Can someone provide details on Australia's legal system? I.e. does Australia have a constitution (I know England hasn't) and a constitutional court which might provide a means of getting this law killed?
Australia does have a constitution, but it doesn't guarantee freedom of speech (it just sets down the structure of government), although the High Court has ruled that there is an implied right of freedom of political speech.
AustLII has information about Australian Courts if you're interested in looking. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't know of anything that would make this law invalid.
So does this mean that all.au ISPs will have to implement either a mandatory proxy server or packet filters?
Probably. The government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to remain "technology neutral" - in other words, to ignore that their proposal is unworkable and expect the ISPs to implement it anyway.
'The Bill meets the Government's objective of helping protect Australian citizens, especially children, from illegal and highly offensive material, but it does so without placing an undue burden on the internet industry,'
This, of course, conveniently ignores that most Australian citizens don't want to be protected.
RMS is the biggest hypocrite in the world. He preaches freedom, yet enforces dictatorship.
He "enforces" nothing. Clearly most people don't say GNU/Linux...
In his mind, he is the only one that can be right.
RMS is a man with a cause - of course he thinks he's right. When I read something he has said, I often find that what's more important than what he says is why he says it. He can seem arrogant, but if I keep in mind that everything he says is to encourage the spread of free software, I can pretty much always see how he thinks it will be of benefit to free software.
I don't call my system GNU/Linux, but I think RMS has good reasons for saying I should.
I've been getting sick and tired of seeing all Linux growth articles focusing only on Red Hat. The article I just read states that 'nobody owns Linux,' but it's quite obvious that Red Hat is trying to snuff out other distributions.
OK, so Red Hat are taking advantage of the publicity that Linux has been achieving, in order to advertise their own products.
But what's wrong with that? For a start, Red Hat's distribution could be one of the reasons Linux has been able to gain such a high profile.
More importantly, I don't understand how you interpret the publicity they're getting as "trying to snuff out other distributions". For a start, they released their packaging software under the GPL, and it's used by many non-RH distributions. That's not behaviour I would expect from someone who wants to destroy their competition.
Since, as you stated further on, you like other distributions more than Red Hat, I think you should take the responsibility yourself to try to get your preferred system more coverage - that would achieve more than merely complaining about the current situation.
If the Constitution is wrong, there's a simple solution. Change it.
Why don't you?
Because the majority of Americans don't want guns banned, as is demonstrated by the way that so many states are busily removing their anti-gun laws at the moment.
The people may well change their minds if they keep seeing children being murdered.
As I see it (from an outsider's perspective), the threat of government tyranny is remote now, but these deaths are quite real. Maybe the constitution should be changed. I don't think taking away guns is the answer - it won't stop children from wanting to kill other children. It might make it more difficult.
Maybe there is no answer. Certainly there isn't one simple answer, anyway.
jwz has abandoned the project. Boy, the developers over there learned their lesson for all of a week. I had such high hopes for the project. Oh well.
Actually, this was jwz's idea, almost a year ago: see the mosaic of chat from Mozilla's "Blue Sky" pages, from almost a year ago now. As the page's title (Unity of Interface) suggests, he argues that a generic chat UI should be developed, encompassing the various chat protocols that exist on the net - which sounds quite a lot like this idea.
I note that if you actually read the page this story refers to, you'd have seen this link already.
FWIW, I didn't think I'd want to use an integrated IRC client then - his page notes the difficulties, such as IRC being line-based, while talk is character-based, for one thing - and I don't now. But I don't see how the implementation of a multiple-protocol instant messaging client as a bad thing - just not necessarily integrated with the browser.
Every consumer has the duty to inform themselves about the products they're using.
I agree totally, and that is why I find it so abhorrent that the publishers of filtering software try to prevent consumers from keeping themselves informed.
This is just the sort of poor thinking and lack of personal responsibility that I was lamenting.
Poor thinking I'm willing to concede; that was terribly written. But "lack of personal responsibility" is an absurd claim.
I don't want to use this software. I am more than happy to look at the Internet without having someone else tell me whether or not it's "safe". If I see something I don't like, I click the "back" button, or move on to the next message.
All I'm trying to say is that those who do want to use filtering software should be able to see for themselves that it actually does what its publishers say it does, and nothing more.
IF you don't trust the product, why use it? Duh! Watch your kids yourself. IF you cannot trust your kids on the 'net, don't leave them alone on the 'net. Duh! None of these things are really that hard to understand. All you have to do is think about it.
Indeed I have thought about it, and that is how I have come to the conclusion this software isn't worth using, and I would never choose to use it.
But there are places like public libraries using this kind of software. There was a story here on Slashdot recently about the US Constitution (or perhaps it was the declaration of independence) being blocked in Utah. If filtering software is to be worth using, people must be able to find out exactly what the software is filtering out, not by happening to stumble across a page which is blocked, but by having that information open for all to see. As it is now, the software cannot be trusted.
I would like there to be worthwhile filtering software available - not because I want to use it, but because I want others to use it instead of trying to force the government to censor the Internet. Here in Australia censorship is a serious problem because we don't have the same protection of freedom of speech as the US Constitution provides. (Only political speech is protected here.) Decent filtering software would eliminate the need for government censorship. But today's filtering software just isn't good enough, because it isn't open, which makes it susceptible to abuse.
Apply some effort to achieving a solution rather than whining to the gov or someone else about the problem.
That's funny, I didn't mention the government once in the comment you replied to. Where did you get that from? It's because of the worthlessness of filtering software that censorship by the government is a threat.
Even if you don't know that they do it, you should have enough mental capacity to figure out that they might just be motivated to do such a thing so you should uh...let's see, check the logs for records of blocked content, whoa, that's hard to do, time consuming. How about turning off the filter occasionally just to get a whiff of reality every now and then?
I shouldn't have to check the logs of blocked content. I should be able to see exactly what they're blocking and why.
But you are free to use the products or not! If you don't want to be censored, by all means, don't use a product that filters!
You're missing the point. If I say something unflattering about their products, noone who uses those products will see it. It's not about what I can see, because I don't use this software. The problem is they claim to be making the net "safe" for children, but what they don't tell you is that they also try to keep you away from information that might hurt their commercial interests.
Noone is forcing you to use such a product.
This is a separate issue; I live in a country where the minister for communications is talking about forcing ISPs to block "illegal or obscene" content which comes from overseas. So what you say may not be true for much longer, if the government gets its way.
Leave it to Katz to come out against personal empowerment and freedom of choice.
I sometimes wonder if JonKatz actually writes more than one version of each article, because people continually seem to see things in them that directly contradict what I'm reading.
This is from what I read:
And now I'm blocked by hundreds of Slashdotters as well.
[...] This is everybody's absolute right; nobody should be forced to read me if he or she don't want to.
I think that makes it perfectly clear that he is not "against personal empowerment".
What he does seem to be against is software that blocks things it shouldn't - software which actually takes away freedom from the individual.
...learn what "censorship" is. It is the limitation of information by a third party, notably the government.
Anything that individuals or private organizations choose to do for or to themselves is just that, freedom of choice.
The problem is that these products don't let you know what they block. So if you use them, you don't have freedom of choice at all - you place yourself in a situation where you must trust someone else to know what you want to block.
But, more importantly, you have no way of knowing whether they block material they shouldn't - because they block their critics! That surely is censorship, and I doubt it's what people who simply want to keep their children away from pornography thought they were choosing.
>However, I do not want my GPL work to be a free lunch for whoever wants to proprietarize it.
I ask this again and again, and no one ever answers it: why should it bother you so much that someone might make money off of modifications to code you wrote, but it doesn't bother you that someone makes money using that code?
Despite the frequently mis-stated claim, your code is *not* being taken away -- it's still just as free as it ever was. It's the work done by someone else based on it that's not free.
Reciprocity. I believe that if they can benefit from using my code, I should benefit from theirs. Seems only fair.
Theos.com says that before theos software contacted him the theos.com web site was EMPTY. (his own capitalization).
Seems like asking for the domain was a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do.
But www.theos.com also says:
Increasingly, the hosts in that domain have become more of an integral part of the OPENBSD project infrastructure.
So maybe www.theos.com was unused, but other names are apparently being used. And Altavista has pages starting with http://www.theos.com/~deraadt/ dating back to last July anyway, so it wasn't totally unoccupied.
I run both Netscape4 and Explorer4 on a Sunbox here, and we have contests to see which uses the most memory. At the moment, Explorer wins. When asked to show an *EMPTY* *FUCKING* *PAGE*, Netscape used a paltry 24 megabytes of memory, compared to Explorers 30 megs.
The funny thing is, half-an-hour later (after coming back from lunch), Explorer was using 36 megabytes. That's right, folks. It took an extra 6 megabytes to sit around and do *NOTHING* for thirty minutes.
Am I the only person who actually finds Gnome 1.0 to be stable?
It works for me too.
I've been running it since day 1 and the worst thing I've experienced is the panel crashing and restarting itself. Even that hasn't happened more than once per day.
Hasn't happened to me since I first tried it out before putting it in my.xsession file.
I was even a pussy and installed from RPMs.
I grabbed the tarballs and used the spec files to make RPMs, because I haven't been able to get Gnome's RPMs to work on my somewhat upgraded RedHat 5.1 system.
My only problem is that I'm not using a compliant window manager, but I've grown too attached to my current setup to change...
Only when computer products are allowed to compete on the basis of merit -- not judicial intervention -- will real advancements in information technology be made.
That argument would be worth something if a Microsoft operating system ever competed on merit.
Actually, some of us spend more time actually working on computers then dealing with this joke of a language. Why is english so common? Because it's a hybrid of nearly everything. Borrow a prefix here, a rule or two there.. grab some ancient greek suffexes. Repeat 30 or 40 times, and you get english. Whee.
The biggest obstacle to Linux on the desktop is the vast waste of memory and other processor time of X.
While X certainly uses a fair amount of memory, ps indicates it's only used 1.5% of CPU time for me at the moment. I don't consider that "vast".
X offers very little functionality for a desktop system,
Please explain. What functionality does a desktop system need that can't be implemented as an application using X?
and the networking stuff is inefficient.
Another unsupported statement.
The solution: XFree should focus on making a smaller and more usable package, and leave the direct graphics stuff up to GGI.
Or: Implement only GGI/KGIcon drivers (which should be highly portable as well), and run X via Xggi.
You'll have to come up with a pretty damned good reason to explain exactly how adding an extra layer is going to reduce the "inefficiency" you criticise.
What's to stop someone from lifting an MP3 device that has MP3's on it tagged to someone's credit card number, and then blasting *these* all over the net?
Why would they encode credit card numbers in it?! It'd be more like how cookies are used on web sites; a seemingly random string that identifies the download.
This one is kind of irrelevant. What GUI has menus in inconsistent locations?!
It's really just a matter of familiarity, rather than one choice being better than others. The first GUI I used had no menus visible on the screen at all - everything was pop-up context menus. Consistent location, in this case, was at the pointer.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone provide details on Australia's legal system? I.e. does Australia have a constitution (I know England hasn't) and a constitutional court which might provide a means of getting this law killed?
Australia does have a constitution, but it doesn't guarantee freedom of speech (it just sets down the structure of government), although the High Court has ruled that there is an implied right of freedom of political speech.
AustLII has information about Australian Courts if you're interested in looking. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't know of anything that would make this law invalid.
So does this mean that all .au ISPs will have to implement either a mandatory proxy server or packet filters?
Probably. The government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to remain "technology neutral" - in other words, to ignore that their proposal is unworkable and expect the ISPs to implement it anyway.
If you have a look at the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts web site and follow to the "Newsroom" link, you find such brilliant statements as:
This, of course, conveniently ignores that most Australian citizens don't want to be protected.
RMS is the biggest hypocrite in the world. He preaches freedom, yet enforces dictatorship.
He "enforces" nothing. Clearly most people don't say GNU/Linux...
In his mind, he is the only one that can be right.
RMS is a man with a cause - of course he thinks he's right. When I read something he has said, I often find that what's more important than what he says is why he says it. He can seem arrogant, but if I keep in mind that everything he says is to encourage the spread of free software, I can pretty much always see how he thinks it will be of benefit to free software.
I don't call my system GNU/Linux, but I think RMS has good reasons for saying I should.
I've been getting sick and tired of seeing all Linux growth articles focusing only on Red Hat. The article I just read states that 'nobody owns Linux,' but it's quite obvious that Red Hat is trying to snuff out other distributions.
OK, so Red Hat are taking advantage of the publicity that Linux has been achieving, in order to advertise their own products.
But what's wrong with that? For a start, Red Hat's distribution could be one of the reasons Linux has been able to gain such a high profile.
More importantly, I don't understand how you interpret the publicity they're getting as "trying to snuff out other distributions". For a start, they released their packaging software under the GPL, and it's used by many non-RH distributions. That's not behaviour I would expect from someone who wants to destroy their competition.
Since, as you stated further on, you like other distributions more than Red Hat, I think you should take the responsibility yourself to try to get your preferred system more coverage - that would achieve more than merely complaining about the current situation.
Note: There was heavier censorship in the fiftiess and sixties. There always is under liberal government.
I think you mean "Liberal government". Despite their name, the Liberal Party is conservative.
Senator Harradine doesn't really have a history of making sense.
Actually, he seems better informed than the Minister for Communications at times; it's just unfortunate that he's on the wrong side, so to speak.
If the Constitution is wrong, there's a simple solution. Change it.
Why don't you?
Because the majority of Americans don't want guns banned, as is demonstrated by the way that so many states are busily removing their anti-gun laws at the moment.
The people may well change their minds if they keep seeing children being murdered.
As I see it (from an outsider's perspective), the threat of government tyranny is remote now, but these deaths are quite real. Maybe the constitution should be changed. I don't think taking away guns is the answer - it won't stop children from wanting to kill other children. It might make it more difficult.
Maybe there is no answer. Certainly there isn't one simple answer, anyway.
And now we see why...
jwz has abandoned the project. Boy, the developers over there learned their lesson for all of a week. I had such high hopes for the project. Oh well.
Actually, this was jwz's idea, almost a year ago: see the mosaic of chat from Mozilla's "Blue Sky" pages, from almost a year ago now. As the page's title (Unity of Interface) suggests, he argues that a generic chat UI should be developed, encompassing the various chat protocols that exist on the net - which sounds quite a lot like this idea.
I note that if you actually read the page this story refers to, you'd have seen this link already.
FWIW, I didn't think I'd want to use an integrated IRC client then - his page notes the difficulties, such as IRC being line-based, while talk is character-based, for one thing - and I don't now. But I don't see how the implementation of a multiple-protocol instant messaging client as a bad thing - just not necessarily integrated with the browser.
Every consumer has the duty to inform themselves about the products they're using.
I agree totally, and that is why I find it so abhorrent that the publishers of filtering software try to prevent consumers from keeping themselves informed.
This is just the sort of poor thinking and lack of personal responsibility that I was lamenting.
Poor thinking I'm willing to concede; that was terribly written. But "lack of personal responsibility" is an absurd claim.
I don't want to use this software. I am more than happy to look at the Internet without having someone else tell me whether or not it's "safe". If I see something I don't like, I click the "back" button, or move on to the next message.
All I'm trying to say is that those who do want to use filtering software should be able to see for themselves that it actually does what its publishers say it does, and nothing more.
IF you don't trust the product, why use it? Duh! Watch your kids yourself. IF you cannot trust your kids on the 'net, don't leave them alone on the 'net. Duh! None of these things are really that hard to understand. All you have to do is think about it.
Indeed I have thought about it, and that is how I have come to the conclusion this software isn't worth using, and I would never choose to use it.
But there are places like public libraries using this kind of software. There was a story here on Slashdot recently about the US Constitution (or perhaps it was the declaration of independence) being blocked in Utah. If filtering software is to be worth using, people must be able to find out exactly what the software is filtering out, not by happening to stumble across a page which is blocked, but by having that information open for all to see. As it is now, the software cannot be trusted.
I would like there to be worthwhile filtering software available - not because I want to use it, but because I want others to use it instead of trying to force the government to censor the Internet. Here in Australia censorship is a serious problem because we don't have the same protection of freedom of speech as the US Constitution provides. (Only political speech is protected here.) Decent filtering software would eliminate the need for government censorship. But today's filtering software just isn't good enough, because it isn't open, which makes it susceptible to abuse.
Apply some effort to achieving a solution rather than whining to the gov or someone else about the problem.
That's funny, I didn't mention the government once in the comment you replied to. Where did you get that from? It's because of the worthlessness of filtering software that censorship by the government is a threat.
Even if you don't know that they do it, you should have enough mental capacity to figure out that they might just be motivated to do such a thing so you should uh...let's see, check the logs for records of blocked content, whoa, that's hard to do, time consuming. How about turning off the filter occasionally just to get a whiff of reality every now and then?
I shouldn't have to check the logs of blocked content. I should be able to see exactly what they're blocking and why.
But you are free to use the products or not! If you don't want to be censored, by all means, don't use a product that filters!
You're missing the point. If I say something unflattering about their products, noone who uses those products will see it. It's not about what I can see, because I don't use this software. The problem is they claim to be making the net "safe" for children, but what they don't tell you is that they also try to keep you away from information that might hurt their commercial interests.
Noone is forcing you to use such a product.
This is a separate issue; I live in a country where the minister for communications is talking about forcing ISPs to block "illegal or obscene" content which comes from overseas. So what you say may not be true for much longer, if the government gets its way.
Leave it to Katz to come out against personal empowerment and freedom of choice.
I sometimes wonder if JonKatz actually writes more than one version of each article, because people continually seem to see things in them that directly contradict what I'm reading.
This is from what I read:
I think that makes it perfectly clear that he is not "against personal empowerment".
What he does seem to be against is software that blocks things it shouldn't - software which actually takes away freedom from the individual.
Anything that individuals or private organizations choose to do for or to themselves is just that, freedom of choice.
The problem is that these products don't let you know what they block. So if you use them, you don't have freedom of choice at all - you place yourself in a situation where you must trust someone else to know what you want to block.
But, more importantly, you have no way of knowing whether they block material they shouldn't - because they block their critics! That surely is censorship, and I doubt it's what people who simply want to keep their children away from pornography thought they were choosing.
I can't believe it... how could you read Slashdot without CmdrTaco's posts? They're easily the majority of all the new articles I see every day.
So, how does this article explain that the people who win the speed-typing contests are always Dvorak typists?
It doesn't - which is OK, because that's totally irrelevant to the point of the story.
It is not claiming that QWERTY is better than Dvorak. It only says that QWERTY doesn't suck as much as economists seem to think it does.
>However, I do not want my GPL work to be a free lunch for whoever wants to proprietarize it.
I ask this again and again, and no one ever answers it: why should it bother you so much that someone might make money off of modifications to code you wrote, but it doesn't bother you that someone makes money using that code?
Despite the frequently mis-stated claim, your code is *not* being taken away -- it's still just as free as it ever was. It's the work done by someone else based on it that's not free.
Reciprocity. I believe that if they can benefit from using my code, I should benefit from theirs. Seems only fair.
Theos.com says that before theos software contacted him the theos.com web site was EMPTY. (his own capitalization).
Seems like asking for the domain was a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do.
But www.theos.com also says:
Increasingly, the hosts in that domain have become more of an integral part of the OPENBSD project infrastructure.
So maybe www.theos.com was unused, but other names are apparently being used. And Altavista has pages starting with http://www.theos.com/~deraadt/ dating back to last July anyway, so it wasn't totally unoccupied.
This was recently posted to aus.tv:
I run both Netscape4 and Explorer4 on a Sunbox here, and we have contests to see which uses the most memory. At the moment, Explorer wins. When asked to show an *EMPTY* *FUCKING* *PAGE*, Netscape used a paltry 24 megabytes of memory, compared to Explorers 30 megs.
The funny thing is, half-an-hour later (after coming back from lunch), Explorer was using 36 megabytes. That's right, folks. It took an extra 6 megabytes to sit around and do *NOTHING* for thirty minutes.
Am I the only person who actually finds Gnome 1.0 to be stable?
It works for me too.
I've been running it since day 1 and the worst thing I've experienced is the panel crashing and restarting itself. Even that hasn't happened more than once per day.
Hasn't happened to me since I first tried it out before putting it in my .xsession file.
I was even a pussy and installed from RPMs.
I grabbed the tarballs and used the spec files to make RPMs, because I haven't been able to get Gnome's RPMs to work on my somewhat upgraded RedHat 5.1 system.
My only problem is that I'm not using a compliant window manager, but I've grown too attached to my current setup to change...
Any acronym without a vowel should not be pronounced phonetically!
If it ain't pronounced phonetically, it ain't an acronym at all.
Only when computer products are allowed to compete on the basis of merit -- not judicial intervention -- will real advancements in information technology be made.
That argument would be worth something if a Microsoft operating system ever competed on merit.
Actually, some of us spend more time actually working on computers then dealing with this joke of a language. Why is english so common? Because it's a hybrid of nearly everything. Borrow a prefix here, a rule or two there.. grab some ancient greek suffexes. Repeat 30 or 40 times, and you get english. Whee.
Sounds like a Microsoft product really...
The biggest obstacle to Linux on the desktop is the vast waste of memory and other processor time of X.
While X certainly uses a fair amount of memory, ps indicates it's only used 1.5% of CPU time for me at the moment. I don't consider that "vast".
X offers very little functionality for a desktop system,
Please explain. What functionality does a desktop system need that can't be implemented as an application using X?
and the networking stuff is inefficient.
Another unsupported statement.
The solution: XFree should focus on making a smaller and more usable package, and leave the direct graphics stuff up to GGI.
Or: Implement only GGI/KGIcon drivers (which should be highly portable as well), and run X via Xggi.
You'll have to come up with a pretty damned good reason to explain exactly how adding an extra layer is going to reduce the "inefficiency" you criticise.
What's to stop someone from lifting an MP3 device that has MP3's on it tagged to someone's credit card number, and then blasting *these* all over the net?
Why would they encode credit card numbers in it?! It'd be more like how cookies are used on web sites; a seemingly random string that identifies the download.
While I agree with many of your points...
Menus in a consistent location.
This one is kind of irrelevant. What GUI has menus in inconsistent locations?!
It's really just a matter of familiarity, rather than one choice being better than others. The first GUI I used had no menus visible on the screen at all - everything was pop-up context menus. Consistent location, in this case, was at the pointer.