Australia to impose "opt-out" filtering

These same problems tend to crop up all over the planet and these bright ideas don't seem to follow any old-fashion party lines or political ideologies when proposed by various politicians. I do wonder if such measures are a misguided attempt to protect children and to apprehend criminals, a calculated populist move to gain points from the more dimwitted of the voters or an under the radar approach to quelling political free-thought.

Yes, this was incredibly disappointing out of the bat. What offended me the most, though, was Stephen Conroy's labelling all those who oppose the filter as child pornographers.

I suspect this is a play to make Family First happy, which is weird considering the high Green vote nation wide, and that making Family First happy without the Greens will still make it impossible to pass legislation in the Senate.

I think this will fail, and that the only effect it will have will be to hurt legitimate porn producers. Illegal, and pirated, porn can be distributed by peer to peer networks which are going to be a bitch to filter. Of course you could just block those too, but they aren't illegal and are used for legal distribution.
The only way I can see this as a positive development is if you subscribe to the "porn is bad, mm-kay" view.

Hopefully the greens can block it.

Australian IT is reporting that it fails, and degrades performance on smaller ISPs. Quelle surprise.

From a technical standpoint, these filtering initiatives are a joke. For anyone reasonably technically savvy there are tunneling, proxying and anonimizing technologies that render most filtering useless. Most online child pornography types are, by necessity, among the more technically savvy, and so it's a rather meaningless measure. If the Great Firewall of China can't stop Chinese citizens who know enough to point their browser and outside open proxy servers, I fail to see how Australia is going to do any better. About the only way to do it properly is like Burma, with one pipe into the country which can be turned off or filtered at whim.

From a civil liberties point of view, it's outrageous. Compiling lists of citizens who want to look at sites that some branch of the government deems improper is a clear violation of personal liberties.

From an ethical point of view, calling opponents to legislation "child pornographers" is pretty damned repugnant too. Where's these guys' sense of decency and fairplay?

So, all in all, it's a liberty-violating, unethical and ultimately worthless plan.

Another indication that we can't expect too much from the bright and shiny Rudd government in terms of civil liberties. Like the control order on David Hicks.

I fear we can expect more terrorism hysteria, along with a new wave of wowserism. I hope I'm wrong about this.

By the way, J Wilkins, are those books really your holiday reading? Ever heard of reading just for fun?

I fear you are right, although it seems to be from misplaced idealism rather than malice.

I had fun once. It was a Thursday. In June. 1972.

Those books tend to be whatever I'm reviewing at the moment, or researching for an urgent piece of writing. I'd better update it, since the first two are now done (this last weekend).

For fun I read Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde, and last week, Bill Pullman. But I find fiction no longer excites me like it did when I were a lad. I used to have obsessions - one month it was Jewish American literature, the next Russian depressives. Now I can't read anything that asks me to think more that the average sitcom.