New Zealand Introduces Internet Filtering 215
Thomas Beagle writes "The New Zealand government has been stealthily introducing a centralised internet child-pornography specific filtering system. Voluntary for ISPs but not for their users, ISPs representing over 94% of the market are already intending to join. Read the general FAQ and technical FAQ about the proposed Netclean Whitebox implementation."
Governments love crime (Score:5, Insightful)
Where would your government be without childporn? If it didn't exist, the government would surely invent it.
Re:I've never understood (Score:5, Insightful)
Why normal people support laws like this.
They hear the word child pornography. Then they stop thinking. And if you question the sense, you are a pedophile, or support them.
ISP's are in a tough spot (Score:5, Insightful)
This path leads to the dark side... (Score:1, Insightful)
Filtering of CP leads to filtering of obscenity, leads to filtering of "objectionable content," leads to filtering of government dissent, leads to another Great Firewall of China. So while I'm all for having child porn off of my internet, I don't particularly like how it could snowball.
It's inevitable. (Score:3, Insightful)
Post-Iran, governments see that controlling the Internet is vital to controlling their population.
ISPs can declare 3rd-party VOIP and other heavy-usage models as violating the filtering rules (whether that makes sense or not) and kick them off the network.
Large businesses prefer that customers be reached through communication channels they control and understand. (TV, radio, print.)
Governments, ISPs, and businesses support it. Nobody important opposes it. (You are not important.) Why are we surprised that it is happening?
Re:ISP's are in a tough spot (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's rubbish. The filter cannot stop https to undesired sites, neither can it cope with proxies. So all in all, it's utterly pointless to have to try and stop nefarious activities to all but the casual browser. The ISPs will know this, and should simply point it out. As ever, follow the money, this has nothing to do with kiddy pr0n.
Re:ISP's are in a tough spot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh god :( (Score:1, Insightful)
Mod me flamebait all you want, but the fact is it's TRUE. Americans are so blinded and oblivious to the better conditions outside their own country elsewhere, even as far close as their own northern border.
Re:Oh god :( (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing the NSA and CIA feel like telling you, anyway..
Re:Good to hear (Score:3, Insightful)
How about spending the resources on busting pedophiles and exposing pedophile rings instead? Or was that too straightforward and precise?
That would involve time, money and intelligence. Something that governments, by definition, are always in short supply of. Politicians ALWAYS take the easy way and most Press friendly route. They will do what looks good now, even if they know it will be a failure later. Hopefully during the next administration.
Re:Good to hear (Score:3, Insightful)
How about spending the resources on busting pedophiles and exposing pedophile rings instead? Or was that too straightforward and precise?
But that might drop the arrest numbers down considerably, which means cutting funding, which means less sweet desk jobs for law enforcement officials.
Think about it. You can bust a guy who is molesting a child and taking photos of it, and that's one arrest. But if you bust all the people who download, trade, or look at those photos, you can potentially makes thousands of arrests! That's thousands of arrests based off of one sexual abuse incident. Best of all, you can keep arresting people who look at those photos for many years into the future. It's the gift that keeps on giving!
No, it's best that these photos and videos continue to be produced. At least until everyone finally agrees to make stories and drawings just as illegal.
Re:Good to hear (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ISP's are in a tough spot (Score:5, Insightful)
- H. L. Mencken
Re:I've never understood (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just that it shuts down the rational part of their brain, but they wind up expecting someone *else* to do the protecting. Because, you know, being a parent yourself is too tough.
I happen to be a father to two little boys (age 5 and 2) and I'll agree that being a parent is tough work. It's not all hugs and smiles with kids. There are temper tantrums. They *WILL* test boundaries to see how far they can go. Repeatedly. They *will* try to get away with things they shouldn't be doing. Keeping up with what is happening and keeping your kids in line (e.g. "No yelling in the store") and safe (e.g. "No running away from Mommy and Daddy in the parking lot") isn't always easy. Too many parents just let their kids run rampant because they don't want to exert the effort to set and enforce boundaries. Many people seem to want someone else to do the work for them. So they whine for the government to step in and "child proof" life. The problem is, you can't child proof life. Life has a lot of sharp edges to it. The trick is to teach your child to avoid the sharp edges *and* what to do if they accidentally hit upon one of them. That takes work and effort that too many parents just seem to not want to invest.
Re:Governments love crime (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the thing.
The kind of people who push for this crap genuinely believe that child porn is a big issue, that it's worth losing all those nice freedoms we have to get rid of it (or at least try as you might as well piss into the wind for all the good it will do) and that anyone who objects is some kind of pervert who is afraid of losing their child porn.
There are people who genuinely believe that a police state is a good thing because "only criminals have anything to fear from a police state"
There are people who genuinely believe that censorship is a good thing because they certainly don't want to be seeing... well just about anything since these are the kinds of nutters who write letters to the editor of your local newspaper.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
quality of life higher? (Score:3, Insightful)
For me 5 weeks (or more) of paid vacation per year is better than 2. Or having more than 2 weeks warning before you are fired also counts as something. Or having a minimum wage that you can actually live on, or not having gun-ridden ghettos in every large city.
I like the quality of life in the Netherlands way better than that in the US, and I've spent about a year of my life in the US.
Re:Governments love crime (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not an American, so I doubt very much my approval or disapproval of the Second Amendment means all that much. I will say that, at the end of the day, the State (whatever state you're living under, unless it's a failed state) has a far larger number of very lethal firearms and advanced weaponry than you'll ever manage to accumulate. So while you may have some false sense of security about building your private army in Oregon, the United States government has at its disposal weapons capable of turning countries into radioactive wastelands, so you're right to bear arms shouldn't make you feel all that secure.
The 2nd Amendment was written when a reasonably equipped militia with some decent leadership could take on an army of the time. That hasn't reasonably applied since the Civil War. The best you can hope for if the government is really out to get you is a tragedy like Waco, and I don't really consider taking a bunch of children with you a reasonable example of holding the torch of freedom high.