Fashionising.com > Fashion Forums > Current / World Affairs

Apparently our good friend Kev wants to censor the internet for all Aussies from our ISPs. This means no porn or "sensitive material". You can, ofcourse, "opt out", but no hardcore violence or child porn regardless. How ridiculous. It's supposed to protect children from porn or something, but isn't that what parents are there for? I'm not saying we all need porn and violent movies, but all grown up adults have the right to make that decision themselves. Ofcourse there are ways aroudn this, proxies etc, but the point is that there is plenty of software out there which will filter sites. If ISP's added the option to filter that would be ok, but it woudl be at the users discretion whether they wanted the filter or not. Mandatory censorship, in my opinion, is ridiculous. Not only is it going to reduce speed, but how long untill they remove the "opt out" option? There are a few countries in the world where this has been done- most of them are in the "backwards" middle east. What happened to freedom of information? oh thats right, we dont have a bill of rights in this country so sorry, that doesnt really exist.

Well done Australian public, you put a control freak in parliament, he does this in a month, imagine what he is gonna do in one term.

Whats everybody elses views?

Censoring the internet is just both silly an unfeasible, and even to try it would be an huge expense.

Big job ahead for them..
But if they can target the hardcore child porn ring stuff then thats a good thing i guess.
Anything else and its a freedom of choice, but it is up to the parents to come through with the responsibility.
I have always believed, when thay say that technology would advance beyond law.

No amount of filtering will ever block any information that people seek. More has to be done on educating parents and kids as well as empowering the parents.

u mentioned ways around it such a proxies
however at my school the governement banned some sites and even proxies dont work
i think that targetting the child pornograghy is a good idea
but porn in general - thats just silly

I think they need to find a good balance. Surprisingly I do believe in censorship if it targets only the extreme things which do serious harm to people; i.e. kiddie porn.

I don't agree with it when it's the blocking of YouTube and Facebook by some of the world's nuttier countries. Nor do I agree with it when it is effectively conservative censorship, which this clearly is as it's targeting porn and "sensitive material", but odds are that the majority of that material is legally accessible anyway.

I can agree with Rudd in wanting to prevent access to child porn, but not porn in general. And wouldn't a system of monitoring and punishing be a better solution then just blocking? As Wayne highlights, if people seek it they'll find it. Rudd's government (with a lack of understanding of the Internet) would block the obvious things such as websites that distribute porn, and those after such content will simply move to other distribution mediums such as Peer-2-Peer/Torrent searching. Once underground, it's going to be a hell of a lot harder to crack paedophile networks because we'll all be a lot more savvy and getting around government systems for even the most basic of content.

Post by kaz

u mentioned ways around it such a proxies
however at my school the governement banned some sites and even proxies dont work

There are still many ways around the Department of Education's filter.

Post by Daniel

[quote]Post by kaz

u mentioned ways around it such a proxies
however at my school the governement banned some sites and even proxies dont work

There are still many ways around the Department of Education's filter.[/quote]

Lol did you find them :P

i was wondering how they were going to get arround p2p and torrents as well...

Only way to do that is to unleash an EMP that wipes out everything electronic in Europe, USA and Asia...then bring back pen and paper, typewriters, etc.