Somebody Think of the Children
Reports

Parents find managing their child’s Internet use easy: ACMA report

A government report on media use by young people, that ACMA Chairman Chris Chapman says is sure to inform further debate about digital media literacy, has found 76% – 92% of parents surveyed find it easy to manage their child’s use of the Internet. The report also found that most young people do not have...

Filtering and online safety reports: Brooklyn Law School and Harvard

Two reports worth reading: 1) ‘Filtering in Oz: Australia’s Foray Into Internet Censorship‘ by Derek Bambauer at the Brooklyn Law School in New York argues Australia represents a shift by Western democracies towards legitimating Internet filtering and away from robust consideration of the alternatives available to combat undesirable information. Bambauer writes: Australia’s decision to censor...

Statistics Laundering: Report on false and misleading online child pornography statistics

Irene Graham has published a comprehensive research paper about the false and misleading statistics associated with the prevalence of child pornography on the Internet which appeared in Australian media reports and articles during 2008. That includes Bernadette McMenamin’s comments in The Australian back in January: ‘Child pornography is one of the fastest growing online businesses...

NSW Parliamentary E-Brief on mandatory filtering

The NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service has put together a briefing on the government’s filtering proposal which is available to download as a PDF here. It reads: At this stage, the Rudd Government proposal would restrict blanket mandatory ISP filtering to the illegal RC content, based on the ACMA’s ‘black list’ of prohibited websites. The...

Why adult stores sell banned films and magazines

Two Brisbane adult stores have been fined for selling Category 2 magazines and films classified as X18+ and RC. Queenslander’s can legally watch and purchase such material, but it is illegal for QLD stores to sell it. That creates a big problem and not just for retailers in the Sunshine State — for stores in...

More flaws surface in clean feed trial

Network engineer Glen Turner has voiced his concerns about the Tassie filtering trial. In the comments section of my earlier post, Glen says a critical flaw exists in the trial’s testbed design: ’80-90% of Australia?s Internet traffic goes to the USA, a considerable distance and a large amount of latency. This is not simulated in...

Why the Tasmanian filtering trial is a failure

Senator Conroy’s office could spin a thread of gold from a lump of crap, I’ll give them that. But if you’ve read the Tasmanian filtering report, it probably didn’t take long before you noticed red flags. I decided to compare the report to what Mr Conroy says in his press release and show why the...

Media reaction to filtering report

It’s a shame that some major news organisations were happy to run a rehash of Senator Conroy’s can-do-no-wrong press release about the Tassie filtering trial report. Thankfully, not all media was so accepting. In Crikey, Stilgherrian points out that even though the report found ‘most’ filters achieved over a 92% success rate in blocking sites,...

Conroy issues report on filtering trial

Just in: Senator Conroy has released a report on the Tasmanian filtering trial. Download the report as a PDF here. Update 29/07/08 2PM: I’ll post tonight about some of the problem findings in the report that aren’t making mainstream media.

Sexualisation report released today

I haven’t had time to fully read the Goverment’s report on Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media, but at first glance it doesn’t appear they’ve fallen prey to the hysteria and scaremongering that was thrown around like a ragdoll by certain groups and moral crusaders. I’ll cover the good and bad from the report...

Naughty words, but a nice result?

The Senate Inquiry into Naughty Words on TV (or Senator Cory Bernardi’s quest to wash Gordon Ramsay’s mouth out with soap) has resulted not in calls for more censorship, but a recommendation that all digital televisions sold in Australia be fitted with a parental lock out system. The inquiry also recommended that stations review their...

Aus Broadband Survey: 73% disagree with ISP content filtering

Whirlpool has released the results of their 2007 Australian Broadband Survey. The survey was completed and verified 17,881 times. In response to the question do you support the government’s policy for mandatory ISP-level content filtering (opt-out), around three quarters of respondents disagreed with the decision to filter internet content, with more than half strongly disagreeing....