Australia poised to start censoring the internets

[Levis]

Australians are pissed. And who can blame them?

[big]Internet censorship plan gets the green light[/big]

[smaller]ASHER MOSES

December 15, 2009 - 5:52PM[/smaller]

The Federal Government has announced it will proceed with controversial plans to censor the internet after Government-commissioned trials found filtering a blacklist of banned sites was accurate and would not slow down the internet.

Full Story Here

[Farin]

oh no, not you too they did almost exactly the same thing here last year (or early this year), which caused significant protest from anyone who actually USE the internet (as opposed to those politicians who let their secretaries print out their emails)

and rightly so, because the whole concept is not only majorly flawed - it's also dangerous:

1. it won't help against, let alone stop child pornography, because these blockings are VERY easy to bypass (there are videos on youtube how to do that in less than 20 seconds), so those people that really want this stuff will get it anyway

1.2 it doesn't (and can't) do anything against their source #1: P2P networks / torrents

but oh well, it's all for the good cause, right?

2. who decides which sites get blocked? who controls the guys who decide?

About half of the sites on the list were not related to child porn and included a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

or how about some radical, violent groups? or how about some radical, violent political parties? or how about some political parties that are just not wanted? [/polemic]

the whole issue in Germany brought out some funny internet memes against the responsible politicians and it also caused the rising of the Pirate Party here

[Levis]

It'll also affect gay dating sites, video games, some youtube links and comedy websites. The censorship doesn't bother me as much as the skewed priorities. 126 million dollars are going into doing something that can possibly be circumvented by a savvy internet user in a matter of seconds at no cost. What about housing, poverty, transport, bushfires, droughts, floods, dwindling energy resources - is the internet really, really, really more important?

[Steel2Velvet]

This action tends to polarize public opinion, which may effectively keep a politician's (or political party's) name in the news for a louder, longer time than a cause more practical and silently noble, which will not cause controversy, though it may do much more for the common good.

Understand this, career politicians do not think as practical, common folk.