This post talks about The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1990. It talks about the ineffectiveness of filtering software and the cost to Ausralia. Google Blog
The Australian Internet Industry has a list of 16 approved filters. However, testing by Computer Choice found that innocuous content, such as medical sites, were often blocked while some adult content passed through the filter.
The filtering software products are ineffective, and Australia cannot control websites hosted outside its borders.
Article on Australian Governement censoring websites. Spending $9.8 million. Possibly futile. Not many Australians enjoy a truly free online experience (only 21%).
ARIN2610
googleblog
"Australia's off-line censorship laws are among the most restrictive in Western democracies and the Net censorship laws are more akin to those in totalitarian regimes than to those, if any, in other countries purporting to be Western democracies."
ONI isis a collaborative partnership of three institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and the SecDev Group (Ottawa).
It aims to investigate, expose and analyze Internet filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion to provide education and policy advice on issues. (clusty)
Australia, have announced its plan to ban at least 500 and more websites from next month. the criteria of filtering 500 websites is that they contain or might contain Refused Classification (RC), such as Child Abuse, Sexual Violence, Content related to crime, euthanasia, violence, drug use and promoting terrorist activities would be banned.
The father of the Australian Firewall, Mr. Conroy corroborates with ISP's in Australia to filter the internet. However, with such censorship brings about issues of democracy and human rights. The violation of the basic human rights to access information on internet. Such censorship is said to bring in several controversies, illogical content bans and censorship of websites that are unrelated to content banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
A look at internet censorship around the world and particuarly the plans for filtering in Australia, considering Conroy's statements and the supposed support of the ISPs.
Talks of Australia joining other nations that have internet censorship. Focus on removing obscene sites and Child pornography. Optus and Telstra willingly censoring sites. Possibly a futile effort and filtering needs to be more thorough.
Comparing Australia with other major countries in both western and eastern to highlight the similarities and differences in censorship on internet. iNet is agreeing on helping Conroy to provide ISP blockage for the censorship (google blog search)
Big Brother aka the Communication and Information Minister is going to replace Iran's Web access with an 'all-Iranian intranet' for the greater good of the country.
Internet censorship can really limit your activities on the internet. Mostly, countries ban some websites from being used with regional IP addresses while sometimes the websites don't give access to IP addresses of certain regions. However, the problems of internet censorship can be solved with the help of VPNs.
While Australia has been debating the important symbolic issues raised by a republic, other countries have achieved significant reform in the field of human rights. We are now alone among comparable nations in not having a statement of basic rights.
Australia has scored highly for internet freedom in its first appearance on a Freedom House report into 37 countries, but violation of user rights and lack of access for some users were cited as concerns.