mstakenidentity | I refuse to email this to people, but I do think it's a good cause. I've signed.

I refuse to email this to people, but I do think it's a good cause. I've signed.

Hi,

Did you know the Government is proposing an internet censorship scheme that goes further than any other democracy in the world?

I've just signed a petition to prevent the scheme that will make the internet up to 87% slower, more expensive, accidentally block up to one in 12 legitimate sites, will miss the vast majority of inappropriate content and is very easily sidestepped. The government of the day may add any ‘unwanted’ site to a secret blacklist under the scheme.

Our Government should be doing all in its power to take Australia into the 21st century economy, and to protect our children. This proposed internet censorship does neither. Can you join me and take action on the net today to save the net?

http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet/442

Thanks!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

www.nocleanfeed.com is also an excellent site for more information on this.
The next Melbourne protest is on the 13th of December, at the State Library.

I support this act of parliament.

My fragile eggshell mind must be protected at all costs!

Damnit, people. Do the research before you get all up on your high horse.

I could provide the information but, instead, I'll sit back and mock the ridiculous links which will be posted.

It is a complete and utter nonsense. Furthermore, the alleged proposal doesn't go further than any other democracy in the world.

Holy crap, people are the worst kind of people.

(deleted comment)

One out-of-context citation and a load of soap box tirade is all you've got?

Are you high? The letter, amazingly enough, is the guy asking for information about the policy.

Arguing with you is more or less pointless - it's more fun to try to point your energies elsewhere, and watch the results.

You're correct. Your arguing with me is pointless given that you're the man who thought driving eight hours with a cat free in the car was perfectly safe because your girlfriend was totally watching the cat the whole time and would totally have caught the cat if you'd slammed on the breaks.

By the way, thanks for posting my name on an unlocked entry, you moron.

As a courtesy I've deleted the original comment.

As a courtesy, you wouldn't have posted the original comment.

What exactly are you afraid of here?

Are you high?

Is this the game where you have to answer every question with another question?

Oh, while I'm here, I'll run another line.

Let's say that the government is planning to do this evil, evil censoring of the 'net in the way suggested (which they're not, by the way).

One of the things they're (allegedly) proposing to restrict is access to pornography. The pr0n in question is usually extremely hardcore and exploitative of underclass women.

Do you, dear

mstakenidentity, think that exploitative material should be allowed to proliferate on the internet? Do you think that society is better off with access to that kind of material?

I knew this'd get you out of the woodwork ;-P

One thing I've never understood about the broadly Feminist-Marxist argument against pornography and sex work as being exploitative is how that viewpoint can coexist with the argument for autonomy of women.

To put it bluntly, if women are allowed to have absolute control over their bodies, then surely this also includes the right to use them in pornography/stripping/prostitution, and it is hypocritical to deny them that option. I acknowledge that some women in the sex industry are genuinely exploited, but so are some men and a whole lot of transgender people as well.

Is society better off with access to hardcore porn? Maybe, maybe not, but it is neither your nor the government's place to control what information I am exposed to. Whether that's pornography, bomb-making data, or a copy of Das Capital, government paternalism is no replacement for personal responsibility.

Wrong. Good day, sir.

I find it weird that most of your flist are complete and utter dumb dumbs. Does it worry you that you have to read their mental abortions every time you go to your fpage?

What gets blocked and whether society is better off without it isn't really the point.

If I'm a normal average internet user who has always been quite happy never trying to access the nasty things being blocked anyway, then in theory this shouldn't affect me right? Wrong. I have to wait longer for all my internets that never contain any bad stuff anyway while they scan it to make sure it doesn't, and I have to pay more for internet access so my ISP can afford to do all this scanning that only minutely often finds anything anyway.

Meanwhile my next door neighbour Bob the Evil switches to sending requests for nasty blocked stuff over an encrypted channel via a computer in the US, and receiving it back the same way. He has to wait longer and pay more too, but the filter doesn't stop him getting access to what he wants.

Then there's the innocent websites falsely blocked, and since there are going to be far far FAR more websites off the blacklist than on it, and far more attempts to access websites off the blacklist than on it, even a minute false positive rate is going to block more legitimate sites than it successfully blocks bad websites. Even if we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend Bob the Evil isn't just working around the filter and is actually being thwarted by this scheme.

And *then* on top of that there are all the murky questions about who controls what goes on the blacklist, and should we be worried about future governments overstepping the intention of the filter and using it to suppress things and all that. Endless arguments there, that I don't even think are necessary because the above points are so overwhelming.

Filtering the internet is simply totally and utterly technically infeasible, and the attempt would be hugely expensive and cause a lot of harm as a side-effect. It doesn't matter what you're filtering for.

I have to wait longer for all my internets that never contain any bad stuff anyway while they scan it to make sure it doesn't, and I have to pay more for internet access so my ISP can afford to do all this scanning that only minutely often finds anything anyway.

OH NOEZ! HOWEVERZ WILL U COPE?!?! I'd kill myself, if I were you. Life will just be so thoroughly terrible in the 1984 land of 1984-class netspeed.

Freak me sideways.

I don't even think are necessary because the above points are so overwhelming.

No, you're going to need them. Your arguments above this point were based around the idea of little consequence. This is a strange argument as it seems to suggest that consequence is the driving factor in doing something. It's not (unless you're some sort of weirdo consequentialist, which you shouldn't be, but you probably are on account of being retarded). There are two simple disproofs if you don't believe me.

1. Imagine if there were no technical problems with the (alleged) proposal: would you be in favour of it? If so, then we might as well make this a technical argument about specifics, but that would lead us into tangent land. If not, then there's a real point behind your waffle and you should get to it.

2. People find a way to get around speeding and drink driving all the time. Do you think this is a reason to dispose of speeding and drink driving laws/policies/policing? If so, you are more of a moron than I suspected. If not, then you agree that mere consequences are not the driving factor behind why we have laws/policies/policing.

Copyright laws are technically unfeasible, and yet we still have them. Or are you suggesting that we get rid of copyright laws and intellectual property?

And none of that answered my question. Do you think that we should tacitly condone that sort of nonsense proliferating on the blogosphere?

What would a filter with no technical problems be like? Costs nothing, has no impact on delivery of web data (either by incorrectly filtering or just slowing down internet traffic), and cannot be bypassed? If it were used to only filter out actually illegal content like child pornography then it's hard to see a concrete problem with it. My concerns would be potential misuse of it over time, if the blacklist grows beyond its original purpose.

People find a way to get around speeding and drink driving laws in that they do it. Some people (not everyone) get caught doing it too. The threat of getting caught and punished is one thing that stops there being a hell of a lot more of it. Speeding and drink driving risks the safety of yourself and others. Thus, preventing a large proportion of speeding/drink driving incidents prevents harm to a great many people. The cost to society is that people are not allowed to drive as fast as they want or drive after they've been drinking. To me, it is obvious that the benefit far outweighs the cost.

Likewise, copyright laws are effective at preventing any company that likes from walking into a DVD/book/whatever shop, purchasing a single copy of a work at retail price and then producing their own edition (even if they're less effective in stopping consumer-level piracy). This allows someone going to the expense of making and publishing a copyright-protected work to stand a reasonable chance of making money off it, which is what motivated them (well, it possibly didn't motivate the artist, and they don't get that much of the money in a typical arrangement, but that's another rant) to produce the work in the first place. Hence in a world without copyright, fewer books/movies/etc are available to the public. The cost to society being copyright licenses. And personally I'm of the opinion that the cost of copyright laws in their current form is not justified; given that ninety-X percent of the income from almost all published works comes in a relatively short period after its release, we could get almost the same level of motivation for people to create/publish works with far far shorter copyright terms (5 years? 10 years? 1 year? Exact number needs more serious thought/discussion), and have far less restriction of the general public.

An internet filter on the other hand, admittedly would stop some people from accessing whatever it's filtering. Not, I think, a high percentage of the people who would otherwise access it, unless sites containing instructions on how to bypass the filter are also blacklisted (hell, if this goes through there WILL be overseas companies offering to let you pay them a monthly fee for routing all your traffic through them and encrypting it to avoid the filter; such companies probably already exist). And if that happens then we've definitely reached evil levels of censorship because that technology has many other uses besides getting around internet filters and it's not illegal for people to know about it.

And someone accessing this content does not directly harm anyone else (nor does filtering it have any effect of the production of the filtered content). And to balance the claimed benefit to society of some people not accessing the filtered content, all consumers have to pay millions or billions of dollars in extra costs for internet access, and will be receiving a lower quality product. And then we have to pay (in taxes) someone to GO THROUGH THE INTERNET AND DECIDE WHAT SITES SHOULD BE BLACKLISTED (in practice I can't imagine that this could be operated by any other means than "report a site you think should be blacklisted and we'll have a look at it", meaning that many of the sites containing content we want to filter will not actually be on the blacklist, being yet another reason why it won't have that much of an impact on people accessing the content we want to filter).

A cost is not a technical problem, moron. It's little slips like this that make you seem like a crazy crank. Boohoo, everything that's not perfect should be bemoaned and protested.

What sort of misuse could possibly happen with this system in our environment? We have a highly educated and well educated population. The chances of abuse from a government is next to nothing. And so what if there is limited access to fundamentalists or extremists? You haven't got a case against the (alleged) proposal. You have a whinge. Good for you and welcome to my NFA list.

The threat of getting caught and punished is one thing that stops there being a hell of a lot more of it.

Similarly with the internet blocker. The (alleged) proposal also includes high level scanning of traffic. So people after the material will need to be constantly upgrading their efforts to hide their activity, or risk being caught. I see this as a good thing. Let the perverts and extremists worry about getting caught. I think that's worth my YouTube being a bit slower.

evil levels of censorship

Yeah... You're totally not a fruitcake.

I don't know that I ever said a cost was a technical problem. I also didn't say that everything that's not perfect is not worth doing. I said you should look at the costs to society of any proposal and weigh them up against the benefits the proposal will bring. I believe the (allegedly) proposed filter (and any possible filter, for that matter) would have significant costs without offering us any significant benefit in return.

I'm happy to concede that there is no possible chance for misuse of any filter of this kind, since that wasn't part of my case against the proposal and it complicates the discussion.

So people after the material will need to be constantly upgrading their efforts to hide their activity, or risk being caught. I see this as a good thing. Let the perverts and extremists worry about getting caught.

Is this filter preventing access only to sites that are illegal to access? Or is it protecting people (think of the children) from accidentally being exposed to the blacklisted material, including material that is not actually illegal? Any attempts to access legal-but-blacklisted material would not be deterred by the threat of prosecution, because there isn't any. I'm not aware that there is any proposal to make attempting to access illegal material and being stopped by the blacklist illegal, and if not there's no deterrent there either.

I have a vague belief that privacy laws would prevent ISPs from giving out information that can be used to pin a particular blocked attempt to an individual without a specific investigation. I may be wrong on that. I also don't think it would be illegal under the (alleged) proposal to bypass the filter (and there many reasons to use the encryption technology that would bypass the filter as a side-effect, so it would be even worse if it was), and it certainly isn't going to be illegal to know how to, or to tell others (say, on your website) how to. Hence my belief that this will not have a significant effect on people accessing the blacklisted material, legal or illegal.

Yes, the cost is not that great in the scheme of things (it won't cost lives or anything), but it still far outweighs the benefit, without even discussing how much of a benefit it really is, because the filter just won't be effective at what it aims to do. Nothing like it can be. Given the current financial crisis and the fact that publicly-funded areas like education and healthcare always need more funds, why is even the amount of money necessary to *test* this idea being thrown away?

No, I didn't answer your question and I'm not going to, because my whole point is that what the content is that is being blacklisted is not relevant.

Is that a straw man, or do they call that technique something else?

You know, where you change the point of the argument to be something different and easily assailed.

Trust me here when I say "don't bother".

You appear to be confused. I didn't change the point of the argument. I shall assume that your lack of refutation indicates your inability to refute.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I refuse to email this to people, but I do think it's a good cause. I've signed.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject