Australian Censorship

"This is nothing other than a blatant attempt to buy votes based on mums and dads greatest fears. This policy is a fraud that will not work and I for one will not support it." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

"I add my voice to the many that understand that the Federal Government's proposals to filter the Internet are: a waste of time, a waste of money, a false promise to parents that will not stop kids being exposed to undesirable content online, a move towards censorship that a democratic and free nation like Australia should reject" - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

Media Release Dated: 15 December 2009 Portfolio: Information Technology Australian Democrats continue to oppose Labor’s clean feed The Australian Democrats today expressed their dismay at the Labor government’s intention to continue with its Internet censorship plans following the release of a technical feasibility report that has been one year in the making. read more

"The ABC's Adrian Raschella reports on the video game industry's calls for a major shake-up of Australia's classification system." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

The Australian Greens have today announced censorship champion Clive Hamilton as their candidate for the 2009 Higgins by-election. This is a surprising choice to me, because while the Australian Greens show competence only in environmental policy (and that with some caveats), it's astounding that their identified candidate for the Melbourne seat is someone with only rudimentary environmental credibility and who rather than being impoverished on sensible social policy, is outright hostile to Australian people and their rights. read more

"While EA and Valve have been quiet about exactly what content had been changed in the "modified version" of Left 4 Dead 2, Australia's Classification Board hasn't been as silent. The Board has provided GameSpot AU with a copy of today's Left 4 Dead 2 ruling, which states that the modified version of the game recently resubmitted "no longer contains depictions of decapitations, dismemberment, wound detail, or piles of bodies lying about the environment"." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

""The trial shows that filtering does work and that the gear stops identified IP addresses without major degradation to network speed," sources close to the trial said. "We can stop individual URLs, IP addresses, but we can't stop peer-to-peer nor virtual private network-type traffic."" - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

So it can filter a known list of ips/addresses easily. Duh everyone knew that. It's the content filtering that was going to slow everything down. And besides, the P2P and VPN traffic is where 99% of child-porn images are transmitted. So what the article should have said it "Filtering works when not trying to achieve anything" - Glenn Slaven

""It certainly does restrict choice to a small degree, but that is the price of keeping this material from children and vulnerable adults. In my view, the small sacrifice is worth it," Mr Atkinson said." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

What on earth does "vulnerable adults" mean. How do you construct legislation around *that*? - Glenn Slaven

"Mao Zedong was right: "Socialism is better than capitalism in every respect", and that applies to casinos as well. Casino capitalists, for example, have to convince punters to part with their money. Casino socialists can merely tax it away. Casino capitalists run the risk of backing the wrong horse. Not so casino socialists, who can simply hand the race to the preferred winner. How? The small print in the government's new telecommunications bill contains this delight, among others: the power to compel Telstra to hand its traffic over to the NBN (in technical terms, to acquire and pay forthe traffic service the NBN willprovide)." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

Better to waste voluntary donor's money than blow the taxpayers money on your useless filter! - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

"I suppose we can't expect the Greens to be concerned for children until whales start using the internet" - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

I couldn't disagree with Wallace more on this the censorship issue, but this is still an hilarious line - Glenn Slaven

The Round Table Forum The twelfth in the well-known Series of topical, high profile evening Forums in Parliament House Sydney on cutting edge issues. ‘Cyberhate? Censorship on the Internet’ Tuesday, Sept. 8th. 6.00-8.30pm The Jubilee Room - NSW Parliament House - Macquarie St. Sydney GUEST SPEAKERS Dr. John Kaye read more

Today’s Online Opinion features Abigail Bray, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Western Australia. Her article, available at http://onlineopinion.com.au/view..., unfortunately doesn’t seem to draw on what we’d assume is a depth of experience and qualification. Read Geordie's full response here: read more

"Queensland Police has said any Australians who simply view the clip could face a maximum of 10 years in jail but today it refused to comment on the apparent disparity between its and the Classification Board's definition of child-abuse material." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

What the? That's messed up. - ronin

Australia is a messed up country. This is as bad or worse than the silverware set with the deadly weapons warning message from the UK that showed up earlier... - Tad

"‘Recent public concern in relation to an episode of the Kyle and Jackie O Show, broadcast by 2Day FM, has highlighted broader issues about the treatment of participants and subjects involved in ‘stunt’ or ‘prank’ calls, competitions and challenges on commercial radio,’ said Chris Chapman, Chairman of the ACMA." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

"In Australia, websites which provide information into how to commit suicide or encourage people to kill themselves are banned but Dr Harris doesn't believe spending money policing this or through the government's proposed $19 0million internet filter was worth the money. "I don't think that is the solution. We need to develop useful sites. We need to give these people a reason to go to professional (counselling) sites, rather than eliminating bad ones," he said." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

"AN INTERNET filter installed by the NSW education department gave students access to pornographic material - but blocked educational sites." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

I love this quote: "My daughter typed in 'swallow', as in the bird, and it blocked access to a documentary on swallowing toothpaste but gave you access to a male site talking about inappropriate material". A 'male' site huh? Interesting description - Glenn Slaven

"Outside the meeting, Mr Sinn said: "In Australia we can vote, have freedom of belief and live without fear. In China, there is no law under the Chinese Communist Party. That is why we, the ratepayers, do not want to pay $8500 of our money to celebrate 60 years of Chinese communist dictatorship.''" - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

The Australian Democrats have announced Sydney technologist Geordie Guy as their new National Technology Policy Coordinator. read more

Last Friday I was on Seven's Sunrise program in the morning (video available here). I was invited on the show to talk about a very bad idea that has been unsuccessfuly tried in some other countries that may be successful here; a "three strikes" policy for people who download Internet content that they haven't paid for. Simply put, the idea is that on your household's third warning for downloading movies or music that you don't hold the copyright for, your Internet account is terminated. read more

Last Friday I was on Seven's Sunrise program in the morning. I was invited on the show to talk about a very bad idea that has been unsuccessfuly tried in some other countries that may be successful here; a "three strikes" policy for people who download Internet content that they haven't paid for. Simply put, the idea is that on your household's third warning for downloading movies or music that you don't hold the copyright for, your Internet account is terminated. read more

"A government report on media use by young people ... has found 76% - 92% of parents surveyed find it easy to manage their child’s use of the Internet - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

"Senator Conroy says awarding him the title of Internet Villain of the Year is misguided and that the people have been mislead into what the Government is doing in terms of filtering the Internet. However, in doing so the Minister for Communications has shown he is either deliberately misleading the public about the type of content that will be banned or he has no understanding of classification systems in Australia." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

"The Australian Government is considering the implementation of a three strikes piracy law as part of a policy that aims to “develop sustainable online content models.” - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet

"So far, however, the blacklisting scheme only applies to web sites. This means that online games such as World of Warcraft or Second Life would continue to work - only web sites making them available would be banned. Due to the limitations of filtering technology, you will be able to circumvent the filters and get to those, too. EFA will show you how - as long as the Government does not criminalize such circumvention." - Glenn Slaven from Bookmarklet