Anyone who wants to publish online or set up an internet businness needs to be very clear what his/her vision is and be true to that. Self-censorhip maybe, but if you want to be seen by as many people as possible you need to decide on your vision and stick to it. Who is to say that what you write won’t be offfensive and blocked somewhere in the world.
Trimming has to stop somewhere, and internet publishers should stick to their authenic voice.
]]>I think it is time for me to dust out my copy of PGP again.
]]>A Great Firewall of Australia has been proposed – it’ll protect the kids (http://is.gd/dZGe). And you could use it for the War on Terror. After all no-one could object to laws against terrorists could they? The data on what you’re looking at, which might be personal communication or online banking, will of course be held in the government’s secure hands away from abuse. So only terrorists or pornographers (and anyone using the internet in the UK) have anything to fear.
If only we had laws in place that already made possession of illegal images a crime…
]]>A ratings scheme would only work if browsers were developed to implement it and you could just use a different browsers. A system like this already exists (PICS) but so few sites use it that no one really pays it any attention.
One option would be for the browser to default to treating all sites as “Adult” or “Inappropriate” unless there was a mark saying otherwise – but this is still avoided by changing browser (Amaya anyone?). Forcing ISPs to block sites based on ratings would be possible but again would demand people self-certified themselves as “inappropriate” or had a default block action and people had to certify otherwise. This would be a field day for legal action though – each time a site was incorrectly flagged…
Another possible alternative is to put pressure on ISPs to content filter but I suspect that would become unworkable very quickly unless we develop the great firewall of Britain. I am unaware of any packet sniffing software that can tell if a YouTube video is a beheading or some 16 year old singing. (makes you wonder which is worse….)
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