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Australia The Internet Communications Government Your Rights Online

Australia Ranked Fourth In Internet Freedom 221

mjwx writes "A report published by Freedom House has placed Australia in fourth in Internet Freedom, below Estonia, the United States and Germany. Freedom House highlights the lack of actual censorship in Australia pointing out that the highly unpopular proposed ISP level censorship has been shelved since the 2010 Australian election. The Freedom House report is available here."
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Australia Ranked Fourth In Internet Freedom

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  • Re:Below Germany? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kreigaffe ( 765218 ) on Friday April 22, 2011 @12:14AM (#35903464)

    I'm pretty sure Germany filters out anything mentioning that party that was real big in Germany a few generations back..

  • by mrnobo1024 ( 464702 ) on Friday April 22, 2011 @12:28AM (#35903546)

    Of course they're going to make sure the US gets near the top.

  • Re:Below Germany? (Score:5, Informative)

    by hweimer ( 709734 ) on Friday April 22, 2011 @12:40AM (#35903606) Homepage

    As of now, there are two websites (Stormfront [wikipedia.org] and NSDAP/AO [wikipedia.org]) that are being filtered at several smaller ISPs in North Rhine-Westphalia. What you might heard of is that there is a controversial law that allows the German federal police to add alleged child pornography websites to a secret mandatory filtering list. However, this law has never been applied and will be repealed soon. In other news, most of Germany's states seem to push for web filtering of illegal gambling, but I doubt that this is going to happen in the end.

  • Re:Blow Germany? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 22, 2011 @03:46AM (#35904214)

    "Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well. Not necessarily in GMB, but 'the west' never fully divested itself of the ideas; even after the NAZIs gave us a front row seat in how badly these things can go."

    That is probably because Eugenics itself is solidly based in science. Eugenics is practiced indiscriminately and with great consistent and proven success across the board in animal breeding practices. This is most easily seen in dog breeds because canine genetics are among the most responsive to breeding. Eugenics is often wrongly associated with race. Eugenics really is selective breeding for behavior as opposed to direct physical traits. No more no less.

    Nazi eugenics was selection based on made up criteria. For instance, jews were culled based on perceived behaviors without any valid evidence that these negative traits existed in the first place. Western Eugenics was at least based on demonstrated criminal behavior rather than a political blame game that pointed the finger at an entire subset of the population for all a societies problems. Race simply is not a valid distinction for any purpose be it for laws, population statistics, or breeding criteria.

    You are right that Eugenics still exists. In reality, that is what the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole amount to. Either prevents further breeding based on demonstrated behavior.

    None of that is to say that I agree with the idea of selectively breeding humans even with valid criteria. But if one values the success of the species over the success of the individual a case can be made for Eugenics using valid criteria. There isn't any logically consistent value system that supports selection based on bogus criteria like race.

Too much of everything is just enough. -- Bob Wier

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