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[ProgSoc] Porn filters rise again




Back in the days when Marina Sirtis! and Sandra Bullock! were the internet's hottest X-rated property, I created a page under ~whophd/ to see if the filters being pushed by Senator Brian Harradine would catch it. (It's just lego and furniture porn, BTW, with some poledancing captured by our webcam once).


Though it may be a reckless manoevure to blacklist my whole website, or the whole of ProgSoc's website -- or indeed UTS? -- I could always remove it at the drop of a hat, while ably demonstrating the ease with which anyone could censor parts of the internet, at will. ProgSoc and UTS have doubtless lots of useful information to share.

But the further point is that it's difficult to draw that line in the sand, meaning that if any of my content was objectionable -- and whether or not it caused more than just that page to get blocked -- the next step would be to turn it down one degree, to see if that was objectionable too.

Anyhow the ultimate goal is to alert people to false positives and false negatives on the net, as well as raise vigilence on the area of censorship generally. The whole debate and technological arms race is a little analogous to the 'war on spam', where it's quite easy to see the importance of striking a balance. In this case it's not quite so easy.

So now Tasmania is in the news again -- though it's entirely state-level this time, and the plan is now to filter at the ISP, not the PC -- and Optus and Telstra are formally asking for some filtering software to implement at their ISP operations, as Australia becomes the guinea-pig trial again.

If anyone has ready access to a 'filtered feed', let us know then?

CK.

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