f13.net

Not sure if this should go in politics or not, but what the hey.

I feel rather bad for our Aussie friends, as now, not only is their government shitting all over their legal access to cool games, they are actively attempting to impliment NETWIDE censorship / blacklisting of "unapproved" websites.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/internet-censorship-plan-gets-the-green-light-20091215-ktzc.html

And for some more information, here is a blog / info site set up to give people details on the plan and a place to take possible action steps against it.

http://nocleanfeed.com/

As someone who works at a AU ISP, this is going to be a disaster for everyone.

I, uhh... wow

If they classify the internet anything like they classify games (much like the article suggests), this could be a really big deal.

I do not look forward to this =/.

I figure I'll just add that the beginnings of something similar has been attempted in Norway. I mean, we have the kiddie porn filter (dns-based, so not exactly hard to work around I would assume, but it's "catching" 7000 requests a day, so it's clearly "working"), but it's only just recently that IFPI (Norway's answer to MPAA etc) sued Telenor for not complying with a request to block thepiratebay.org, and not automatically handing out the identity of the people behind certain IPs to private investigators (i.e. not the police). This was debunked, but I'm expecting they'll keep trying.

I can only hope that this is debunked in Australia as well, but I wouldn't keep my hopes up. At least 18+ games aren't banned in Norway, so we had that going for us, and they weren't using the it's for the children line.

Here's the poll for the topic on the site linked:

What do you think of Senator Conroy's plan to filter the internet?

Yes, I think it's a good idea - 2%
No, it impinges on my freedom - 96%
Not sure, it sounds good in theory - 2%
I don' t understand it - 1%

Total Votes: 22400


It's too bad internet polls aren't reliable because that's a pretty severe result.

Also I love how "it sounds good in theory" is tacked onto the "not sure" option.

Speaking from a purely selfish viewpoint, I hope this happens and it's a spectacular wreck so nobody else in the world ever tries anything similar.

...

Oh, who am I kidding, we'll probably do it anyway in the US.  I think we're just about retarded enough that if Australia jumps off a cliff we'll do it to fit in.

Which would be a justifiably ironic twist, since usually the situation is the other way around.