Australia wants to fine for banned hyperlinks.

[him_over_there]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/home/technology/banned-...

smh said:

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.

...
Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government's censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.

"The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship," Wikileaks said on its website in response to the ACMA ban.

...

The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.

That's rather scary. The Internet is a powerful tool for freedom of speech and expression of ideas. I don't fancy the prospect of a government imposing fines and penalties on people who want to make certain information available to others based purely on a governments decision on whether you should be viewing it or not.

I know the regular "will someone think of the children" line will come out, and everyone will say we need this sort of government level censorship to stop child pornography. However, it will not stop child pornography. I posted a little excerpt from an article the other week about the methods used by pedophiles to spread their abhorrent materials. This censorship will do nothing to curb that.

Do you trust a government to tell you what you can and can't be reading. How long until we have such a system in the UK with the same sort of penalties ?

[Jasandjules]

Left Wing Govt in Censor things they don't like shock.

[Orb the Impaler]

Crikey - looks like the Totalitarian State is coming to more than the UK

[FunkyNige]

him_over_there said:

Do you trust a government to tell you what you can and can't be reading. How long until we have such a system in the UK with the same sort of penalties ?

Uhh, we do already. It's called the Internet Watch Foundation and produces a black list of sites that ISPs have to block, at the moment it's just child porn (but after a couple of mistakes they managed to block all Virgin customers editing Wikipedia, and some site that stores a lot of webpages called the Wayback Machine).

[deviant]

Orb the Impaler said:

Crikey - looks like the Totalitarian State is coming to more than the UK

The rot has been spreading for years mate...its not unique to the UK at all.

[Dogsey]

FunkyNige said:

... the Wayback Machine).

Not heard of that before ... look what I found.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000706223609/http://w...

A lot's changed.

[deckster]

FunkyNige said:

him_over_there said:

Do you trust a government to tell you what you can and can't be reading. How long until we have such a system in the UK with the same sort of penalties ?

Uhh, we do already. It's called the Internet Watch Foundation and produces a black list of sites that ISPs have to block, at the moment it's just child porn (but after a couple of mistakes they managed to block all Virgin customers editing Wikipedia, and some site that stores a lot of webpages called the Wayback Machine).

Let's not be unfair here. The IWF is an independent body made up of the leading UK internet companies, not part of the government. Equally there is no requirement for any ISP to use their blacklist, although the vast majority do. There is no penalty for linking to sites purely because they are on the blacklist.

There is a clear and fundamental difference between this and the system in use in Aus.

[Orb the Impaler]

Dogsey said:

Not heard of that before ... look what I found.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000706223609/http://w...

A lot's changed.

Ugh! It's like some sort of "TVR Arse-Lickers Website".
I bet all the forums were full of people with beards who smelled faintly of urine

[sadako]

deckster said:

FunkyNige said:

him_over_there said:

Do you trust a government to tell you what you can and can't be reading. How long until we have such a system in the UK with the same sort of penalties ?

Uhh, we do already. It's called the Internet Watch Foundation and produces a black list of sites that ISPs have to block, at the moment it's just child porn (but after a couple of mistakes they managed to block all Virgin customers editing Wikipedia, and some site that stores a lot of webpages called the Wayback Machine).

Let's not be unfair here. The IWF is an independent body made up of the leading UK internet companies, not part of the government. Equally there is no requirement for any ISP to use their blacklist, although the vast majority do. There is no penalty for linking to sites purely because they are on the blacklist.

There is a clear and fundamental difference between this and the system in use in Aus.

The IWF is nowhere near as independant as it proclaims IIRC, and not all ISPs currently subscribe to it, but the UK govt are trying to force them all to. The IWF is currently operating as a registered charity which some annoyed people are currently trying to get revoked as they should not be operating this way. If every government censorship system start to get too much feature creep then we'll see more of the kind of software people are using to get free electronic speech in china such as Tor in everyday use.