Google, Yahoo and Others Fight the Aussie Filter 166
TheFrunj writes "In the wake of an attack on Australian Government websites comes a statement from a joint group of companies banding together to oppose Senator Conroy's infamous Internet Filter. AtomicMPC has posted the statement up on their site: 'We, the Australian Library and Information Association, Google, Inspire Foundation and Yahoo! agree that Australia needs to take effective action to ensure that internet users, and particularly children, have a safe experience online.' Backed by the weight of the Inspire Foundation, Google and Yahoo, this is a good sign for the local and international community that will hopefully spark some positive reaction."
What about china? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about china? (Score:2, Insightful)
Australia = elected government.
China = military dictatorship.
As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about people actually started parenting their children? I'm sure as hell not going to let the kids go online alone until they are old enough to do so responsibly. Just like I don't let them watch TV programs and movies out of their age group. Or how I actually spend time with them and talk to them about stuff. (Even a three-year-old can have a proper conversation if you actually listen and support with asking questions.)
So when will people get off their collective asses and stop trying to find ways to escape responsibility and offload it to whatever solution happens to be popular at the time?
I man can dream, can't he?
(And no, I can't control what they do at their friends etc. etc. But there are risks with crossing the street too.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion. (Score:5, Insightful)
And even though you can't control or watch the kids at friends or the teenagers out on the town, the best way to have responsible kids is to respect them, not to be too harsh, take interest in them and talking to them about everything.
They will grow up respecting you and they will want to tell you things and they will (statistically, though I'm not gonna pull out any link, so trust me or not) avoid doing stuff that they wouldn't want to tell you.
Re:What about china? (Score:4, Insightful)
Australia = elected government.
China = military dictatorship.
That's probably about right. Since Australia prides itself as a democracy it is open to opposing opinion and the will of the people. There is always a problem when a democracy is hindered by extremist agendas, whether its is religious, political or of some other form. China has one party who pretty much do as they wish, and in going into the country companies know that it is the case and therefore have to accept the law of the land. It is up to the people of the nation who should decide the future of their own country, not foreign nationals or corporations - I realise this is not realistic in all cases.
Re:I interpret that as.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion. (Score:2, Insightful)
Umm, those are your babies. It's your job to raise them and yours alone. You are not a victim here so start parenting and stop sounding like one.
Re:But the problem is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me throw a piece of reality back at you -
You either chose to have four children or you're an idiot. I'm going to assume that you're not an idiot for the sake of this discussion and assume that it was your choice.
If you chose to bring four lives into this world without the ability to deal with it, that is, to be blunt, your own fucking problem. You are the irresponsible one, and I don't see why any of the rest of us need to be forced by our government to live with censorship laws to "protect the children" just because you're an irresponsible nitwit who wanted to have four kids. Frankly you should probably be apologizing to the rest of the world for having four kids when you by your own admission seem to only have the ability to properly raise two.
I've got one of my own and I know kids can be a handful. That's why we have one. Uno. One kid. One kid that we can focus on and make damn sure we can handle it. We did not rush out to have four kids. We might have a second one once we know whether we can handle one or not. But to think that you might arrogantly go out and have four kids without bothering to figure out if you're going to be able to handle it just stuns me. Unless you're an idiot. In which case I apologize for the rant.
Re:But the problem is (Score:5, Insightful)
Definition of safe while I was growing up was making sure none of the scrapes and cuts got infected.
Definition of safe now days is to not get any cuts or scrapes.
Make the Parents Responsible (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in Canada, we have a very simple system of keeping children safe in the real world. We make their parents legally responsible for watching their children.
Why can't we (Canada, Australia and everywhere else) make the parents legally responsible for watching their children online? This way the government wouldn't need to do internet censorship.
Re:As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion. (Score:5, Insightful)
raise your fucking kids. If you don't wanna raise 'em and be responsible for 'em then don't fucking have 'em.
Re:What about china? (Score:3, Insightful)
China = military dictatorship. Single-Party State
I fixed that for you... Whether you agree with the policies of the P.R.C. its political structure certainly doesn't fit the label of "military dictatorship", military government/junta or even "dictatorship". Ultimate control over the country rests neither with the military, nor with a single person (ie. dictator).
Re:As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Make the Parents Responsible (Score:2, Insightful)
Because many bad parents would rather have a scapegoat to blame all of their troubles on than hear that they should have been parenting while little Billy was searching for filthy porn online.
Seriously, it may not be easy to raise kids, but don't blame the medium whenever your kid uses it to find questionable material. I like that the article mentioned an education program, which would probably be more effective and less costly than a massive filter anyway. It's just too bad that the knee-jerk reaction is always to censor.
Here in Canada
Though this reminds me, aren't we supposed to be blaming Canada?
Yay /b/!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, the new Slashdot debating style.
The other poster said he had less time to spend with two of his children, focusing more time on the two with learning difficulties.
You heard that he spent no time on two of his children, and then used your failure to understand what was said to construct a fantasy world in which filibuste was responsible for serious injuries.
I love this style of debate. It's used by politicians, bad businesses and lawyers. It's only good for bolstering weak points and for polarising opinion - that is, it's everything we hate in politics. And now we see it in Slashdot, where it puts another nail into the coffin of the 'community.'
On top of all that, the accepted meme at Slashdot is that parents should watch their kids more frequently, and that people just don't take responsibility. Bad laws are attempted because of parental failure. When that's challenged, posters like filibuste are drowned in a deluge of invective from posters who just don't seem to like other points of view.
Lastly, most of the responses to filibuste's post have the assumption that the first two children had obvious learning difficulties. Even if it was the first two, I'm pretty sure such issues are impossible to spot for a while, and maybe, just maybe, they had some more kids because they love children and even if they did realise, thought they were fine to work through this. As indeed they seem to be based on the very short post - the kids who need more attention get it.
Shatteredstar, your post is not insightful. The mods got this very wrong. Moreover, you have no shred of understanding or compassion. You should think more before you post.
Re:What about china? (Score:3, Insightful)
So Australia can't filter but China can?
So the Saudis can treat women as inferiors or slaves, but the western world can't?
You're comparing a regressive action to the status-quo. Obviously neither situation is acceptable, but it's only natural that people will protest more strongly against a progressive nation slipping into tyranny than they will against a regressive nation maintaining policies which are hundreds or thousands of years old.
I'm not optimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
A number of factors are likely to keep Stephen Conroy in after the election this year.
In Australian election ballots for the senate we select one box above the line or number all the boxes below the line. To elaborate: below the line we number all of the possible candidates in order of preference (and we have to number all of them in order for that vote to be valid. Above the line we choose one political party who will be choosing the below the line preferences for those voters. Such preferences are selected based on the principles of the political party, on a reciprocal basis or for attempted political gain. This was how we ended up with Steve Fielding [wikipedia.org].
Due to the extreme number of senate candidates in Australian state and federal elections (last time I voted in the South Australian state election I think there was 46) most people elect to have their favoured political party choose their preferences for them. Based on the traditionalist attitudes of voters that revolve around biases, prejudices and/or traditionalism (my family has always voted for party X) the parties with the most senators tend to be Labor and Liberal, Conroy being a Labor senator who was elected even during the years that the Liberal/National Coalition had a majority in both houses of government.
As I now live in Victoria I'll certainly be voting in favour of candidates that are not him in the election some time this year. However I don't trust the preferences of other parties, nor do I want to re-elect members of the party of fear and xenophobia, so I'll be voting below the line.
But you can count on the majority voting above the line.
Re:As a parent, I would like to make a suggestion. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think once a government, ostensibly from a liberal democracy or otherwise, decides that it is going to take an active role in censoring a medium, it's rather irrelevant whether they show people the black list or not. Whether your chains are visible or invisible, they are chains nonetheless, and by all appearances, the Australian people seem little concerned. What's the point of a list of blocked sites, when the populace doesn't seem to care that government has formulated a list of sites that the populace shall not see?
To some extent I do blame the media, which, intentionally or unintentionally, has primed a lot of citizens of supposedly free and liberal democracies with the underlying notion that the Internet is an inherently dangerous place, where molesters and terrorists lurk on every page waiting to pervert the young and where gangsters hide illicit transactions within innocent-seeming communications. To be sure, these do happen, but all these "news magazine" programs (largely hysteria-driven frothing-at-the-mouth sessions designed to produce ratings by invoking paranoid schizophrenic-like reactions in the viewers) are not interested in actually reporting the rates of Internet crime versus, say, mail crime or hell, Main Street crime. To listen to the 20/20-style programs the world over, you'd think pedophilia, terrorism and sophisticated crime in general didn't exist until the age of modern communication.
It isn't just the Internet, either. These irresponsible pseudo-journalists literally have most of the Western world terrified that every time they're children leave the front door there are a near-infinite supply of perverts and maniacs waiting to rape, murder or twist children. Every time some child is abducted anywhere in a 3,000 mile radius (and sometimes, if the circumstances are sufficiently lurid, much further afield than that) the 6 o'clock news is dominated by it, as breathless on-the-scene reporters recount every vile detail, followed by child safety experts explaining how children must be programmed to believe that every adult is out to touch their woo-woos or slit their throats, and probably both. The fact that most molestations are committed by people known to the child rarely, if ever gets mention, because, of course, telling parents that it's more likely Daddy or Uncle Billy are perpetrating a sexual crime against the kiddies won't sell a lot of advertising.
The Internet gets picked on because it's relatively new, still very poorly understood and much easier to whip parents and voters into frenzies. You can sell five minutes on the 6 o'clock news pretty easily and cheaply by throwing up a child-abuse expert whose qualifications in Internet crimes probably amounts to checking their email five times a day, along with some faded-out images of child porn sites, along with Sheriff Brown/Jones/Rogers/whatever, who is quite happy to get his mug on the news telling us how the Internet kills. Of course, it's just as cheap to do one of the "news magazine" programs where they lure a few pathetic sex freaks to a house to meet teenangel5 or whatever, only to find out its some failed would-be anchorman and some cops ready to lead him off to jail.
They say we get the government we deserve, and well, Australia, you must be a right stupid sheepish bunch to have deserved Rudd and his band of Super-christian liberty-hating political hooligans. Don't bitch now, just wait twenty years until the government has to clear newspaper articles. You'll wish you were living in Beijing by that point.
Forget "protect the children" (Score:3, Insightful)
The government is not running on the assumption that a filter will save all the children, although it certainly is in their PR arsenal. What the government is doing, in their own eyes, is simply closing a loophole in the law. Australia has tough censorship laws *already*, the internet is just not filtered at this point. The government is simply seeking to apply its existing legal framework to the internet.
But this raises the far more important issue: Australia has a draconian censorship framework which needs to be brought into the modern age. The mere fact that the government applying their ratings rules is immediately seen as great wall of China style censorship is indicative of how out of touch the local censorship laws are with contemporary society. This sums up the far bigger problem that critics face: Conroy see this whole issue as applying the law in its intent, the way it is meant to be applied (closing a loophole), in order to get the government to view it any other way would require the government to be convinced it censorship framework needs to be loosened up, R18+ for games would be a nice start!!
Re:I'm not optimistic (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I would like to see above-the-line voting abolished, but at the same time add a "no further preferences" option to the ballot (as the first option, to kill a few donkey votes), which, if your vote goes that far down the list, means that your paper is then ignored for the rest of the redistribution. This is better than allowing an incomplete list without a terminator, because the coutners are supposed to try to figure out how you were trying to vote if your paper seems invalid.
Although counting would be slower and more expensive, senate vote results aren't usually needed for some time anyway, and this would go some way towards improving the quality of election results.