Thread: Internet Censorship - again

Australia is a great country. However I fear we are loosing it. We allow governments to take away our rights and if you question them you're a bad person. Hmmm....

As to the "clean feed" it's going to be a complete mess.

time for an armed rebellion...... oh wait..... they took our guns off us.....

Not all of them.

I cannot believe that a country such as Australia would even consider such censorship, this is the sort of thing they do in communist countries like China, I already believe you have "gates" on your internet as it enters Australia, and from someone outside the country, your web sites are very slow.
What happened to the easy lifestyle and laid back attitude of Australia, it is being eroded by the do good and PC brigade.

The thing that annoys me is that even after they introduce this, the internet will still be (more or less) just as unsafe a place for my kids to spend time as it ever was. So what are they hoping to achieve by this? The thin end of the wedge so that they can in future control what we can see?

Originally Posted by Captain_Rightfoot

The thing that annoys me is that even after they introduce this, the internet will still be (more or less) just as unsafe a place for my kids to spend time as it ever was. So what are they hoping to achieve by this? The thin end of the wedge so that they can in future control what we can see?

While the avowed intention of the scheme is to prevent access for anyone to any material on the internet that is unsuitable for those under fifteen, it is quite clear that it will not do that - for a start it will be trivial to bypass (and even primary students having hones their skills bypassing school systems will have no trouble), but with over a trillion URLs increasing at a billion a day, no blacklist of a few thousand can have any significant effect - I know of one person who has listed 300,000 pages to lodge complaints about. At seven months per complaint.....

The government must know it won't do anything to "make the internet safe for kids", so you have to ask why they are pushing ahead with it in the face off this? They aren't stupid? Are they?

I can think of several reasons, all pretty grubby. As someone says - follow the money. Filterware vendors (same lot who sell filters to Iran for example) stand to make a fortune, and, for example, during the Insight programme, Conroy had one sitting next to him advising him. Media copyright owners are big contributors to the ALP - with a secret blacklist, they can get pirate sites added. Or perhaps they are simply under pressure from minority lobby groups, such as Australian Christian Lobby, a secretive organisation with no published membership or financial details (and which boasts of the PM doing the keynote address at their next conference - this seems to be a first for a democratic country; the head of government as keynote speaker for a lobby organisation). The only real use for the filter will be to hide from naive internet users those web pages embarrassing to or offensive to the government of the day. While this government denies it will be used for this (would you expect them to admit it?) the blacklist already contains political material such as anti-abortion propaganda. And can they really expect no future government would use it for this? History says that if the facility exists, it will be used, as it has in other countries, where blacklists introduced to block pornography are found when the lists leak (as seems to be inevitable) to contain political material.

If this scheme manages to get implemented, it will be because the vast majority of Australians are not interested, or perhaps do not really believe that an Australian government would really do something so undemocratic.

If it concerns you - write (or email or phone) to your local federal member saying so. Remember, in a few years this could be used to suppress discussion on subjects you might be really interested in - for example, restrictions on four wheel drives to help meet emissions targets.

John

Originally Posted by Crackerjack

... I already believe you have "gates" on your internet as it enters Australia, and from someone outside the country, your web sites are very slow.
...

I think you will find that the "gates being slow" as you suggest is more a function of too many users in Oz using up the bandwidth of the available links to the outside world. This seems to be the habit of Oz based ISP being happy to oversell their infrastructure but not so happy to build new infrastructure to handle the customers need for bandwidth. This is particularly relevant with the downloading and streaming of video and audio.

I was one of the very earliest customers on the Optus@Home cable broadband and the speed was fantastic, over the years I have noticed a market degradation of the cable speed as millions of users came onto the system without a appropriate and corresponding increase in infrastructure particularly international fibre-optic links.

Diana

Originally Posted by Lotz-A-Landies

I think you will find that the "gates being slow" as you suggest is more a function of too many users in Oz using up the bandwidth of the available links to the outside world. This seems to be the habit of Oz based ISP being happy to oversell their infrastructure but not so happy to build new infrastructure to handle the customers need for bandwidth. This is particularly relevant with the downloading and streaming of video and audio.

I was one of the very earliest customers on the Optus@Home cable broadband and the speed was fantastic, over the years I have noticed a market degradation of the cable speed as millions of users came onto the system without a appropriate and corresponding increase in infrastructure particularly international fibre-optic links.

Diana

That is a pretty accurate picture, although to be fair, laying additional cables is almost certainly beyond the resources of any except perhaps the largest ISPs, and even there it is unlikely that any except Telstra would have the capital resources to consider it - and they seem to regard other things as more important.