Tuesday filtering wrap up: Conroy’s blog, AISA, Greens and the trial of doom
Another busy day of filtering news with the Greens calling on the Government to abandon their live ISP trial as ‘as it’s flawed and doomed to failure‘. Senator Ludlam said: “This trial is simply all show. It won’t give any meaningful indication of how mandatory internet filtering would work in practice. One of the few...
December 13 filtering protests
Don’t forget that on December 13 there will be net censorship protests across most of the country. Might be a good networker as well. Time City Location Facebook Events 11am Brisbane Brisbane Square Brisbane Facebook Event 11am Hobart Parliament Lawns Hobart Facebook Event 11am Sydney Town Hall Sydney Facebook Event 12pm Adelaide Parliament Adelaide Facebook...
Simpsons porn and that swinging video
Hasn’t it been an interesting day? First up, Chris Illingworth, a 60 year old from from QLD, has been charged with using the internet to access and publish child-abuse material after he republished a controversial viral video of a man twirling a baby around. As Asher Moses from SMH points out in his article, the...
Telstra and EscapeNet won’t participate in live trial
Telstra will not take part in the Government’s live ISP filtering pilot. According to Australian IT, Telstra says it is not in a position to participate in the Government’s internet filtering trial, primarily due to customer management issues. A spokesperson for Telstra said: Telstra is separately evaluating technology that allows the blocking of defined blacklists...
Live filter pilot will not involve real customers
It has been revealed that one of the most important elements of the live ISP filtering pilot, testing the impact filtering a blacklist of 10,000 URLs has on network performance, will be a closed network test and will not involve actual customers. Here’s an extract from a letter sent by Senator Conroy to an Australian...
GetUp! raises 25K for Save the Net campaign in hours
GetUp! has raised a whopping $25,000 in donations in less than half a day for it’s anti Internet censorship campaign, Save the Net (you can donate securely at the GetUp! website). At time of writing, the exact figure is $25,618 and just like their petition, the number rises every minute. GetUp! will use the funds...
Question time turns into Conroy comedy club: Question dodging at its worst
If it wasn’t such a serious issue (and one that has been around for well over a year in Labor land), Senator Conroy’s game of dodge-the-question in parliament today would be comedy gold. Conroy not only fails to answer a single question put forth by Senator Cory Bernardi (good questions, at that, for a guy who...
Servos cave into family group pressure, drop porn mags
BP and Shell service stations will drop pornographic Category 1 magazines from their stores after a successful campaign to have them removed by Kids Free 2 B Kids and Australian Women’s Forum. According to Refused-Classification.com, Kids Free 2 B Kids issued a press release in September accusing the petrol giants of selling material condoning rape, incest...
With adults controlled like this, protecting children can wait
Guest post by Jon Seymour Clive Hamilton does not believe, like the Kantians, that exercising rationality is a virtue. It shows. Hamilton does concede that rationality is useful to the extent that it allows one to avoid being manipulated by others against one’s better interests. The unstated corollary of this is that if one wishes...
Young Labor turns on Conroy: They want opt-in filtering
Kathryn Small, a journalist writing for the recently launched BanThisURL, informs me that Young Labor unanimously passed a motion last week calling on Senator Conroy to switch to an opt-in filtering system and to redirect the funds to the national broadband network. According to BanThisURL, the motion read: Motion 42 – The Internet is a...
ACL calls for bipartisan support of mandatory ISP filtering
Nothing unexpected here: The Australian Christian Lobby has called for bipartisan support of ISP filtering, saying that in the interests of children this issue should be placed above party politics and the impact on speed is a small price to pay. ACL says Australia is taking a huge step forward with filtering. Here’s a snippet from...
F.E.A.R. 2 fifth game ban this year, 2008 worst year yet
PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 game, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, has been refused classification because of high-impact violence. It brings the total number of banned games this year to five, making 2008 the worst year for game bans according to Refused-Classification.com (and it’s not even over yet). GameSpot obtained the ACB’s report: “The violence is...
