Hello Everyone, Now, I know this isn't gliding related, but it's for a good cause! Honest!
Those of you who work in the industry may well know that a couple of days ago the government announced that they were to go ahead with the plan to filter the internet, but we would have an opt out option. What they kept quite was that there are two filter lists, and you can only opt out of one, and opting out results in you agreeing to be monitored by the government. In my opinion, and many others, this is a gross invasion of our privacy and freedom. Not everyone wants to be filtered, and those that do want to be filtered have already gone for the governments net nanny released last year. How can the government decide what is appropriate for the public to view? Don't we have the simple right to choose what we look at, within legality? Adding to this, going ahead and making all ISPs filter their connections is bound to end up slowing down connections. I think one of the biggest fears of people within the industry is that this will end up becoming a political tool. Most other countries in the world that have a national firewall/filter use it for political purposes, restricting access to opposition party websites or websites and blogs that publicly oppose the governments policies etc. More info you can read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship which has a list of countries that filter and what they filter. So what will the government block? Currently, there are two lists. The first is things deemed "harmful and inappropriate" for children. Isn't it up to the parents to decide what is harmful and inappropriate for their child? Where one parent may believe it's inappropriate for their child to view, say, an article on homosexuality, another parent may decide that it is important to the child's development and life choices. To delve even deeper, religious views can come into this, where a Muslim family will deem it inappropriate for their child to see any information about pornography, drug use, gambling and religious conversion, an Atheist family may well believe it's okay and maybe even important for the child to understand all this. So we can choose to opt out of this first list, only to still be filtered by the second list, which will block content that is illegal or "inappropriate for adults", and only then to be monitored by the government. How can they decide what the ADULT population of Australia is allowed to view? Don't we, as matured well rounded, educated adults, have the right to decide what may or may not be appropriate for ourselves? I understand that our children may stumble upon bad things, but we should still have the right to decide what OUR children may and may not view. I don't know if anybody out there has read the statistics on filtering software, but every filter results in a drop of internet browsing speed, the most accurate often being the slowed, and you can never block every single "inappropriate" website out there, with this resulting in anything from 2 to 13 percent of things that should be blocked, not being blocked. On top of all this, you will always end up with blocked websites that should not be in the list, from some 1.3 to 7.8 percent of blocked websites being wrongly blocked. (See http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310554/isp-level_internet_content_filtering_trial-report.pdf ) I'll finish up now, as this email is long enough as it is, but I just want to urge people to protest this. Let your local MP know how you feel about it, let the minister, Stephen Conroy, know what you think. Send a letter, write an email, make a phone call. Finishing here, anyone more interesting, you can go to http://www.nocleanfeed.com/ and read up a bit more. Dion Baker -- <timmo> you know what i hate <timmo> errors that wont go away <Guilty> So you dislike children too
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