Thursday, 28 February 2008
Australian IT reports today that, despite an ACMA report questioning the use of filters for today’s challenges to child safety online (see this post),
‘The federal Government’s plan to have internet service providers filter pornography and other internet content deemed inappropriate for children is going full-steam ahead. Trials are to be conducted soon in a closed environment in Tasmania.’
‘A closed environment in Tasmania’. Must. Avoid. Obvious. Jokes. At least Brian Harradine would be pleased.
See also ZDNet here.
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2 Responses to “Yesterday’s policy, Australia’s tomorrow”
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February 28th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Why is it that pictures/video of nudity on the internet are seen as FAR larger problem than pictures/video of violence on the internet?
Is nudity really worse than violence? The government and other groups certainly think so.
If a parent cannot take on the responsibility of supervising their own child on the internet, then are they really qualified to be a parent at all?
February 29th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Hi Kim and Richard,
Thanks avoiding the obvious jokes, Kim. I have friends in Tasmania who were sharpening their axes…
It is the parents’ responsibilty. Period.
Realistically, the only level where such filtering and other preventative measures will work is at the user level. Attempts to filter content through ISPs will only slow the delivery of all content, and that is already too much of a problem.
There’s not much sense in signing up for ADSL2+ if the ISP is required to slow the traffic down to dialup speeds because they have to filter every few bytes. And yes, some of these alternatives almost achieve that level of slowdown.
Using available technology, a pretty good lockdown of a system over a home network can be achieved. There is a published list of 1500 child pornography sites which can be blocked at the browser and operating system level.
That alone avoids most of the proxy problem, where a kid learns to access a site by bouncing their requests off a free proxy server.
Programs which allow easy access to pornography can be prevented from being installed. This is problematic though, since these are often the same programs which share MP3 and MP4 widely, and kids will feel disadvantaged in comparison with their friends if they can’t use these networks.
The labelling of so many sites as “Web 2.0” is just fearmongering. The label is inaccurate, as is necessary in a fear campaign. These are some of the most popular and powerful sites on the Net for many reasons.
But yes, they can be permanently blocked from an individual computer.
Parents seem to be looking for an easy solution; or more correctly, they want the government to do their jobs for them again.
Maybe it’s time parents started thinking of a computer as a tool, and not just a toy?
Paul