QOTD: Are The New Temporary Filter Measures All We Need?

I’m confused. So this filter of Conroy’s is meant to stop Child Porn. So if the ISP’s are already blocking it, why do we need the Filter? I’ll quite happily defeat the spams and scams coming through the Portal with Norton Anti Virus.

I don’t think the question goes far enough.

The internet community as a whole should be encouraged to report “abusive” material to centralised repository that can produce a list of known sites. This can then be used by ISP’s to block out those sites.

I think the important thing here is that it is a community run innovative that is open and provides clear paths for dispute resolution (and with clear mandate and guide lines).

We then need a good education system to educate parents and concerned citizens as to the best approaches they can take to further filter material they deem unreasonable.

When you start getting into the argument about “illegal” material, we start running into the what the government is talking about, big brother.

Given the fact that they can’t honestly stop people from importing “banned” or “unrated” material via traditional means, I think they have bigger problems.

Do they have the right to “blacklist” a site that sells this material? Or do they simply have the right to prevent it from been “imported”?? Personally, I believe they only have the right to prevent it’s importation, but not prevent people from visiting the sites that might make it available…we’re talking about the ability to do something as apposed to the act of doing something (take a long hard look at your VCR and/or DVR for an example).

The problem is, the government only has the right to legislate up to it’s borders, beyond that it does has no legal right to restrict anything.

While I agree we need to protect the innocent (children and the exploited), simply filtering out what ever we don’t like isn’t going to stop it from happening. That would be a better fight to take on.

The government should embrace (and legislate) the use of the “xxx” domain naming scheme (and even lobby for better classification’s within the domain naming scheme) to help people know what they are getting into. Then we could have browses configured to automatically restrict access to those domains.

Ahh, you know what, they really have no idea of what the real problem is. Conroy shouldn’t be allowed to use computers thus saving us all from the problem in the first place.

How is the filter run? How are sites reported? How are they checked? How are disputes resolved?

I was going to vote Yes, filter just the kiddy porn, but that doesn’t solve any of the issues raised previously.

First, it’s going to block only a small fraction of the kiddy porn anyway, and it might give people a false sense of security.

Second, how do we know only kiddy porn is being blocked? Where’s the accountability, the recourse when the wrong sites are inevitably blocked? Like when Wikipedia was blocked because it had an old album cover picture on it that some groups didn’t like.

Third, it’s still the thin edge of the wedge. Today it’s just kiddy porn, tomorrow it’s any sites deemed illegal (hello China), next year it’s any sites deemed Refused Classification (even though they’re not illegal), then “immoral” sites (porn, online gambling), and finally that’s expanded to everything they don’t like – euthanasia sites, abortion, and of course political commentary.

Fourth, the government is already talking about mandatory browser history retention by ISPs. If they’re examining all your URLs anyway, it’s a lot easier to log them for a year as well.

There’s also the cost (passed on to us both as taxpayers and as customers), and the speed hit, though if they’re sticking to the ineffective URL blacklist rather than packet inspection, that may be small (at least relative to current ADSL speeds).

Given the minuscule chances of my own children (or myself) happening across a kiddy porn site accidentally, I see virtually no advantages, and a whole heap of disadvantages both real and potential.

It’s a tough question.

Obviously child porn & abuse in general is abhorrent, but where does it classifying it stop?

eg. Police shut down Bill Henson’s photo exhibition of nude 12 & 13 year olds (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=567712) showing how touchy this topic is. None of the children were posed explicitly. Just naked. Human form. Like millions of other adult nude (non-pornographic) photographs. It was all done with their parents’ consent. By definition, it’s not porn and it’s not abuse – but was shut down anyway.

If child porn & abuse is blocked, how wide will the scope grow? What about a photo of some kid in board shorts at a swimming pool, or a child wearing just a nappy playing in the garden? Things you see every day in suburbia that are now illegal to digitise and put online.

There’s already the *ridiculous* news of the Australian Classification Board “banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films” (http://boingboing.net/2010/01/28/australian-censor-bo.html) Come on. This is beyond stupid. And it’s just going to get stupider.

I don’t have any problem with child porn & abuse being blocked, but the scope must be set in absolute concrete first, and definitely not open to additions & bending of the rules from Christian lobby groups etc aiming to fix society’s morals.