Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Internet Filtering: Australia heads further towards totalitarianism

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Happy said:
(Wander if this thread will be gagged and closed by this Forum Censorship as boat thread was?)
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Off topic, but ASF does not condone racist discussions, its in the site rules. Also, this is not a public site, it has a owner who decides rules, so in theory there is no right to free speech on any Internet site, its all at the owners discretion.
 
prawn_86 said:
Off topic, but ASF does not condone racist discussions, its in the site rules. Also, this is not a public site, it has a owner who decides rules, so in theory there is no right to free speech on any Internet site, its all at the owners discretion.
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There you go, so if it is so good for Owner of the Forum it must be good for the Country too :)
 
prawn_86 said:
Indeed, as we have no actual right to free speech set out in a bill of rights or our constitution.
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(Caution: I may be speaking from the hole in my @ss)

The way I understand our system of law, we don't actually want one.

Freedoms are either positive or negative freedoms.

Under English law we have negative freedom; that is to say everything is permitted unless explicitly forbidden. In other words I can do triple back flips on my front lawn, because the law doesn't say I can't.

Under Napoleonic law they have positive freedoms; that is to say everything is forbidden unless explicitly allowed. For me do be able to do triple back flips on my front lawn, the law has to say that I'm allowed to.

A bill of rights is a positive freedom document. Personally speaking, they can shove a bill of rights up their khyber because I prefer negative freedoms. I don't want any gu'mint "allowing" me the right to free speech.

I want free speech because it is an intrinsic right.

Internet forums are a different matter and cannot be compared to society in general. A forum is private property, just like a pub. The publican can through a person out if he doesn't like what they say.

Fortunately, we have an administrator here at ASF that only places restrictions on speech that are likely to cause extreme offence, or breach one or another statute or the common law, and that's fair enough.
 
A couple of amusing (and one not a little concerning) sidelines.

Stephen Conroy had failed to register his own name as a domain. Finding it vacant, someone has registered stephenconroy.com.au and set it up as a parody of the man himself. Though the sites registration has been cancelled by the auDa (.au Domain name Administrators). The site has now been temporarily moved to stephen-conroy.com.au. The site owners were given only 3 hours to respond to the complaint about the site when the auDa dispute resolution process allows 20 days for a response. Leaned on by a few Labour heavies I imagine. Who needs a filter to censor the net?

Here is the temporary site: http://stephen-conroy.com/news.php
Here is their note about the takedown: http://stephen-conroy.com/page.php?4
Some information about the alleged contravention: http://www.stopinternetcensorship.org/57-auda-take-down-stephenconroy-com-au.html



On a somewhat lighter note a smh blog has posted a story taking the piss out of Conroy's filter:
Conroy plans speed humps for Australia's freeways

aturner | December 18, 2009

In an ambitious plan to protect Australia's children, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has announced plans to install speed humps every 100 metres on all Australian freeways.

After a 12 month trial of speed humps in several suburban back streets, Senator Conroy says he is confident that placing speed humps on every Australian freeway will reduce accidents by 100 percent with a "negligible" impact on traffic congestion and travel times.
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http://digihub.smh.com.au/node/1484
 
When someone makes rules about what is not acceptable speech on their property, they are not gagging your speech as they are not stopping you from speaking your mind elsewhere or setting up your own website. Much like a club with dress rules, they are not telling you what to wear, only what is not acceptable on their property, which is their right. In fact they are granting you freedom to enter and do what you like within certain limits.

When someone tries to impose their view over what people are allowed to say or view on their own property, then that is censorship. This difference is not always understood, but is important.

There is no reason why people who want filtering can't impose it on their own property at their own expense and let others choose what they will do with their property. Public access to the internet such as at libraries is already restricted; I was once unable to access the site delisted.com.au at a public library. This kind of overkill could easily obstruct the efficient flow of information if filtering was imposed on us all.

I dislike pornography, but I am much more offended by someone who makes it their business to violate someone else's negative property rights.
 
Australia's Government Internet Filter

Hi All,
I haven't read too much into this, but a friend of mine touched on the subject last night. Said that it's going to be like China's "great firewall", but worse.
what are your views on this?
Personally, if it blocks pr0n and other x-rated material, l have NO problem with that.
BUT, if it's going to be used as a political tool to block opposition/free speach, that's just not cricket.
Post your thoughts and lets have a chat about it peoples...
 
Re: Australia's Government Internet Filter

This has been talked about at length here:

https://www.aussiestockforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=12986

But the main problems are these:

Won't actually achieve what they said they wanted to.
Will cost a lot of money to implement.
Once we go down the slippery road of censorship whats stopping them censoring material that is anti-government.

Thats a very short reply but if you have a look through the other thread you can read plenty about it there.
 
Re: Australia heads further towards totalitarianism

marklar said:
Letsee...
  • Cost goes up (user has to pay for this somehow)
  • Latency goes up (gotta inspect traffic to see if it's naughty or nice)
  • Risk of false positives goes up (www.coleSEXpress.com.au is a good example)
  • The internet is more than WWW

There are a heap of ways of avoiding this 'mandatory filtering' including:
  • Encryption
  • Tunneling
  • Anonymous proxies
  • Changing protocols
  • Peer-to-Peer
and combinations of the above. Where there's a will, there's is a way.

It's just like the war on drugs, or the war on terror, or reds under the bed; might have sounded plausible at the time but history shows just how naieve we really were at the time.

m.
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Great post.
Costs (to taxpayers) up, freedoms down. It's censorship and intrusive state control, and should be resisted all the way down the line.

Can we have a poll on this thread please, as with the whale wars thread.
 
I haven't seen this specific address mentioned. It's the Facebook group for the March 6th Internet Filter Protests. (Sorry, I have less than 5 posts so I can't make them direct URLs).

w w w.facebook.com/event.php?eid=200213317223#

And their external site (which seems to have less info) if you don't have Facebook.
w w w.block-the-filter.org/home.html

And this is an online petition:
petitions.tigweb.org/oznetcensorship
 
There has been massive and very vocal opposition to this across all strata of Australians.

The organisation "Get Up" I know organised a substantial protest.

The Minister can be under no illusions as to how unpopular this proposed filter is. Some of the ISP's refused to participate in the trial, partly because they were against it, but also because of pressure from their customers.

It appears the Minister is unmoved, no doubt well convinced of the potential for hiding all manner of facts from us, especially those politically unfavourable to the government.

If it were really just the protection of children he had in mind, then why would the government not simply continue with making available to parents the sort of individual filter software that has been available for some time.
 
Especially when child protection groups are also saying it's pointless and a waste of money.

Children’s welfare groups Save the Children and the National Children’s & Youth Law Centre joined GetUp! in the campaign, issuing a joint statement (PDF):

We argue that the tens of millions of dollars that such a scheme will cost should instead be diverted to appropriate child protection authorities and police to prevent the abuse of children, and towards effective community-based education strategies that give children and parents the skills to protect themselves.
Further, PC-level filtering software should be promoted to and provided to parents that wish to protect their children from inappropriate internet content.
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URLs from my previous post URLed.

Facebook Group

And their external site (which seems to have less info) if you don't have Facebook.
Non-Facebook Link

And this is an online petition:
Petition
 
Yeah Ive been on the Facebook one for ages.

The filter is such a load of B.S which the govenment tries to sell it to the public by saying its best for the children or to stop kiddy pr0n.

NOONE WANTS IT.

These clowns we elected in need to listen to the people that put then in their jobs today.

marklar...peer to peer will not get past a filter. Thats one reason they WANT the filter. pressure from the tv and film industry...but a seed box would by pass a filter i believe. If it ever gets to that, I'd do more research on it...until then...screw AFACT!

Pointless waste of peoples money and absoltely totalitarianism!
 
There is little chance of getting Conroy and Labour to back off. I think the only way to defeat this is Greens and Opposition against it in the Senate. Since Greens are already against it that leaves the Opposition to be persuaded. I have written to Tony Abbot, Tony Smith (shadow broadband minister) and Barnaby Joyce (who petitioned against the ETS).

http://barnabyjoyce.com.au/ContactSenatorJoyce/tabid/100/Default.aspx
http://www.tonyabbott.com.au/Pages/contact.aspx
http://www.tonysmithmp.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=107&Itemid=68
 
The Rudd government believes in unrestricted access to media and information, for China

The internet must be free, a spokesman for Trade Minister Simon Crean says yesterday amid the Google censorship row:

AUSTRALIA has consistently urged China to protect freedom of expression and freedom of information and noted that free media is fundamental to the effective functioning of government. Free use of the internet is a key element of this. Australia has raised its concerns with China over restrictions on the internet, including through our bilateral human rights dialogue.
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Apparently Crean hasn't spoken to Conroy lately.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/freedom-with-a-few-fetters/story-e6frg6zo-1225821004625
 
Go Nuke said:
marklar...peer to peer will not get past a filter. Thats one reason they WANT the filter.
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Of course it will, at the moment the proposed filter is web traffic only, P2P is a completely different beast. Have a search for "Fast Flux" to see what techniques are being adopted by malware writers, it's really not that difficult to adapt these techniques to P2P applications... where there's a will, there's a way!

m.
 
marklar said:
Of course it will, at the moment the proposed filter is web traffic only, P2P is a completely different beast. Have a search for "Fast Flux" to see what techniques are being adopted by malware writers, it's really not that difficult to adapt these techniques to P2P applications... where there's a will, there's a way!

m.
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Isn't that rather beside the point? How many average Australians are going to even think about something along these lines, let alone know how to access it?

What most people do when they want to look for something is simply type it into Google.

They will simply not know what they don't know, to paraphrase Mr Rumsfeld, because the government will not be telling us what the sites are to which they are barring our access. To me, that's almost the worst aspect of this whole unreasonable legislation.

Has anyone heard if the Coalition have decided to back it yet?
 

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