Still As Life

I was just reading a post by Duncan Riley about the potential for banning of things that are commonplace and acceptable today, purely because of the possibility of porn being received via these channels.

Duncan outlines just a few possibilities, Second Life, Skype, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, Usenet, BitTorrent, Blogs, Twitter, regular Google searches and Image searches, internet archives including Google's caching system.

In addition to this, what else is there? If Skype has the potential to allow the receipt of porn and anything else deemed unacceptable, which it no doubt does, than logically so does MSN, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and so on. Any other search engine can potentially be used to search for porn as well as Google.

While I don't deny that a porn filter would be a great thing, if it could be done effectively, as I have said before, when you start this sort of mandatory filtering, not only does the question arise about where does the line get drawn on what content gets filtered, but where does the line get drawn on what methods. Duncan even offered up the fact that porn can potentially be received via email as well, and often is in spam.

So what things get filtered and what don't? As BitTorrent is often deemed as a means for illegal downloading, despite the huge amount of legitimate uses for it, the excuse to filter it out would no doubt be jumped at, but what about everything else?

To filter out all of the possible sources leaves us with practically no internet at all, and then at speeds reduced to up to 78% slower than our already slow connections.

Mr Rudd, you and your ministers need to let go of the controlling attitude and stop even discussing this possibility. When it comes down to it, the only viable solution is to let parents teach their kids and teach parents how to use software filters. If you want, provide education about it in schools. Don't try to filter out the vast majority of the internet though.

Labels: internet, politics, rants