Australian Government Initiates Covert Internet Censorship 104
An anonymous reader writes "Remember how the Australian Government tried to enact a big bad Internet filter on the population? Well, that effort failed, but now there's a new initiative in place. At least one government agency, the country's financial regulator, has quietly started issuing legal notices to ISPs requesting them to block certain types of websites deemed illegal. There's no oversight or appeals process, and already a false positive event has resulted in some 1,200 innocent websites being blocked from Australians viewing them. Sounds ideal, right?"
"Legal" Notices (Score:4, Interesting)
A notice does not become "legal" simply because it was issued by a state agent.
That "false positive" was BS (Score:3, Interesting)
That "false positive" event was BS, and the EFF should know better. Slashdot covered the story here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/11/1849207/australian-networks-block-community-university-website [slashdot.org]
Basically, a community college cheaped-out on it's webhost, and it was sharing a single IP with 1,200 other sites. It is certainly not out of the realm of possibilities that one of those 1,200 was doing something naughty (malware, DDOS, spam, kiddie porn, who knows?), and CheapBastardWebhosting was apathetic when informed about it. Just like any harmful of blatantly illegal site, the next step is a block of the IP.
The block was lifted after the outcry, but I suspect that was more because the block got the webhosts attention and they then properly booted the naughty customer.
EFF, please don't Greenpeace or PETA yourselves with silly crap like this. (This wouldn't be the first time their press releases have stretched or misinterpreted facts more than a bit.)
Re:You have consented to large government (Score:3, Interesting)
there hasn't been a single group of people operating without a central government that has made a mark on history.
- I see, so what you are looking for is an empire, you can't just have people living without being oppressed by an empire because you are looking for "historic marks". Well, that's your idea - there should be 'historic marks' and the human cost is irrelevant.
But we know of historic marks, Stalin was historically remarkable. So was Lenin. Hitler. Mao. Pol Pot. Nixon. Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy. FDR. Hoover. Teddy Roosevelt. Bush the first. Clinton. W. Obama. Genghis Khan. Alexander. many more, I do not consider them to be good for people as a general principle though they left their marks alright.
OTOH I consider people like Martin van Buren to be historically significant because they did NOT leave marks like that and instead allowed the PEOPLE to live their lives in a much freer society because of much smaller government intrusion. He was for complete separation of government from banking, from money, from business in general and he did not sell out for more power. He strengthened peace with the British instead of pursuing war.
Warren Harding would be another case, he was the POTUS when USA went through its first Federal reserve inflated bubble crash that cause a depression. He did not do anything and instead cut government spending by 70% and the problem dissipated in 1.5 years.
(you still haven't defined where central government stops and local government starts, by the way)
- good question. As with everything there are grey areas here, but at the least with local governments you know the people that are elected, they live in your town probably and they do their business in the town, they are responsible to people in the town. I suppose the real difference is proximity to power, the more central the power is the further away you are from it, the more abstract it is, the more institutionalised it is, the less you can have direct influence on the outcomes for your locality. Ideally there is enough competition that you can choose to live in a town with central government or in a town where there is no government of any kind at all and all decisions are completely on individual and business levels.
the ones with a larger or more effective central governments always won out.
- you find this to be desirable, I do not.
the largest and most successful nations/organizations in history were marked by highly effective, pervasive and very large central governments.
- I disagree with your definition of the word 'successful'.
AFAIC any system that destroys individual rights is unsuccessful by definition. What is the success for an individual in that scenario? Ability to steal from a minority by using a huge institutionalised authority that has enough apparatus at hand that crashing an individual is not even an afterthought, I disagree that this is even remotely a success story.
Just for fun, show me nation-wide numbers.
I will do better. Stalin said something I agree with: when a person is killed people see it as a tragedy. When millions are killed, that's just statistics.
Governments are the biggest criminals and harbour the biggest criminals in history of humanity. Every government that started a war for power and resources and egos are criminal by definition. In the eyes of history the only difference between war criminals and heroes is who lives to tell the story.
I don't need to talk about hundreds of millions killed by central governments over the millennia, how about Iraq to make this simple? What local government, what private institution or individual can boast up to a million people dead over 10 years of murder and destruction?
Did you know that in Mein Kampf, Hitler specifically argued that the State power must be diminished for the explicit purpose of increasin