This is what happens when you let your government oppress you.
First your government takes away your guns.
Then they want to restrict your access to information.
Then they deny you a voice and try to silence their critics.
No, this is not China, folks; I'm sad to report that this is my former homeland. This is what's happening in Australia, right now.
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4 comments:
Its just a beat-up, common sense will prevail as it usually does.
It's hardly enforceable anyhow.
I was reading about this last week, but refraned from posting about it since I knew it was only a matter of time before I was able to get your opinion on it :)
My college Political Science professor told us the day would come when governments around the world would begin censoring the internet. She said it happened with the independent press by financial takeovers, and she predicted it would happen online for "the good of the people".
Child porn and sites that promote anorexia are wrong imo, but the question is where do we draw the line? If it starts with topics that make sense to ban, are we to believe the movement will stop there? Or will it eventually spread to other areas like our blogs? Every movement starts slow and continues to gain steam until the original rationale becomes lost in a sea of illogical arguments. Lets hope we don't see a reemergence of the sedition acts.
Lyndon, for your sake I hope common sense does prevail, but IMO our politicians haven't displayed an awful lot of that these last few years.
With respect to the enforceability side, I'd disagree. They don't have to target the consumer, they just write the law such that it's the ISPs responsibility to block restricted IPs, then they do random spot checks to make sure the "illegal material" really is being blocked.
NOw, of the filters that were tested, only one resulted in an acceptable loss of connection speed, being 2% or less, with the others causing drops in speed from 21% to 86%.
And the results were less than admirable. They allowed access to 2% to 13% of material that should have been blocked, while blocking 1.3% to 7.8% of websites that should have been allowed.
The more accurate the filtering, the bigger the impact on network performance.
So the filters cannot do what they're supposed to if you want to maintain acceptable broadband speeds, but to get filters that work, and reliably so, you need to take a huge hit in performance.
Given the Aussie government's excessive reaction to Port Arthur, the fact that they would not only consider censoring the internet but attempt to silence objections from the general population, I suspect their Common Sense attribute is rather low. Maybe a -1 modifier? Possibly even -2?
Common sense isn't all that common, especially as you fail upwards in politics.
I haven't read 1984 in a while. Maybe I should pick it up again and see how close we're getting.
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