Sunday, December 30, 2007

Four Horsemen Alert: Australia Moves to Mandatory ISP Content Filtering - Users Must 'Opt Out'

Lachlan Heywood writes on Australian IT:

Australians will be forced to contact their internet service provider to avoid having their access to the web restricted.

The restrictions are planned by the Federal Government to give greater protection to children from online pornography and "violent" websites.

Under the plan, all internet service providers will be required to provide a "clean" feed to households and schools, free of pornography and other inappropriate material.

Any internet users who want to "opt out" of the clean feed will have to contact their ISP.

Online civil libertarians yesterday warned the freedom of the internet was at stake, while internet providers are concerned the new measures could slow the internet in Australia down to a crawl.

But Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said everything possible had to be done to shield children from violent and pornographic online material.

More here.

Note: Background on the "Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse" can be found here.

I'm also curious as to whether or not "opting out" of this nonsense would land you on some government watch list? -ferg

1 Comments:

At Sun Dec 30, 10:02:00 PM PST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

>I'm also curious as to whether or
>not "opting out" of this nonsense
>would land you on some government
>watch list?

Of course it does. Isn't that the whole point?

One wonders how TOR figures into the mix - I'm guessing that, like most things of a technical nature, folks with a brain will be able to find workarounds.

 

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