Australian internet censorship - please give this a mention

[smspillaz]

Hi, SmSpillaz, Compiz developer here.

I listen to your show quite a lot and I've heard Fab's rants about the ridiculous right-wing internet censorship and data retention laws they are running in Germany right now. Well, considering that Fab used to live in Australia (or at least has been there!), I think some awareness needs to be raised about the situation in Australia. And no I'm not some weird political troll who spams boards so don't ban me

Basically, they are going to pass a new law which:
[*] Makes a mandatory secret blacklist of websites that will be blocked for everybody
[*] Hands control of this blacklist to an 'independent organization' which will most likely be proponents of the filter (i.e the church and big business)
[*] Gives payment to ISP's to block material which isn't illegal but 'morally reprehensible'
[*] Allows ISP's to block whatever they want. Now where was this net neutrality thing again?*

The other thing is that we are now totally screwed since the big party that opposed this recently had a major shake-up and now is led by right-wing church supporting people who support this (and also oppose things like equality for women etc).

Anyways, it would be great if this could be given a mention at the top of the show so that people in other countries can keep their eyes open for sneaky stupid governments who want to control the internetz.

People who need to find out more can head over to http://www.nocleanfeed.com which is the EFA's website about the ordeal.

Oh and internet censorship?

It's CRAP.

* Note that I doubt my ISP would do this since they are not evil and are very outspoken against any form of internet censorship. But I'm sure my former ISP would love this.

[x1101]

<angry rant>
Why is there not a group, worldwide, fighting this kind of political bullshit. It seems that two things lead to this.
1) Ignorance - and by this I mean people (sadly the people making the decisions) DON'T UNDERSTAND TECHNOLOGY, and yet they still get elected and put on committees to make decisions about Internet regulation and the like.

2) Right winged religious nuts who think that they have the right to push their beliefs onto other people. Don't get me wrong. I fully support religious freedom, but part of that is respecting that others MIGHT NOT SHARE YOUR POINT OF VIEW. If you expect your religious freedom, you must extend that to others.

</angry rant>

[Dan]

<angry rant>
Why is there not a group, worldwide, fighting this kind of political bullshit. It seems that two things lead to this.

</angry rant>

I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation do a great job in this respect and deserve all of our support http://www.eff.org/. Whether they're truly International I'm not entirely sure, a lot of their work seems to be based in the US. We also have the Open Rights Group in the UK doing good work on this http://openrightsgroup.org

I agree that one central International body might be a good idea and there must be countries that aren't currently getting the support they need. Australia sounds like one of them. I'll keep a note of this and make a effort to schedule it for a mention in the next show.

Dan

[x1101]

Excellent, its because of this show I have started to think of things outside of my country as important as well (it seem like some kind of American mind set that can only be broken by seeing another perspective). The world we live in, borders are meaning less and less. We are all in this together. And really, mistreatment of any one country (or minority in a country or region) is mistreatment of all.

[dpkgregor]

I read somewhere that Google strongly opposes this idea (which is really a bit ironical taking Google China into consideration), does that carry any weight?

EDIT: link to news story http://news.softpedia.com/news/Google-S ... 9931.shtml

[Fab]

I listen to your show quite a lot and I've heard Fab's rants about the ridiculous right-wing internet censorship and data retention laws they are running in Germany right now.

Well, problem is they don't come from the right wing camp at all, which is part of the problem.

[Fab]

I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation do a great job in this respect and deserve all of our support http://www.eff.org/. Whether they're truly International I'm not entirely sure, a lot of their work seems to be based in the US. We also have the Open Rights Group in the UK doing good work on this http://openrightsgroup.org

Neither the EFF nor the ORG are international organisations at all. Currently all of these efforts are highly localised....

I'll keep a note of this and make a effort to schedule it for a mention in the next show.

Dan

I already put this in the wiki for 128 a few days ago...

[Dan]

I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation do a great job in this respect and deserve all of our support http://www.eff.org/. Whether they're truly International I'm not entirely sure, a lot of their work seems to be based in the US. We also have the Open Rights Group in the UK doing good work on this http://openrightsgroup.org

Neither the EFF nor the ORG are international organisations at all. Currently all of these efforts are highly localised....

That's what I was saying

[x1101]

Not that any of use need it, but here is one more thing to get your blood boiling
http://stephen-conroy.com/news.php
it seems that a blog protesting this bullshit was arbitrarily shut down, and might simply disappear. We owe it to them to make sure they don't go quietly.

[oswaldkelso]

At least there's been one victory over there.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/tec ... -ndwr.html
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010 ... ertainment