hoping it would have been dropped like a hot potato for now, but it's obvious they aren't backing down. Our only hope is if it goes to a vote in the senate and fails.
Apparently so, I just logged in and received this message:
A couple of weeks ago, we posted an update to our Terms of Use that we hoped would clarify some parts of it for our users. Over the past couple of days, we have received a lot of questions and comments about these updated terms and what they mean for people and their information. Because of the feedback we received, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.
And Stephen Conroy is the Minister for "Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy". Censorship Minister is accurate, and rolls of the lips much more easily.
And surprisingly, they're accepting some strongly negative posts as well (an overwhelming majority of the posts there, actually). There's just a backlog of about 12 hours worth of posts that need to be approved first.
I'm quietly hopeful that this means they're looking for a quiet excuse to drop it (and Senator Conroy).
Slashdot Mirror
There's also an increasing number of bands such as Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead who have legally released their own material for free online.
And the sky didn't fall in.
DRM just makes pirate copies more useful than the originals, so even honest users who pay for the games/movies/etc often end up breaking the DRM or obtaining pirate copies anyway.
No unskippable "piracy is stealing" promos on DVDs (which the pirate copies obviously don't have), no phoning home every time you run a game, no access being denied to a single player game because your internet is down (and therefore want something to do while it comes back up), no scrambling around for half an hour looking for a disc when there's no valid reason to require one, no "you've upgraded three times since you bought this game, sorry, you have to buy it again".
Yes, it is a problem that pirates are offering a cheaper product but for those of us who want to pay for it, the answer isn't to ensure that they are also offering a superior product.
Three minutes.
Actually, that's the time it took to realise I added an "8" to my post, if you read it you'll realise 49 was what I wanted anyway.
With any other country I'd be prepared to laugh it off, but the current Australian government is stupid, technologically ignorant and authoritarian enough to try this.
They're pushing for enough control of the internet as it is, a license to communicate in the first place is just begging for abuse.
Er... make that 1+16+32 = 49.
There is no "browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped". At least not in Firefox 3.5.2...
Turns out it's got something to do with the "browser.urlbar.default.behavior" entry, which consists of:
1: history
2: bookmarked
4: match tag
8: match title
16: match URL
32: match typed
So to kill the annoying bookmark/tag/title matching, set it to 1+8+16+32 = 49
I've also been told you can modify "places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus", but every time I do that Firefox changes it back.
So much for user friendliness...
That's assuming they don't have the support of the Liberals - the traditional social conservatives in Australia. They've known all along that the Greens aren't on board, so it's the Liberals they're relying on to back the government.
Labor is much stricter on crossing the floor than the Liberals and the threat of an early election might push them into avoiding any double-dissolution triggers.
And if an early election is held? Labor likely takes the Senate and pushes through the changes anyway.
Just remember - this is the senator who said that the previous trials were a success as well.
Those previous trials showed an average 30% slowdown (87% for the most accurate filter), and still managed to block about 1% of the internet by mistake.
The current trials are a farce - everyone knew they would be rigged from the start (one ISP - iiNet asked if they could perform a comprehensive double-blind test and Labor told them to go jump in a lake). We have an extremely tiny proportion of the population testing the filters, on a purely opt-in basis (scalability and selection bias are obvious concerns here) - and they can't possibly test the potential for over-blocking (there are over 1 trillion urls on the internet, and there are only 15 users trialling the filter in some cases). They've also got nothing to do with what Conroy now claims the filter is going to block (halfway through the trial when the blacklist leaked he actually realised what was on it and promised the real blacklist would be different).
As for redtube being blocked by mistake - it's not a mistake. It was on the leaked blacklist from March and the user who submitted it has the official response from ACMA confirming it is prohibited in Australia. Virtually all pornography on the internet is technically prohibited here, even "simulated" sexual activity and "adult nudity" (check out ACMA's homepage linked to from TFA if anyone doesn't believe me).
Haven't been keeping up with the developments, have you?
This "laughably insane" idea is alive and well, as of two hours ago.
And with precisely the same reasoning - any time you disagree with the government... "but, child porn!". The filters won't work, they'll be trivial to defeat. "Child porn!". This is a top-secret blacklist without a scrap of accountability, confirmed to contain mostly adult pornography... "CHILD PORN!"... and multiple political websites "you don't support child porn do you?". Your top-secret list of the most evil content on the internet leaked, exactly as we told you it would "kiddy fiddler!". Even PG-rated material is on the blacklist... "PEDOPHILE!".
Ugh. And more depressingly, the tactic's working.
Uh... Nuremberg defence anyone?
We've been writing to them, trust me. Unfortunately, it's been decided regardless of public and technical opinion - those in power want our intertubes filtered, so that's the way it's going to be.
One of the reasons it isn't getting much play here at all is that the media companies want the filter to go through so they can add torrents/etc. to the blacklist. At the moment they just have to satisfy themselves with suing ISPs because they don't cut their users off when the film industry tells them to.
If you follow the references, they do mention who considered it white - the Oxford English Dictionary.
Maybe downloadable content will be the winner much further down the track, but for the moment I think the problem is that Blu-ray hasn't done enough to dethrone DVDs as the standard format.
Think about what DVDs had to offer over VHS - much smaller form factor (you can get about three TV seasons worth of content in a case the size of a VHS tape), significantly increased quality (both picture and sound), the ability to choose subtitles in dozens of languages with a click of a button, no rewinding, multiple soundtracks on the one disc, selectable camera angles, chapter selection, usable menus, special features, audio commentaries, no degradation of the signal from repeated use, etc...
Blu-ray offers... a slightly better picture. If you fork out ridiculous amounts of cash for the new discs, players and a HD Television to go with it.
Sure, I can tell the difference, and so can most people, but DVDs are actually reasonably good quality to begin with, and good enough for most people out there, myself included.
Iraq was technically a democracy as well. It's just that Saddam happened to get 100% of the vote every time.
"Democracy" isn't the first word to come to my head when describing Iran... the recent events have done nothing to suggest otherwise.
I'm not sure if the original poster was aware that the mandatory internet filtering proposal in Australia appears to be going down in flames, but even factoring that out, we still have much more restrictive internet censorship laws than the U.S - it's just that they only currently apply to material hosted in Australia.
For instance, anything that would be rated R18+ or higher (that's not just explicit pornography, movies like Pulp Fiction fall under that rating) cannot be hosted in Australia unless they can confirm the user's age with a credit card or equivalent. Any video game that is found to be unsuitable for a 15-year-old is also banned outright. Many of the other controversial sites on the blacklist (e.g. euthanasia advocacy) have been forcibly removed from Australian servers, and if you even link to one of those sites (e.g. wikileaks), you will be threatened with fines of $11,000 per day until it the link is removed.
That's pretty damn serious censorship, if you ask me.
This is probably similar to Jew Watch being the top result on Google for "Jew" - not necessarily the result of a hack or Google policy, but the fact that "Jew" is more often used as an insult than "Jewish" or "Judaism" and the vulnerability of searching/indexing to external influence (e.g. Googlebombing).
That said, I don't think "It was a glitch and we fixed it" is a sufficient response from Amazon for the other allegations. We need to know exactly what happened, how it happened, and how they're going to stop it from happening again. Whether intentional or accidental, the large-scale blacklisting of anything with gay themes in it (unless the gay themes are "how to stop your son becoming a homo") is absolutely disgraceful and Amazon should be boycotted until they give a better explanation for this mess.
There's also the fact that one of the biggest problems with the concept remains - it is still a top-secret blacklist that we aren't allowed to see. We're not allowed to know, or talk about, what exactly is being censored. We were assured by Conroy that no political content would be blocked, but we have no way of confirming that if the list is a secret (unless it leaks... which it did, clearly showing that political content was being blocked).
Time and time again, experience has shown that these lists WILL leak, and they WILL be trivial to defeat (particularly for those with the greatest interest in defeating them). And these people want to keep adding child porn to some of the most widely released documents on the internet?
Fucking imbeciles, I tell you. You're not helping the children, you're harming them, and you're pandering to fundamentalist wowsers who have about 1% of a clue about what they're talking about between them.
For obvious legal reasons (i.e. the fact Australian government no longer even pretends to believe in freedom of expression), I'm not going to post a direct link to the list, but wikileaks now has the blacklist - updated as recently as of two days ago.
I expect the site to be under very heavy load, but it's there for those who know where to look.
Nice catch... presumably if it had nothing to do with the government blacklist, he would not only say "they have URLs we don't have", he would also say "we have URLs they don't have".
It's not the government blacklist, but it is likely a superset of it - it's possible some of those sites were added by the filter vendor who leaked it.
And to further my point about six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon blacklisting, here is a link that eventually leads to the banned Danish list.
I think I should be pretty safe, though... the last step before getting to the list? The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Oops.
(Props to the Whirlpool poster for discovering this hilarity).
I think you might have him confused with the independent Senator Xenephon - who initially supported the filter because it could block gambling sites, but who now realises how stupid the plan is.
Not only does Fielding strongly support it, but his senate vote with a Labor minority is likely a factor in the proposed filter.
They're going to need more than Fielding, though. Labor needs either the support of the Coalition (which they don't have), or the support of everyone else (Greens are against it, so they don't have this either).
To be fair, the fine is for ignoring a request for deleting links to prohibited content. It would be stupid to significantly penalise someone for breaking a law they aren't allowed to know about... but if I had a dollar for every time I thought "That would be stupid, there's no way the ALP will possibly incorporate that into the net censorship plan", I'd be able to forget about this whole financial crisis and retire at 26.
What's just as concerning is the apparent recursive nature of the blacklist. Link to prohibited content, and your website becomes prohibited content. Therefore, any links to your website become prohibited content. Given the nature of hyperlinking and the internet, the whole web is probably only a few steps away from being banned. At this stage, I'm not even sure that's not what Labor wants.
It's actually worse than this - the blacklist doesn't just deal with "prohibited content", it deals with "potential prohibited content". In other words, material that has not been found to be prohibited, but which a single bureaucrat thinks has the potential to be prohibited if it was investigated. Given that even MA15+ (i.e. material that is legal for a 15-year-old to view) content can be prohibited, and a significant proportion of the blacklist is legal for 18-year-olds to view (i.e. R18+ and X18+), that's an extremely low threshold for something to be considered off-limits to Australian web users by our government.
Ugh... the whole thing sickens me. I was hoping it would have been dropped like a hot potato for now, but it's obvious they aren't backing down. Our only hope is if it goes to a vote in the senate and fails.
Apparently so, I just logged in and received this message:
A couple of weeks ago, we posted an update to our Terms of Use that we hoped would clarify some parts of it for our users. Over the past couple of days, we have received a lot of questions and comments about these updated terms and what they mean for people and their information. Because of the feedback we received, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.
It's the Ministry of Truth, actually.
And Stephen Conroy is the Minister for "Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy". Censorship Minister is accurate, and rolls of the lips much more easily.
And surprisingly, they're accepting some strongly negative posts as well (an overwhelming majority of the posts there, actually). There's just a backlog of about 12 hours worth of posts that need to be approved first.
I'm quietly hopeful that this means they're looking for a quiet excuse to drop it (and Senator Conroy).