Internet filtering
evolvingthoughts | November 5, 2008
Hmmm... cool name for a song. Anyway, here are a few things that caught my eye while I was trying to ignore some politics.
The Internet filtering debacle has reached the pages of Nature. With luck this will blow up in Conroy's face. It really does look like this was pandering to the religious right here in Australia.
Siris has one of his usual erudite and evocative pieces, this time on herbs (i.e., drugs) making people beasts in classical sources. I wonder if the notion that drugs take us upward rather than downward was an invention of the moderns?
David White argues that intelligent design…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2008
One of the downsides to being old is that your favourite teachers die. I learned most of what I know about the Empiricists, in particular John Locke, from a book by C. B. Martin, who passed away recently. Hat tip to Leiter. I didn't know he spent so much time in Australia.
John Lynch is tantalising me with a workshop I very much want to go to but can't: The 2009 ASU-MBL History of Biology Seminar: Theory in the Life Sciences. It looks like enormous fun (hey, I'm a philosopher: I use philosophical values of "fun"). I Have Views on what counts as a theory in life sciences, and I'd love to…
evolvingthoughts | October 28, 2008
As I feared, the internet filtering issue has now been taken up by special interests. The conservative Christian political party Family First, run largely by the Hillsong evangelical denomination, has one senator, but the balance of power is so tight they wield disproportionate power, and as PM Kevin Rudd and several of his cabinet colleagues are themselves religious, the FF interests are likely to be pandered to, as they were by the conservative Howard government. Senator Steve Fielding wants the filtering to include pornography and gambling, both of which are legal for adults in Australia…
evolvingthoughts | October 26, 2008
Users, or Lusers as they are known, learn early not to piss off the sysadmin, who is God. Federal minister Stephen Conroy's ham-fisted attempt to gag critics of his stupid paternalistic and ultimately failure-ridden net filter scheme has managed to piss off the whole lot of them. This could be fun. Anyone got the popcorn? I have the beer...
This, by the way, puts Australia in the company of such civil liberties havens as China, North Korea, and Burma. Yay us.
evolvingthoughts | October 24, 2008
I told you so 1: High cost of internet filtering and controls stricter than Iran's, oh and critics bullied.I told you so 2: Terrorism laws unsafe, court rejects charge of breaking laws that did not exist when the "crime" was done
evolvingthoughts | October 17, 2008
The Labor plan to interrupt Australian internet access, which I have previously excoriated, has been, as I feared, extended. Electronic Frontiers Australia reports that the government has a second, secret, list that even opting out doesn't free you of. So the technical overhead is still there and there's no control or oversight on what gets put on that black list. Who gave the government this power?
As I said last time I mentioned this:
And of course once it's in place, no government will be able to resist blocking other unpleasant sites, like those that, say, give the Arab perspective…
evolvingthoughts | January 2, 2008
I'm going to have to start a "freedom watch" thread, I can see.
Australia, under the ALP government, is to impose an "opt-out" internet filtering system on all lSPs, leading to the question asked by IT-Wire: what happens if I do opt out? Will I be listed somewhere as a potential child porn user? Or a potential terrorist? And anyway, why make the end user suffer because the authorities cannot prosecute or even find the child porn sites?
I will get back to philosophy and science (although this is an exercise in moral philosophy and philosophy of law and politics). But it seems to me that…