Is it goodbye to Aussies?

The newly elected Australian government is planning to install a 'giant firewall' to filter out all material that's considered unsuitable for viewing by Australian children. Could this mean Australians being unable to access Second Life? Probably not, but it's worth flagging up the risk, I think.

(Source: BBC Radio4 report, You and Yours programme, Thursday.)

PS I'm not from Australia, but from UK

Oh wow.. that would suck o.o

WOW


SO they don't have freedom of speech over there?

I wouldn't imagine that anyone would specifically want to ban access by Australian adults to SL, but I wonder if there's a risk that the proposed giant firewall might automatically block access.

The floor is falling!

Equator joke...

lol..

I think I found the explanation funnier than the joke.. but in a good way o.o

I dunno... last time I tried to take away porn from an Aussie it turned out ugly...

Filtering out the entire country? Schools I could see, but the whole country? Wow. I could only have nightmares about what would happen in the U.S. if the goverment decided to do something like that.

Headline: "President Signs Universal Firewall Bill"
Subtitle: "Say goodbye to Webkinz, Google, and Second Life"

The words Riots, Looting, and mass hysteria come to mind. =O
Webkinz? Think of the children!

Oo

Free speech is a bit of a myth anyway. Even countries that boast about having free speech have laws of libel and slander. Is it legal in USA to call upon people to burn the Stars and Stripes?

Apparently the plan is to filter the entire country with individuals being able to apply for exemption if they can provide a good reason.

Only if you own a domesticated koala bear...apparently.

hmph

Wait.. they cant do that! A few of my best friends are Aussies! I'll burn down that firewall! Or..err... pour water on it o.o

If it blocks SL that is

Maybe this is like a new millennium style protective tariff on porn.

I hope its not good bye to Aussies my closest friend and benefactor is a Aussie.

Are Chinese vendors installing it for them?

I'm not entirely sure it will go ahead, considering that it's obviously completely pointless. Even if it does, though, there will be an opt-out under the proposals - which I imagine the ISPs will definitely encourage people to use, so they don't have to do the filtering at their end.

This is probably a continuation of the international bit-by bit efforts to control internet content. France is proposing to introduce internet bans as a punishment to people convicted of misusing it.

There seems to be a general fight against "freely uploadable content" sites by Governments at the moment.

For example, the UK government is considering passing a law making it illegal to own "violent pornography". In order for downloading such material to be considered "accidental" and not illegal, it has to be the case that you "did not make any request for the material, OR had not seen the material and did not have any cause to suspect that the material could be violently pornographic".

The material covered by the law has to be real, so avatar interactions wouldn't count, but uploaded textures would. But what this could mean is that a UK person could be gambling with jail time if they visited any sex or BDSM related sims in SL - because although they might not have wanted to see any _real_ violent pornography, or indeed any violent pornography at all, it would be hard for them to argue that they had "no cause to suspect" that such textures might possibly exist in the area they were requesting to teleport to.

In the extreme case, this law could be applied to _any_ site which allowed images to be uploaded and didn't vet them.

(The same law has already caused controversy, by the way. In Parliament yesterday several ministers complained that the Government had essentially pushed it through by putting it in a blanket Criminal Justice Bill with many other controversial items, thus meaning it was only assigned one Bill's worth of time, so discussion time would inevitably run out. The pornography provisions were not debated in Parliament at all!)

Yes, there is a general move towards increasing state control, though of course when other countries do it it's "censorship"; when we do it it's "protecting children" or "stopping extremists" or whatever it happens to be.

One huge area that the censorship enthusiasts have overlooked as far as the net is concerned is that of inaccurate information. It might not be indecent or violent but it could lead to people making serious wrong decisions. For instance, if someone published a train timetable on the net and they just guessed the times of trains, would they be committing any offence?

Well, I assume they'll be modelling the Giant Aussie Firewall on that other biggest single structure they've got downunder, the Great Barrier Reef.

And as we know that doesn't stop the locals from accessing the ports they need. But at least it reduces the cyclic outbreaks of crown-of-porns starphish.

And in the worst case you can always get a marine life.

The porn in Austrailia is ugly?

Same here.
This could be the beginnings of a new Simpsons episode. Remember the last time Bart went Down Under?

It's the coral polyps.

Good lord, I find it hard to believe that a country can do that!!!

But maybe this would be a way around it....

Someone, who has 'insider' links with the Australian government, could suggest to them that they employ an American company called Linden Lab to install the firewall for them. That way, it will probably hardly ever work and people can surf the net as much as they want...