Sometimes in IT, you have to go back to the drawing board.
17Jul 09
Posted by Christine Lee @ 12:30 11 comments
Senator Conroy was recently named Internet Villain of the Year at the British annual Internet Industry Awards. But were the other villains jealous?
(Credit: Christine Lee/ZDNet.com.au)
So just because you think that criminal gangs are worse, that makes it okay?
I liken it as highly dangerous, as we only need to look at other countries which have tried the exact same thing, and speech repression is guaranteed.
Get your head screwed on and realise how this policy is a very bad idea. I challenge you to name one country with mandatory internet filtering which has not abused the system.
What was the prize for?
Internet Villain of the Year.
Now is an internet filter worse than the others i mentioned?
If you think so, ask those who have lost money to identity theft, and I doubt whether they will give a damn about an intenet filter.
In any contest about 'villians', I would always rate those who do actual damage as worse than those that just are an afront to my sensibilities.
That is not to say that your concerms may not be justified, but to rate them as worse than actions that actually harm individuals, shows a lack of perspective, to my reasoning.
You're still arguing a straw man argument, much less a "slippery slope" fallacy in your argument.
Context -- the award is for the *year*; moreover it's a pointed outvoicing against exactly the sort of breaches of personal liberty as the previous Anonymous has explained regarding the government's proposed filter. No doubt the people behind the award think child pornography abusers, spammers in Romania and whatnot as worse ... but, as you say, context. Don't insult people's intelligence with attempts to appeal to over-emotional language.
Its worse because SC is a politician and is supposed to be representing ALL Australians. He does not have a mandate to act as the social conscience of the country.
To slow down every internet transaction to block the 0.00000001% of traffic that involves child porn is stupid, ineffectual and unwarranted.
Also, just how will filtering prevent social engineering crimes, the biggest online crime at present? (kiddy porn doesn't even show in the stats!)
Senator Conroy is worse, because unlike criminal gangs, SC is using the machinery of the law against us.
Further, your argument can be easily used against you. What is SC doing, trying to filter the internet with a filter that everyone knows won't work, when there are actual criminal gangs and governments that won't be stopped for a second by this filter? Why the colossal waste of resources?
And any time a government engages in a crime, it's much worse than when a gang does it. That's why living under the North Korean government is much scarier than an organised crime syndicate.
My issue with the internet filter is the way that government works. All governments have to pander to minority parties like family first. How long do you think it will be before the govt needs their vote to have some peice of legislation passed? These guys will say "sure if you add this to the filter, no problem"
Give them the tool and they will find innumerable "new" uses for it. If he gets this thing up this is only the beginning.
Yeah, we have had media censorship in Australia for 100 years, and the scope creep has been breathtaking... Just look at all the stuff we cannot read today that we could in the past.
Oh hang on, we can read more today in the media than ever before... So does scope creep mean we will be able to see more on the internet in a few years than now with Conroy's filter?
lol... Look out, there are Ruskies under the bed!!!! Help...!
The media censorship in Australia in the past was open and, rightly or wrongly, was mostly supported by previous generations.
The Conroy version is secret censorship with no public scrutiny possible or permitted. When we look at how every political group now uses spin and hype to con the public, it's easy to see how being able to silence opposing voices would mean absolute power that would be sbsolutely corrupted.
Only supporters of a politician, or political spin apparatchiks, would try to pretend otherwise.
Sorry anonymous, but we do have more censorship than we had 30 years ago, there are several films that were released in the 70's and 80's that were banned in the early noughties, similarly the ban on adult video games with content milder than many allowed films
All Magneto had to do is magnetize the servers... :) That'd be a real DDoS attack.
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People have to have strange prioities if they think what SC is trying to achieve is worse than the masses of criminal gangs stealing millions of identities, governments launching DDoS against other governments and paedophile rings utilising the internet to stalk children.
GROW UP AND GET YOUR HEAD SCREWED ON THE RIGHT WAY ROUND