Politiks: Get involved and save Australia's internet

[Pirate]

The Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force ISPs to filter out all material "inappropriate" for children from Australian homes. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access. Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home. Don't let him!

All Aussie geeks, please go to http://nocleanfeed.com/ and join in the fight to stop this stupid fucking internet filter that our cunt government is forcing upon us. It is important that we all get involved as the numbers will win the fight. Don't let Australia fall under the internet dictatorship that you see in countries like China.

Do something!

[astro]

Thanks for voting labor, everyone. Now look what you've done!

[Furball]

It was in the works already from the loliberals dumbass.

[astro]

And if the liberals had got in I would have bitched people out for voting for those bastards too.

[Sikosis]

So how bout we agree that governments in general suck big hairy balls.

[astro]

Agreed. Seeing as we're stuck with them, I'm going to call this dude tomorrow.

Also, is it just me, or is there a bit of "Come here, little boy. I have candy" in this pic?

[King_Crud]

is there a freedom of speech thing in australian law? If so why isn't someone mounting a legal challenge?

[astro]

Originally Posted by King_Crud is there a freedom of speech thing in australian law? If so why isn't someone mounting a legal challenge?

As far as I know, there's nothing like the American constitutional right to free speech.

Any of our rights to free speech have been set by court rulings in the past. If a particular judge felt that someone deserved the right to free speech, that would be something that following lawyers would use as precedent. So if someone wanted to step up with a legal challenge they'd have to say "We have the right not to have this happen, as in the case of Mr. Smith versus Mr. Jones."

This might be slightly difficult as there haven't been too many rulings to do with digital censorship, etc.

Any legal types out there might be able to shed more light on it than I can. All I'm good for is ranting furiously.

[Scumbag]

Originally Posted by Pirate Don't let Australia fall under the internet dictatorship that you see in countries like China.

Im no supporter of the clean feed, but thats a bit far fetched. There's no danger of that happening. With the plan underway we fall under OpenNet Initiative's (ONI) category of "Nominal" - together with 21 other countries including the US & UK - and wont be listed on Reporters without Borders list of "internet enemies".

China is in ONI's pervasive category and is on RSF's internet enemy list.

Sources:

http://opennet.net/

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=19603

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship

[astro]

scary

[Naiad]

Has anyone found a way around the filter yet? I mean I know they haven't actually implemented it yet, but hey these things are usually released before the big day.

[WinterMuteAu]

YEah, they dudes working on it will have a backdoor for their own use, you can bet and it'll eventually leak out to us pleebs

[Shampyon]

We connect to the internet through our ISP... and the filters are supposed to be on every ISP in the nation... how do you get around that?

The thing that pisses me off the most (besides the fact that opt-in is the proper choice, not opt-out) is the fact that this allows government agencies to enforce our archaic obscenity laws on the world wide web. We've already had so many great books and movies and video games banned or heavily censored. Now it's gonna be websites too.

[sperm]

VPN, webproxy, dial-up via sat phone, etc ...

I remember one multi-national company I worked for that was globally connected and our portal to the internet popped up in america somewhere; the upshot of which was that it was quicker to download stuff from mirrors there rather than australian ones.

Aussie internet is slow enuff already, you think we'd notice it much more if they gotta scan everything as it comes down anyways ?

[WinterMuteAu]

http://www.efa.org.au/2008/07/31/efa...ial-a-failure/ :

Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today labelled a recent government trial of ISP-based Internet filtering a failure. The recently released ACMA report entitled “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering” showed that of the six unnamed ISP-based filters evaluated: One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was *not* performing filtering; Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%; The most accurate filters were often the slowest; All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested. Despite this report highlighting the inaccuracy of these filters and the loss of performance caused by their use, Senator Conroy announced the government will press ahead with a real-world pilot program in furtherance of Labor’s pre-election commitment to force all Australian ISP’s to filter their customers’ Internet access.