Mandatory internet filtering

I’m not against the free filtering to those who want it either… don’t get me wrong.

But considering most parents I know can only just turn a computer on, they would find it hard to install/turn on/configure/even know about.

I think overall its safer to blanket it first, then let the tech savvy people remove it. It would reach far more of the population and not be a burden for people who don’t know what they’re doing.

Until people who are currently in their twenties grow up to be 50-60, there will always be people who are not computer literate.

Children should not be able to use the internet unsupervised – the computer should be in the family room where it can only be used under the watchful eye of a parent – this is the only true way to protect children online.

Well, look, if people can’t be bothered to learn how to protect their kids on the internet – don’t get the internet. Simple!

The Govt could even make a internet filter tips fridge magnet?

Would probably as useful as the anti-terrorism one that we all got a few years ago!

Then Adza – why not give free filtering software to all parents and educate them to use it? Why take this extra measure that affects everyone?

then, adza, if the situation was reversed, and it was offered to those who wanted it rather than imposed upon all those who didn’t, you would equally concur on the policy’s efficacy?

why should i declare to the govt, or to my ISP, or to anyone else, what i want access to on the ‘net? it makes much more sense that those who want to have restrictions request them – this is a slippery slope into a travesty of freedoms.

Won’t make any difference to me. I’ll ask for it to be immediately removed. As long as you can remove it then I don’t have a problem.

Why?

Because not all parents are up to speed in relation to being technologically savvy. Personally, my kids are not allowed to access chat, porn etc etc. But I’ve set up filtering and security measures myself to prevent it. Most parents don’t know how to do that, so yes I support it being introduced… as long as there are no issues with it being removed for those that don’t want it.

Chat really is bad… it’s fully of 12-20 year olds talking about sex… and yes the older people are on there trying to lure younger ones into it. There is no way in hell my kids are chatting on the net.

“we should ban bad food outlet advertising”

Katy’s working on it!

thing is, all this ‘let’s stop pornography’ chatter never gets round to showing why stopping it is a good thing, and/or why letting it be available is a bad thing.

i understand we don’t want to encourage the sexualt exploitation of children, but using them/their images in pornography is surely entirely different from allowing them to see naked people, no?

we should ban bad food outlet advertising and atrocious grammar before we stop pictures of nudity.

I doubt I can post the photo directly, so here is a link.
-linky-

If Rudd likes China so much I wonder when we’ll start seeing giant posters of Chairman Rudd all over town, with propaganda slogans in 6ft letters underneath?

Now that he’s ‘living’ at the Lodge, he won’t have far to pop across to see his mates at the Chinese embassy either, for advice on other freedom curtailing ‘reforms’!

The policy is in as Rudd needs Family Firsts vote in the senate. Its nothing more than policy created to pander to Steve Fielding.

However, it will end up just like the PIN code on the R-Rated channels on Foxtel – every teenager will know the code and parents will remain ignorant of their kiddies on-line habits.

This is just fantastic more bloody regulations and controls on our freedoms. When will it end can we be allowed to choose for our selves these days or do we need to be mothered in every aspect of our lives. Let the parents control what there children can and cant access. We don’t need the government to do it for us.

‘Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road … If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.’

What a stupid uniformed comment do they really think were all out there viewing child porn? And if people are which I would guess would be around 0.000001% of the population it wouldn’t be through normal porn sites so it would be impossible to block anyway.

This is complete bullshit and if implemented it wont stop at porn that’s for sure. They say it will be an opt out policy so you can opt out if you want but it should be the other way around an opt in policy. I can just the privacy issues here when people elect to opt out. Will they be included on a secret government database along side the pedophiles. What a joke. And I actually thought Rudd would scale back Howard’s attack on our freedom and liberty.

I’m hoping they do try per-packet filtering, just for the deliberate false positives. Drop a couple of pro-paedo, pro-Osama comments into the ALP’s forums and hey presto – they’re blocked!

JR, why do you say that about anymouse proxies? Once you’re at the proxy, you’re just doing POSTs into a form. There’s no way for the ISP to pick it up without filtering on the entire series of packets instead of just looking for IP addresses. Not feasible in any practical sense. If the proxy is using https, forget about altogether. Then there’s tunnelling…

@Vic Bitterman:
If they have implemented the filtering correctly then bypass proxies *should* not work (as you need to go through your ISP before hitting the other proxy)… there are many other work around solutions though…

I wonder if you could access a free proxy server on the internet to bypass the filters. “They” would need to block all of these sites.

Why, here’s a site with over 4,700 free proxy servers 🙂

http://proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml

I think that saying your internet speeds will be affected is an overkill. Thankfully we still hold onto ‘Net Neutrality’. At the way the US is going this may soon be gone sadly. This filter hopefully wont affect us, but if it does affect someone, then opt out. If you do nothing illegal you have nothing to hide. When I first heard about this 2 weeks ago (yes, the media takes a while to pick up on things) it was stated that your name and age would be required for any content hosted in Australia that was deemed MA15+. More incentive to host overseas if you ask me 🙂

It is still better than the ancient Spartans, who actively supported and encouraged it.

“The Christians invented being upset about porn.”

Whilst turning a blind eye to paedophilia.

Thanks Skid.

The Christians invented being upset about porn.

@Maelinar:
‘Pornography’ is literal Greek for representations of whores.
The Greeks didn’t care about it, the Romans supported it as it was better to visit the venereal temples (ie: of venus, but also where the term venereal disease comes from) than stray with other people outside the sanctity of marriage.
Christians invented the wholly new idea of being upset with it.

First point – didn’t the Christians invent porn ?

Second point – how will they catch the pedos without advanced computer tracking ? Will it drive an already well hidden group of people even further underground and harder to find ?

Perhaps Krudd should adopt a nationwide Parent-Filter: if you’re not capable of looking after kids and don’t have any commonsense, then you are automatically blocked from breeding.

Yes, parents do need to show responsibility, but it can be hard in the case of chatrooms and stuff. Nobody can be expected to look over a kids shoulder for an entire internet session. Plus, kids seem to be able to access this stuff from Library. Perhaps ban them there?

I’ve got an almost failsafe way to protect children from internet nasties, it’s an amazing thing called “parenting”.

This ISP filter stuff is rubbish.

The young bloke I was referring too was the alleged pedo whose mates had an argument on here. Thought I should make that clear.

Actually, having read what I just wrote I would want it blocked whether it helped or not…

What I fail to understand is; how this will prevent dirty pedo’s (U.S. Senators) from trying to pick up innocent children? That’s the main issue that needs to be addressed – and what with the case of that young bloke *allegedly* starting fake Myspaces and all sorts of crap; unless you block chat-rooms, social networking sites and just about everything else kids use, filtering software is just not going to work.

I agree with free filtering software for families, but don’t f-k the internet up for everyone else. Anyone who visits Somethingawful or any sites of that ilk and even Loadedog knows that their displays of adult content is for the purposes of humor and adds to the experience.

I reckon we need to develop some form of online identification system for families to use so their kids can use chat/social networking sites and communicate only with people whom are actually in their age range (although I think my crazy, uneducated idea would need worldwide backing to properly work). That and properly educating your kids on how to use the internet, monitoring their usage and ensuring they don’t spend hours on the damn things anyway would be a much better way to stop kids from falling victim to sick f-k’s (Vote Foley).

And the other thing is: if the government knows where the kid pr0n is, why aren’t they getting the cops to track these f-k’s down and lock them up for good?

Finally (phew), I’d like to say, although I voted for Rudd via preferences (which I selected myself, BigDave, if you are reading) during the elections, I was under no impression that I wasn’t going to disagree with about 3 quarters of what he does. But since that’s opposed to disagreeing with about everything Howard ever did (Gun laws is about the only thing I can remember), I think I made the better choice between two evils.

Well, then brings in the moral implications – is mandatory blocking of things such as child pr0n (as opposed to “regular” which is between consenting adults) worth slowing the internet down? If it went any way towards helping to stop it I would say yes. But yeah, where to draw the line?

There’s quite a lot of discussion about this on Whirlpool, and what is emerging is that the “nasty” stuff (kid pr0n etc) will actually be blocked for everyone, opt in or out. Then, the stuff you can choose to opt out of is the further blocking of normal porn and the like.

So, mandatory web filtering of some sort will apply to everyone, thus slowing speeds down markedly.

And there’s that thin edge of the wedge thing. If they can blanket-block stuff for everyone, what next will they block?

all because of noisy parents who can write letters to politicians but can’t be bothered controlling how their kids use the net.

Its like the recycling bins, something we pay the government to take away from us.
(apparently)

Responsibility: some grand ideal that our parents and grandparents knew of, but it seems to have fallen by the wayside in the last 20 or so years.

what is this word responsibility you speak of?

Lets extrapolate this to a larger setting. Perhaps labor can create a department of responsibility. Within the dept we can have separate groups for:
– personal responsibility
– parental responsibility
– community responsibility
etc etc

each group will administer related policy that in turn was used to create a series of new laws in Australia…

Wonder how the flow on effect to insurance claims and civil suits would happen….

ok so I am bored but as one other riot actor said here not that long ago “you know it makes sense” 🙂

“Seriously though, if it is possible it should definitely be opt-in and not opt-out. I think the option should be there to filter that stuff out (if it is feasible), but only for those who wish to utilise it.”

Agree wholeheartedly; but again, that’d mean all parents had to be responsible for their children’s wellbeing – easier to get us all to carry the bloody can – as per usual! 🙂

“Personally though, if I were a parent the computer would be in the living room where I could monitor the usage…”

But then the little angels would bother the parents while they’re watching Mcleod’s Daughters/ER/Outrageous Fortune/ACA, or other such ‘important’ programs!

This is also a way they can introduce further internet filtering. i.e. they wont stop on blocking violence and pornography, they will begin introducing it to file sharing, and whatever else suits their agenda.

I think they mentioned somewhere that it is up to the ISP to implement and maintain. As many ISP’s are small businesses, it sounds to me like this is the beginning of Governments war on them.

The big danger is parents will think their kids are safe and will relax from watching what they access.

It only takes one kid at school to spread the word about proxies or tunnelling and every kid now has unlimited access, and the parents don’t realise.

But, I’m like the others, I’ll believe it when I see it. I wonder if it’s really a strategic announcement so they can later say they tried but it wasn’t technically possible.

Wag the dog? What will they try to slip in while we’re distracted by this? (sorry, couldn’t help bringing up a conspiracy)
Seriously though, if it is possible it should definitely be opt-in and not opt-out. I think the option should be there to filter that stuff out (if it is feasible), but only for those who wish to utilise it. Personally though, if I were a parent the computer would be in the living room where I could monitor the usage…

I think the motivations may be somewhat religious. Or just populist politics- disgraceful either way.

I think it might be just a silly idea, and another example of the “parents not being responsible in making sure that their kids aren’t doing the wrong thing online, so we’ll just penalise everyone” syndrome.

It always -was- access to a computer at school, it was repeatedly misreported.

It’ll never happen. And even if it did there’d be too many easy ways around it.

Reminds me of the “No child will be living in poverty by 1990” promise dished out by the last Federal Labor Govt.

One of their big sellign points in the election was bigger better faster internet for everyone. Now this idiot idea will put a choke on our speeds, and you’ll see all kinds of ordinary sites blocked because of it (we all know how net nanny doesn’t work), and all because some parents can’t or won’t control their kids sufficiently (not like that’s unusual, go visit any shopping centre).

This will also be expensive, and who do you think will pay?

A better way would be to offer an opt-in option for those lazy parents, and they can pay the associated costs.

there’s a facebook group for this:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9680096100

Thumper – the Socialists know best!

Big brother crap. It’ll be completely ineffective for its intended purpose but coincidently sit there available for when another (or the current) government decides there is more content they want censored at a latter date.

none;ACMA, according to your link; I reckon it’s copy/paste commercial lists, after paying a fat licence fee, plus a list from ASIO/ASIS/AFP, plus community complaints; no, dissent can’t be silenced in a population that is both fed and educated; it doesn’t matter, why would anyone want to stop policy proposals? They can propose whatever they want, it still has a long way to go from there.

It’ll never ever make it to “production” status in the first place, and even if it (hypothetically) could or would, it wouldn’t achieve the stated goals anyway. Anyone close to the ideas or with a decent knowledge of the net knows this, which is why it would be never make it to production status in the first place. More from Electronic Frontiers Australia:

http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/PR070811.html

The horse’s mouth:
http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communications_for_consumers/internet/online_content_regulation

And before we all freak out, remember you can opt out (although it should be opt in).

Show me the legislation then we can discuss it. Until then, it’s all just the usual hogwash.

I don’t care about the filtering, except that I’ve heard it will make everyone’s connection slower, and probably wont’ work as far as filtering everything to make the net ‘childsafe’ anyway…