Why I am against the filter
The proposed “clean feed” internet filter:
- will slow down the internet speeds, which:
- damages the internet’s usability, and thus innovation and the economy
- provides an incentive to bypass the filter
- Which is incredibly easy [Google]
- Plus the filter is not very good anyway.
“it’s hard to get around the fact that the filters simply aren’t that great. Five of the six filters degraded network performance by over 20 percent, and two simply hammered the network, dropping throughput by more than 75 percent.
That poor performance came without stellar filtering performance, either. Half the devices let more than five percent of the blacklist sites through anyway, and all devices had measurable percentages of false positives. And all of these problems came simply while trying to filter web traffic; FTP, P2P, and other protocols would all flow through the filters unimpeded.”
([arstechnica], emphasis mine)
- Censorship is against free speech, and putting methods in place that make malevolent censorship easy is a bad idea.
( More on Internet censorship around the world. [wikipedia],
a little about the “Great Firewall of China” [uncensor.com.au]) - This filter will make law enforcement’s job a lot harder by making criminals harder to track [LifeHacker].
After all that, the internet still has the same websites out there, even if it’s a little bit harder for Australians to see them. Resources would be better spent in tracking down the creators of the objectionable content and putting them in jail, and shutting down their websites.
And that is why I am against the proposed Australian Internet Filter.
Further reading:
- Electronic Frontiers Australia
- Sign the Getup Petition
- Information on Whirlpool.net
- Cartoon about the practicality of the filter [Userfriendly.org]
Lobbying for the filter will not protect our society, our children; it will not “clean up the internet”, as much as I would like the internet to be cleaned. The best way to protect children on the internet is to supervise them and give them rules for its use. Put a filter on your own computer, to prevent its users stumbling across unwanted material.
The filter is flawed. People are the real solution.
COMMENTS
sigh
So, after working at Eastland all morning, I walked out to my car, in the staff car park, and thought, hmm. something looks funny. The bumper is a bit skew. Some person had hit my car on the curb side and crunched my head light. My guess is that it was done when reversing for a car space.
The damage doesn’t make me too angry, I mean, it will need to be fixed, but it isn’t a brand new car with delicate paint work. (I hope theirs was.) No, what makes me maddest, is the fact that they didn’t leave a note. Nothing! So inconsiderate.
But I feel better now after expressing my anger and letting it go.