Posted on 12/30/2007 1:17:40 PM PST by generalhammond
EVERY Australian with an internet connection could soon have their web content automatically censored.
The restrictions are planned by the Federal Government to give greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites.
Under the plan, all internet service providers will have to provide a "clean" feed to households and schools, free of pornography and other "inappropriate" material.
Australians who want uncensored access to the web will have to contact their internet service provider and "opt out" of the service.
Online civil libertarians yesterday warned the freedom of the internet was at stake, while internet providers were concerned the new measures could slow the internet in Australia to a crawl.
They said it was a measure usually associated with oppressive regimes and was no alternative to proper parental monitoring.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
To be fair, the reason the Labor government can do this so quickly is because all the planning for it was done by the previous conservative Liberal government.
All it actually does is require ISPs to make available a censored feed for those who want it. If you want an uncensored feed, you can have it.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manue
The Aussies already surrendered their right to own guns. The only one who actually FOUGHT it there was Crocodile Dundee - the REAL one...and they killed him, a la Waco. So, why should they complain about losing THESE rights?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manue
I think that bureaucrats who censor web content are a bunch of [CENSORED]!
Over a million Australians own guns perfectly legally under Australian law. I’m one of them.
As for the ‘real Crocodile Dundee’, Rod Ansell, he was shot dead by police after he opened fire without warning on them at a road block, set up to arrest him for attempted murder.
He had, in the previous twenty four hours, fired shots into the homes of two different families (one of which had a ten year old daughter - he wounded a neighbour who came to help that family).
He crept up on the police road block, and from cover, opened fire on a young man who was asking the police for directions. He then continued firing, mortally wounding Police Sergeant Glen Huitson - the first Northern Territory police officer murdered on duty in nearly fifty years - before being shot dead by Police Constable James O’Brien who had stood his ground with a pistol as Ansell advanced on him with a 30.30 rifle.
Ansell was not killed a la Waco. He was a man who’d lost all sense of reason and had gone on a rampage.
Oil and maple syrup dressing?
I find it impossible to believe that the so called "rights" of pornography, sodomy and abortion are God given, thus afforded protection by government.......instead, they are in reality manufactured "rights", created by men who deem themselves smarter than God..............
These manufactured "rights" are the roadsigns to Utopian Socialism............or in other words............on the path of fall and decline.........
I see nobody’s asking for the days before the “do not call” list for our telephones.
The Internet community missed a huge opportunity to overcome that issue by assigning a range of IPv6 addresses for the pornographic sites. It would have been efficient for a router to filter out that range without affecting the overall speed of connections, and in my opinion, an IP range regulation would have survived the court challenges.
Some people who are ignorant of marketing and the architecture of the Internet have proposed a dot-xxx top-level domain as a filtering solution, but that would only increased the amount of pornographic material on the Internet, and any clever teenager could get around it by using the IP address instead of the host name. And unlike an IP-range solution, the dot-xxx solution probably would not survive a legal challenge.
Thanks for that input on Rod Ansel. I had not heard that side of the story!
Shouldn’t there be an easier way to provide ‘clean’ internet? The inappropriate sites have to be marked somehow in order to be left out of the ‘clean’ feed. Therefore, it shouldn’t be excessively difficult to just to offer some sort of software that blocks the inappropriate sites instead of creating an entire seperate ‘feed’ that doesn’t even include them. Some sort of browser add-on would seem to be the easiest choice - if the parents want filtered internet, they can just take five minutes to download a little bit of software and set up a few controls.
Of course they'll tell you you're getting a completely uncensored feed. It may be completely uncensored or it may be just a bit less censored.
Maybe you'll just notice certain websites that have not so politically correct opinions don't seem to load anymore.
As for me, if there's any censoring to do I can do it on my end.
The thing here is “opt out”, and “opt in”. If it’s an opt-in system, I have no problem with it. And the fact remains there’s an abundance of programs designed to protect kids on the internet.
And it’s not so much about porn, either. It’s the fact the government is SAYING WHAT WE CAN AND CAN’T WATCH. Now, here’s the clincher. Do you really trust nice ol’ Mr. Gubermint with your freedom of information?
As a user of the school-based internet here in Australia, (and if anyone here takes any TAFE courses, they’ll understand what I’m talking about), the measures enacted to “protect” children at school go FAR beyond useful. They’re draconian. Under the school guidelines, this site should be blocked (for some reason, it’s not, possibly because it doesn’t use a standard forum layout).
Under the school guidelines, half the HISTORICAL information I want to access is blocked.
This isn’t a question of morality - it’s not exactly hard to get porn, and there’s no way they can block every single site out there. It’s a question of how much you want the nanny-state to regulate your life.
Fine by me as long as YOU pay for the ISP's costs of constantly monitoring a virtually unmonitorable Internet to make sure that no objectionable material gets through to your children whom you don't have the time to monitor.
Also, this could work if the nanny-powers-that-be include wording in the legislation that will hold the ISP harmless if it slips up and misses a porn site posing as, say, a Harry Potter fan club. Fat chance. It will end up as an excuse to censor the whole thing just as surely as Iran and China do.
I think the whole idea is naive, foolish, unnecessary and ultimately dangerous, all of which certainly means that it will be proposed in the U.S. shortly.
Tools, Internet Options, Content, Content Advisor, Enable. The rest is up to you (provided you use IE).
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