Oz watchdogs howl over 'Cyber-Safety' net filter Aussie civil liberties watchdogs are warning the country's "Cyber-Safety" internet filter plan won't actually let adults choose to opt-out from web censorship. The Australian Labor party's $125.8m proposal is being pitched as a means to prevent children from accessing online pornography. The scheme includes a choice to opt-out …
...government overlords will invariably toss the baby out with the bathwater and approximately 75% of the time it's to save the chirruns. I can't think of the last time I willingly visited a sexually explicit website, but I'm somehow reassured that I can if I so choose, which, after all, is the whole point of freedom. Inevitably, the algorithm the Aussies use to create their "naughty list" will erroneously bin a few legitimate sites and the expected round of lawsuits and legal challenges will ensue. One also has to wonder how long it will be before the Aussie overlords are knee-deep in negotiations with Google to suppress any searches that might bring up objectionable material.
To paraphrase Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" character - "No internet for you!"
Interesting that Australia is worried about censorship of "illegal" material - the UK and US already censor certain sites.
I remember receiving a FBI block page when attempting to surf to a site hosted in Oman (looking for travel info) and, of course, the Internet Watch Foundation already provides a censorship list for UK ISPs for child abuse websites hosted outside the UK.
It is probably time to decide what type of censorship is acceptable to the population and where the lines should be drawn.
WAR IS PEACE!
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY!
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!
YOU ARE ENJOYING BIG BROTHER!
If only Hitler, Stalin and Thatcher had lived to see this bright dawn!
'Ban, 'Ban, Ta-, Ta- Taliban,
Has a new master, get a new man!
(Paris cos she enjoys big ones too)
If you set up such a system, you would have to do a few things...
Never go to Australia or anywhere they have an extradition treaty with.
Don't get kidnapped by Oz security services and rendered there.
Do not use your own satelites. Too easy to shoot down.
Figure out some sort of payment scheme they can't block - like the US blocks non Mafia gambling sites.
Imagine this. You type in www.hotbot.com. oops, look what's right next to the "t" on the keyboard. Why, it's a "y". Which means you really went to www.hotboy.com. I know that hotbot is Lycos, but I'm not even going to try for hotboy.
But I suspect the Aussie nannies are now convinced you're some sort of pedophile.
el Reg, you still don't have "the finger".
Censorship of the internet to protect the children is THE PARENT'S JOB!
As an Aussie I am appalled that our gubbermint would even contemplate such an absurd idea! What's really worrying is just who is going to decide what belongs on these lists? There is some pr0n out there that I would happily watch/view but am unlikely to personally indulge in... then there are the things I would do/have done that most 'puritans' would be absolutely gobsmacked by! None of it illegal (yet) only ever with consent of all involved, and only involving adults.
I believe that as a law abiding, tax paying, other wise upstanding citizen I have the right to unfettered access to whatever type of pr0n I so choose - providing that it a) doesn't delve into the obvious no go area ie: kids and b) that by accessing it for myself I am not exposing any body else to it be they minors or other adults who may not like it...
next thing there will be the great firewall of UK...
people of the so called free world need to start shouting, and shouting loud to keep the internet free of censorship.
The internet should be, as it was designed to be, open for all...
I remember years ago, when there was the whispers that there was a book on the internet on how to make bombs. if you did a little digging you found it was called the terrorists cook book. I and plenty of others at the time all downloaded it.... there was nothing in it that was not available in A'level chemistry books. But today, that same book, (long since deleted), will get you put in jail. will the chemistry book? no... well not yet, but its days are numbered.
The internet is knowledge, and the day you limit access to knowledge you may as well close the libraries, the schools and universities...
mines the one with the pockets full of banned literature...
Speed, what bloody internet speed.
Australia continues to suffer under the Telstra/Optus duopoly, ensuring that its citizens only get pathetically low data speeds and allowances @ an exorbitant price.
As for this B#llSh#t filter thingy. The only thing that does is prove, yet again, how useless and incompetent politicians and beauracrats are.
We get fucked over so much censorship here. It's shit. No doubt about it.
Even if there was an true opt-out, we'd get placed on the "watched like a hawk" list.
It's not the censorship I'm really worried about (Proxy anyone?), it's the fact that pretty soon, *everyone* will be watched alot more intently.
Although this is nothing new, we already have some ISP level censorship. The Liberals saw to that last term. Unfortunately Labour is just continuting Liberal schemes. So much for change.
Well, better fire up that connection to my VPN host in Brazil...
Now, more than ever, we need a constitutionally-enshrined Bill of Rights, including the right to freedom of communication in all forms.
It's a very sad day indeed when a Government so brazenly disregards the rights of its citizens to serve a minority and, very probably, follow an ideology. There is, and never was, any mandate for full-time censorship. The lobby group claiming that "internet porn is destroying our kids" represents a minority opinion, but is very vocal and has the ears of both sides of politics in this country. Not that that is the reason, but it is trotted out as an excuse every time someone objects to censorship. Rather surreally, we've just been through a "nudity in art is porn" brouhaha here, and you wouldn't believe the bloody-mindedness of the anti-porn proponents.
Filtering MUST be opt-in for private subscribers. I have no problem with ISP-provided filtering, so long as it's opt-in. Personally, I would choose a home-gateway filtering solution, which affords me the opportunity to turn it off for my own use.
if I want to visit the Scunthorpe council site, or experts exchange. So long rotten.com. Soon we wont even be able to visit kevinruddisauselessmandarinspeakingtwatwithabsolutelynorealworldexperience.com.au, or the sister site kevinruddthinksheisfrickingtintinandgillardishistrustydogsnowy.com.au. Time for Western Australia to think about becoming an independent nation.
The government is implementing this highly undemocratic censorship policy in order to get the vote in the senate of 1 senator from a religously affiliated party, family first, who holds the balance of power in the senate.
send the senator organising it a message, http://nocleanfeed.com/takeaction.html
I agree with those planning a tunnel out of OZ, perhaps to a ssh box in sweden. arr.
did I read that correctly?? Unsuitable...for adults?
I thought adults were supposed to make that decision for themselves?
Ooh, here's another idea, tell the parents it's their responsibility to teach their kids or restrict their internet access accordingly. Problem solved. (well not really, but come on! If a 7 year old kid sees some porn then frankly that is not my problem, and the kid will have much bigger problems caused by their lack of parenting than a couple of porn sites).
I do not want my internet restricted to prevent ANYONE getting access to anything. What's the point?! That's what the internet is for...everything is available and we get to pick and choose. Unlike TV where we are force-fed what they want us to hear, when they want us to hear it, HOW they want us to hear it.
Okay so I live in the UK but i'm still taking this personally.. If anything because it's only a matter of time before it spreads here...
The kids filter, fine, as long as the parents dictate that the feed will be switched to that filter.
Adults filter, that's not good. Just because you made a filter, didn't mean you made it for everyone. That's no excuse. The adult gave you permission to filter their kids feed, they did not give you permission to filter their own feed. Presumably if you missed a site and someone went to it, they would still be legally liable. Adults take responsibility for their actions, kids don't the two are different.
The problem with these block lists is they are never restricted to illegal content, they are restricted to somebodies *opinion* of what is illegal content. Usually some nutjobs opinion at that. What does nutjobs opinion count more than yours? Whose internet connection is it? Who takes the consequences of their actions? Certainly not nutjob.
Logging: the world is full of people who want power, wanting power is wanting control. What Jacqui is doing in the UK, building a MASS SURVEILLANCE system under the guise of 'anti-terrorism' is a natural consequence of the grasp for control.
If you're filtering, the filter logs data, and suddenly you find you're logging too. If you have the logs and they need searched, suddenly you're data mining and randomly searching peoples private data.
Everyone is totally well meaning, they just can't see the bigger picture.
When the police put up a CCTV it's for the greater good, then they add ANPR for the good, then someone links those ANPRs into a database, for the good, and the barriers to accessing this database are dropped, for the good. Everyone's little step is for the good, it's just the big picture is bad, very very bad.
Romania? Poland?
Governments shouldn't be allowed to build repressive infrastructure regardless of how they say they'll use it. It just plain unsafe!
Yes we're building gulags, but don't worry, its just fer furrin terrists and paedophiles. Maybe the odd Icelandic defaulter too.
I thought the point of being a child is that porn has no attraction. Is this all about parents avoiding some embarrassing questions? Oh no, I forgot, its another "be very afraid, but we'll save you!" message from the politicians. *yawn* Somebody vote them all out.
Arrrr, yer government be takin' over ye parenting job. Yer lazy bones can walk da plank.
Before we know it our freedoms will be masked with the governments "good intentions".
I'd hate to say this is one of the worst schemes ever come up by our so called democratic government. They will try to implement this new content filtering system and discover that it is a lot harder than they'd imagine and will have budget blowouts typical of any project undertaken by the goverment.
The government will push on claiming it is in the best interests of our country where they'll subvertly start talking about filtering terrorist content and anything which may be considered dangerous to us as a country.
Then citizens of our great country will start complaining that normal websites are being content blocked and there is no way to get it unblocked. After much time and lobbying, the goverment will be forced to put in a system dedicated to solely looking after the complaints and there will be another cost to the system which will be taxpayer funded.
Then after many years of futile attempts to protect us from ourselves they discover not only did it not stop all the pornography from coming through but there was a free service out on the net which does a reasonable job of what they set out to achieve in the first place.
OpenDNS.com will be considered the defacto standard in content filtering and will be recommended by the government for householders and ISPs where parents are concerned about what their children look at on the net.
So then it will all come back to this. Parents should be the one responsible for looking after their children and if they have such concerns they should take the appropriate measures to make sure that their children are not able to search for porn.
And it was made very clear in the last election that Rudd would push this through. Yes, Australia has done exactly what the UK did: you had a tyrannical government under the Liberals with Blair, you voted him out to be replaced with an even more tyrannical government under Labour with Brown. We had a tyrannical government under the Liberals with Howard, we voted him out to be replaced with an even more tyrannical government under Labor (yes that's how the Australian party is spelt) with Rudd.
So those of us with any technical knowledge have taken a leaf out of China's book and already have measures in place to bypass this. Alternate DNS routing, anonymising proxies, tunnels and darknets are already in place. More information on how to join these systems will be published on geek forums around the world (except in Australia, where our sedition laws will prevent the publication of such information). Don't look for it on Whirlpool for that reason; but keep an eye on Slashdot and Digg. The methods for bypassing any censorship blocks the nannies put in place will be widely publicised once the censorship is in place and has taken its final form.
Peoples' respect for the law is only as good as the law's respect for the people. That respect is gone, to be replaced by open, deliberate defiance. Let the resistance begin!
Not only are there ridiculous data plans in Australia, which make "normal" internet usage bloody expensive, now they even want to decide what the few with enough cash to actually *afford* to watch hi-def pr0n online are getting to see - other "critical" content up next, shirley..
Here in Germany they come up every once in a while with the notion to censor "bomb-building instructions". What a stupid idea! - Why not just go and censor chemistry und physics lessons and you get there!
Bloody friggin stupid.. - Whatever happened to pre-9-11 Australia, land of the free?
Sad news: Osama's won, at least in some parts of the former "free world"...
No our dear tony was labour, and we didnt vote brown in, he promised us an election but he has yet to deliver it, i expect it will be in 2 years or when ever the laws say he has to give one, assuming these dont need to be changed. 42 years PM ship without an election, bound to stop terrorism that one....
Yes, exactly, where in the Free World?
It's no joke.
If you view these proposals in isolation then each can be defeated. If you have noticed the global nature of what is happening you will see that there will be no free world. True that each country would implement filtering in their own unique way, but the policy of tackling porn and extremizm and piracy etc seems to be universal.
Yes making China the bad boy of filtering keeps our minds off of the real issue.
The Internet seemed to come togther without regard to the usual contraints of a communication system. First it connects any point with any point at no cost to the user unlike a telephone call. Second you can send anything you can get into a computer. Third, anone is allowed to do it, HTML is easy enough for anyone to put something online (some need a little help).
This was so different from what normally happens, you can't run your own Newspaper, TV, Radio or Telephone service. The Internet says you can.
If they take the Internet away from us we will simply rebuild it the way we want it. Probably via tunneling and wireless networks and our own DNS servers. If we build it, then people will come since it will contain all the things that people go online for whilst the filtered Internet will lack those things.
The net is dead, long live the net.
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