Film shorts banned at Melbourne Queer Film Festival
The Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) cannot screen their special presentation, The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome, at this year’s festival. The package of shorts (currently classified X18+ in Australia) were denied exemption from classification by the OFLC even though they would have been shown to adults only. “The MQFF is terribly disappointed not...
Geeks fuming over filtering
Stilgherrian’s latest article in Crikey explains why Child Wise’s Bernadette McMenamin got hammered for her comments in The Australian: Geeks get angry when their knowledge isn’t respected. Too right. There’s a little more to it though as Stil explains: Two completely different problems are conflated. One, preventing distribution of already-illegal child pornography to anyone. Two,...
News Bites: Blacklisting the wowsers
Mark Pesce sums up in a neat article what much of the web communities views on mandatory filtering have been over the last two weeks. He had some great points of his own to add: Last May, Wang Guoqing, Vice Minister of the State Council of Information, the man who oversees the Great Firewall of...
Industry rejects sanitized Internet
Computer World and PC World (both part of IDG) have published part one of a series of articles looking at mandatory filtering in Australia. The first, Why Content Filtering Will Fail, highlights a number of concerns that all of us have, especially ISPs. A director of a small Sydney-based ISP, who requested anonymity, said the...
Kiwi company may help Rudd filter net, but it won’t be easy
New Zealand company, Watchdog, says that filtering out child pornography at ISP level in Australia is possible, but admits that the Australian Government’s attempts to rate websites for violent content and other objectionable material will be extremely difficult. Watchdog currently provides a filtered ISP service to NZ and Australian customers, claiming to block harmful and...
