Internet filtering in Australia

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The government just opened up public comment on introducing an R18+ rating for games (as I said RC material is not allowed to be sold in Australia, a lot of games the dev has to alter them or the games get banned). In the meantime all games related websites and online games will not be included in any filtering until this has been sorted out.

Do not want to derail this thread, this matter can easily make a thread of its own.

They can only censor Australia (maybe Tazmania too, not sure about that...

The Internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it.

Could be worse, you should see what's censored in Saudi Arabia.

You could, except that's censored.



(what they don't know they don't know . . . )

The problem is that since the mid 1990s, the Christian lobbyists have became so strong that it has affected how we think and act.

From the 1980s to the mid 1990s, we had an agnostic Prime Minister and at one stage an atheist Governor General (Bob Hawke and Bill Hayden respectively). Australia did not have much time for such religious rhetoric in the media.

Unfortunately, since then the conservative views had risen again. Religious groups such as Hillsong has not helped either due to how heavily they had influenced politicians.

Going on to the internet censorship issue, what would happen if there was a PM in Australia that was similar to Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who was Premier of Queensland from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s? He even had people arrested for protesting peaceful because of a ban on any protest marches etc.

I dread the repercussions of the idea of censorship.

the first time this came up and they made an internet filter this was a few years ago, a 13 year old (i think thats his age) boy hacked through it in less then an hour.

What about safe spaces for survivors of child sexual abuse or rape? I know when LJ had a mass-shutdown of anything even remotely related to child abuse or rape, a lot of support communities for survivors were shut down.


That new legislation seems terribly paternalistic. Sounds awfully like the filters my (uber-conservative, fundamentalist "christian") parents set up on my computer when I was a kid. Even when they had filters set up in high school, people could get around them. If your kids are looking for porn or information about sex, they will find it. Better to give them full access to sites that provide health information (that occasionally veers into explicit, given the nature of adolescent language) than to deny them knowledge.

Just because something happens to be illegal doesn't mean information about it should be blocked--something being lawful or not is just a LEGAL state, not a moral one, and ignorance doesn't get us anywhere as a culture. If you're proposing to block something because you happen to find it immoral, at least have the balls to come out and say it.

Let's say the government can block certain sites. But can they block Yahoo or Google?

I think they can in China because Google has agreed to give them a special search which won't include certain sites.

But what if an Australian typed in a certain search term and was given a list of sites by Google or Yahoo or Bing or whatever.

Then our Australian clicks on that link. What is he going to see?

Perhaps a page that says "We know who you are and we know where you live. We are coming to arrest you"

Can't happen? Tell that to the poor sods who have been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for downloading a few songs from a file sharing network.

Search for "how to make a bomb" = "go to jail"

Well, just in case, how about explaining it here?
I would love to know how to re-route through an international proxy server!

seconded, i am not a fan of censorship