As an Aussie, I am disgusted that this is seen as a viable solution for an advanced democracy. It riles me on all sorts of censorship levels, even before it pisses me off as a taxpayer that a system so readily circumvented will be the subject of public spending.
I honestly thought the 'trial' was going to be used to demonstrate what a pathetic and short-minded idea this was, so that it could be quietly swept under the carpet. Instead, I can only assume the trial was always intended to arrive at a foregone conclusion.
Extreme conservatives - who won't ever support the current Labor government - must be delighted. And there will be a whole swathe of middle-class, swing-voting families relieved that their children will be protected, until they discover their 12 year old surfing the net around the filter just to see what sites like donkeyporn.com and ruddisacommunist.org (sites I probably made up) are all about. At that point they'll be wondering why the government couldn't spend $125.8 million over four years on reducing the massive deficit or stimulating jobs.
Edit: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away - the government has also communicated today that they plan to open discussion for an R Rating on video games - http://www.news.com.au/technology/australians-get-their-say-...
I doubt it's a timing coincidence.
Aside from the censorship issues (I know which end of that spectrum Senator Conroy sits and I can't imagine him moving), I cannot believe they are going ahead with a plan that they have been told repeatedly will fail.
From the tv debate held here a while back, it all seems to be based on the ridiculous agrument that we have to try something...anything...for the children's sake.
No, you really don't have to try things we know will fail. That's just pure idiocy.
I think this is a pretty good indication of where Australia is at - welcome to the nanny-nation. What really grates me about this is the supporters always seem to fall back on saying it protects children. I find this absurd - it amounts to "can't see the problem therefore it doesn't exist".
What really grates me about this is the supporters always seem to fall back on saying it protects children.
That always amuses me too; because it doesn't protect them at all (do Children really browse CP sites? no, they get caught in MSN or other chat rooms.... are they going to block all them ;))
It might limit the CP being viewed; but I highly doubt that will have an appreciable impact in the # of children abused.
I registered this one-off account to respond to this point: yes, they do. Or rather, I did, so there exists at least one :)
When I was 11, even 18-year-olds tended to look ridiculously alien, anatomically, and were not something I would really consider myself aroused by. Instead, I tried to find porn of girls closer to my age, preferably ones I could fantasize were classmates or somesuch. I was much too introverted to strike up a conversation in a chat room; I just browsed websites until some random server somewhere transmitted the bits I wanted to see.
Totally agree that it won't impact abuse, though—the Australians seem to have never heard of Tor.
Thanks for the reply: your something of a statistical anomaly though (no offence intended). This, then, would have "protected" you, however the vast majority of kids looking at porn would be unaffected.
Imagine how many child abusing monsters could be brought before the law for that kind of money, instead of just using it to close our eyes and pretending that nothing is happening!
How is this different from China's rationalization of their filtering? Is there any objective difference?
the Government will not determine what is blacklisted on the internet in Australia, rather an independent body will determine what sites are rated as RC for refused classification.
This will turn into a convenient way to let lobbyists ("Block the hate speech!" "Block the anticompetitive corporations" and ultimately "Block those who would weaken our country") hide behind a separate entity, giving the politicians a screen to hide behind while continuing to support the overall concept.
will require all ISPs to block material which has been refused classification in other countries
Umm... who is in charge of classifying the content on the Internet? I know of no one doing so (let alone someone who can be trusted by all interested parties). I think this statement is 100% BS.
When they tested the filters they reported "less than 3.4%" of innocuous URLs were mistakenly blocked. They say this is too high (no kidding!), but that "blocking rates of below 2 percent would be considered low" and thus acceptable.
They also considered performance degradation of 0-10% to be "negligible", and 10-20% to be "minimal". The performance results looked incredibly noisy to me, but they don't report variance or any kind of statistical significance, so I don't think their results mean much.
It seems that nowadays you can get pretty much anything through by playing the "think of the children" card even if it won't do anything to protect them.
I'm not adverse to interventions that will keep children safer (although I think their vulnerability is overplayed) but it'd be nice to see useless proposals get shot down at least once in a while.
It's so ironic to move to Australia from Russia ... the former Soviet Union ... just to find myself eventually back to roughly about the same level of government regulation. Hopefully not worse than that.
Should I now set my goal to leave Australia for a better place ... but what could it be though? Any ideas?
Exaggerating much? An ineffective porn filter is a long way from the 'regulation' of the population as practiced by the KGB. You'll notice for example that you can openly call K-Rudd a bloody idiot on national television for trying to implement this, and nothing will happen to you.
An ineffective porn filter is a long way from the 'regulation' of the population as practiced by the KGB
Yes and no ... just as the filter is ineffective for someone who knows a bit about how stuff works, there always was the 'black market' in the SU where one could find books, movies, music etc. that were not supposed to be available to Soviet people.
Ineffective as it is, it may be just the first step towards a certain direction ...
you can openly call K-Rudd a bloody idiot on national television for trying to implement this, and nothing will happen to you
Reminds me of a popular joke from Soviet times:
American: In the USA you can go to the central square of your town, and shout out "Reagan is a bloody idiot" and nothing will happen to you! Soviet replied: Big deal! In the Soviet Union you, too, can go to the central square of your town, and shout out "Reagan is a bloody idiot" and nothing will happen to you.
So, basically, everyone is calling K-Rudd a bloody idiot about the filter, but still it gets implemented.
I will admit that a large part of my satisfaction comes from the fact that I no longer have to be involved. I am not on the electoral roll in Australia (where voting is mandatory) and I can't vote in Canada... I guess I'm taking a 'hands-off' approach...
This makes me quite happy to be moving to Estonia in February.
It's not just this, it's a pattern of behavior in general by the Australian government. It's not even a single action, I don't play games that often anymore and the lack of an R18+ classification has almost no effect on me, there are many data points in Australian political actions though which reflect a deeply troubling underlying truth, the government perceives it's citizens as children.
My reasons for leaving are many, but the two big ones; primarily the above, but secondarily that I can't help thinking in a large amount of cases with regards to aforementioned citizens, the government is not entirely wrong.
6) Quality of technological innovation in Australia in general.
7) General contempt for civil rights displayed by political parties in Australia.
8) Apathy disguised as being laid back.
9) Hot weather.
10) Sun.
I like;
1) Low cost of living.
2) Very low marginal tax rate.
3) High quality of internet access, almost ubiquitous wifi access.
4) One of the highest populations of atheist people in Europe.
5) Largest political party majority ideology is classical liberalism.
6) One of the most advanced technological infrastructure programs in Europe.
7) Straightforward no bullshit populace.
8) Very cold weather.
9) Very little sun.
All of that said, you can never really know until you've actually tried it a while, so start February I'm moving to Tallinn for a three month trial, in the event that it wasn't for me was planning on coming back to Sydney but in light of these new developments and a continuing frustration / annoyance with associated events, I think if Tallinn doesn't work out I'll just pick some place else, I have a pretty big laundry list to go through. :)
From what I've heard from a friend who has already moved over there, English is fine for Tallinn (the capital). That said, if I do end up making the move permanent, I'd want to learn the language fluently regardless.
Actually I'd prefer to assist a local consultancy, I've been looking at Aqris as they were listed on the grails development firms list and seem like a good place to work, but in the event that I'm unable to find some place to work over there already I can happily live off remote contracted consulting work from existing clients after I leave my full-time position end of January 2010.
Might even give me some time to actually build something of my own if I can outsource the sales / marketing aspects I'm not so hot at.
I sure hope one day we will look back on the early age of the internet and even if the debate over illegal content, piracy and privacy and so on is still on going, we will at least have settled on one solid fact. Internet filtering doesn't work and people that want to access illegal content will get it anyways.
I think that from the point of view of global digital society, if this thing fails spectacularly and publicly, it could be money well spent - if it deters other nations from pouring their taxpayers money down this particular drain.
Can anyone think of a way to make it fail loudly, rather than quietly?
A problem with this idea is that the easiest ways to get around filters (secure tunnels) would generally result in the connection appearing to come from outside of the country.
maybe todays filters don't work, but you never know what tomorrows filters will look like. For instance it might be possible to build an intelligent filter that blocks based on content not address. Maybe it has image recognition etc.
I don't think Strong AI is hardly required for sophisticated filtering based on content. Face recognition is already pretty good, it's not a stretch to go to boob recognition and so forth. As clistctrl mentioned the obstacle is computing power, and connection speeds.
Not really, I don't think its a stretch to say you could use todays technology to make an approximation such as age/clothed status the real problem with that kind of filter is processing power. The point is you don't know what the future will bring, we have some good ideas but there's always some uncertainty.
To who though? The crew who were pushing it previously? Remember Alston? Both parties have spoken out against it when in opposition but pushed it while in power? And no one would believe for a second that Abbott wouldn't want this or worse.
Family First love it. Xenophon has only gradually shrunk away. I think only the Greens have consistently opposed it. Very frustrating situation.
Australian Sex Party first, Democrats second, Greens third.
The Greens lost a whole lot of credibility after they ran Clive Hamilton in the Higgins bielection. Clive Hamilton, for those who don't know, is a strident supporter of the content filter and has penned such dreadful op-ed pieces as:
Fair points from both of you, and I wouldn't be unhappy about voting for these mentioned, but you have to worry when your best bet is the Sex Party, your second option is almost dead, and the third hosts a strong supporter of the filter.
I was really disappointed to see the ALP pushing this.
"Successful technology isn't necessarily successful policy. We're still yet to hear a sensible explanation of what this policy is for, who it will help and why it is worth spending so much taxpayer money on."[1]
-- Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the EFA
The thing is we shouldn't be having to work around the filters, and we shouldn't have to put up with degraded performance just because some non-technical people think that it'll protect their kids from the Scary Internet.
Also we shouldn't be wasting tax dollars on a boondoggle that achieves nothing.
Finally, it's a bit embarrassing to be a citizen of an educated first world nation that is actually implementing something so ill advised.
As an Aussie, I am disgusted that this is seen as a viable solution for an advanced democracy. It riles me on all sorts of censorship levels, even before it pisses me off as a taxpayer that a system so readily circumvented will be the subject of public spending.
I honestly thought the 'trial' was going to be used to demonstrate what a pathetic and short-minded idea this was, so that it could be quietly swept under the carpet. Instead, I can only assume the trial was always intended to arrive at a foregone conclusion.
Extreme conservatives - who won't ever support the current Labor government - must be delighted. And there will be a whole swathe of middle-class, swing-voting families relieved that their children will be protected, until they discover their 12 year old surfing the net around the filter just to see what sites like donkeyporn.com and ruddisacommunist.org (sites I probably made up) are all about. At that point they'll be wondering why the government couldn't spend $125.8 million over four years on reducing the massive deficit or stimulating jobs.
Edit: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away - the government has also communicated today that they plan to open discussion for an R Rating on video games - http://www.news.com.au/technology/australians-get-their-say-... I doubt it's a timing coincidence.