Aussie Pirate Party plans election onslaught

After winning 7.1 per cent of Swedish votes in this year's European Parliament elections, The Pirate Party has opened up a branch in Australia and plans to contest the next federal election.

The party, which will campaign on a platform of anti-internet censorship and the decriminalisation of non-commercial file sharing, has already signed up 550 members, enough for it to register as a party with the Australian Electoral Commission.

Pirate Party Site:

SMH Article:

File sharing is a grey area. The idea that people would have no right to protect their work is not fair. Artists need to eat too. But the idea that a person can be sued by a record company for hundreds of thousands of dollars for having a hand full of mp3s on their computer is simply absurd.

So, as system where artists are rewarded and record companies are destroyed... don't know how but I think it could fly. :)

Then we more to internet censorship. I care more about this than pirating so I find myself agreeing with the Pirate Party. Also, pirates are on FSM's side and it is blasphemy day.

Turkey's YouTube blackout enters year two

Much ado about Ataturk

Turkey is getting a dressing-down today from free press organization Reporters Without Borders, as the country's blockage of YouTube enters year two.

Google's video-sharing site has been banned a number of times in Turkey since early 2007, in most cases because of videos deemed insulting to the country's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who died over eight decades ago.

Turkey's fourth and most recent YouTube banning was hammered down on 5 May 2008.

The Register:

Does Turkey's government imagine that Ataturk set up a secular democracy so that the government could suppress free speech over a stupid, childish insult traded between football fans?

As usual, the net filter was proposed on the back of moral panic thus:

Turkish law lets prosecutors seek a court-ordered shutdown of any website deemed liable to incite suicide, paedophilia, drug usage, obscenity, prostitution, or attacking the memory of the republic's founding father.

Critics note the law opens the door to many abuses — such as letting a couple soccer fans effectively shut down an entire country's access to the world's most popular video-sharing website.

Sound familiar? Drop the "republic's founding father" and this statement could have come straight from Senator Conroy's mouth.

What's government's role in making the web secure?

There is no kill switch for the internet, no secret on-off button in an Oval Office drawer.

Yet when a US Senate committee was exploring ways to secure computer networks, a provision to give the US president the power to shut down internet traffic to compromised websites in an emergency set off alarms.

Link:

Lots of juicy what-if style ticking time bombs here. These what-ifs don't happen in the real world or cyberspace. Saying, what-if hackers infiltrate a nuclear power station is a reason not to have nuclear power stations, for me, rather than a reason not to have freely operating internet. If hackers get in and know that they could be cut off at any time they will simply design their attacks around the knowledge that they have to get in, set the computers to destroy stuff autonomously, and get out before they are detected. Not safer, just different.

Lookout! More moral panic coming... so to speak.

A study from the Swinburne University of Technology of 1325 internet users found more than half of those who engaged in cybersex were married or in a serious relationship.

SMH article:

Note that the article mentions that 40% of people stumbled across illegal material.
1) This doesn't have to be child abuse material. This could be any sexually explicit material cause Australians aren't allowed to see pictures of real sex that might cause titillation.
2) This isn't kids accidentally stumbling across illegal material. These are adults looking for sexual material or encounters. They went looking for material and found it. I am still yet to stumble across sexually explicit material by accident, even though I'm on line 15hours a day.

Watching Crocodile Dundee

Well half watching it. So, Paul Hogan grabs the transvestite on the groin after the cab driver tells him that she is a man, not a woman. We all remember this. This scene has been hacked out. WTF?! Who cares about this? Yet, hacking someone's jacket to bits with a huge knife is fine. Being beaten up in an alley, that's fine. We can have all the violence we want but nothing sexual.

Wikipedia article

Internet censorship in Australia primarily refers to the proposed banning of certain Internet materials by the Australian Federal Government, through restriction of site access on all Australian Internet Service Providers.

Internet censorship in Australia

Link:

How the Web Prevents Rape

All that Internet porn reduces sex crimes. Really.

Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

Slate Article:

I like this so much it's going up again!

Statistics Laundering: false and fantastic figures

This research paper contains information about various alarming and sensational, but out-of-date, false and/or misleading 'statistics' concerning the prevalence of 'child pornography' material on Internet Web sites, etc., which appeared in Australian media reports/articles, government agency reports, etc., in 2008 and 2009.

Link to libertus.net:

This is an important fight because conservatives are making laws that affect the net based on the fear that these false statistics create in people.

Protect children while near churches.

A site listing church sexual abuse.

Broken Rites:

Senators Ludlam and Conroy on the net filter.

This debate in the Senate between Ludlam and Conroy end in Conroy's admission that filtering will not be able to block peer to peer traffic.

Peer to peer traffic is said to be the best way to share child abuse material.

Police busts are often through police infiltrating boards who share material this way. This means that the government is attacking normal porn, not child abuse material.

Open Australia copy of the Senate Question Time debate.

Chinese schools ditch controversial web filter

Schools in Beijing are quietly removing the Green Dam filter, which was required for all school computers in July, due to complaints over problems with the software.

China last month formally backed down on a plan to preinstall the internet filter software on all new computers sold in the country after July 1 after an international and domestic outcry.

SMH article:

Senator Conroy.

Even the Chinese are finding the filtering idea unpalatable, and yet you persist.

Tell Mr Rudd that you don't want this:

Email Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to tell him that you don't want net filtering.

http://www.pm.gov.au/PM_Connect/contact_your_pm_form

Nine news poll on net censorship.

Nine is running a net poll on net censorship on their website.

http://ninemsn.com.au/

Baby-swinging video charges dropped

All charges have been dropped against Chris Illingworth, the man who was charged for republishing on a video-sharing site a video of a man swinging a baby by its arms like a rag doll.

SMH Article:

This utter waste of police time and resources will be repeated again and again as long as we are allowing hysterical child protection agencies to dictate public policy on what constitutes child abuse. The time that the police wasted on this nonsense could have resulted in the arrest of a few more Catholic priest pedophile rings.

When will this nonsense stop? When people stop voting chronically ignorant, witch hunters into parliament.

Congratulations Mr Illingworth. You stuck it to the man. I hope you are compensated to the tune of millions so that they think next time. Well done EFA for backing him up. I'm on my way with another donation.

Hard police work, not majic bullets.

A SEVEN-MONTH operation tracking international predators on the internet has culminated in the arrest of a 44-year-old father of three in rural Queensland.

Canadian detective Mike MacFarlane, posing as a 14-year-old girl on an internet chat room, was contacted by the Queensland man in February, police allege.

Link:

This is how crimes are solved. Useful police investigations, such as this one, would be hampered by the internet filter.

Mormons on pornography.

This is the kind of nonsense, unsupported by research, religions go on about when porn comes up.

[Pornography] is like a raging storm, destroying individuals and families, utterly ruining what was once wholesome and beautiful.

I do feel sorry for the wife who outlines her upset at her husbands use of porn. However, I feel sorry for her because she has been mislead about what porn use means. If she'd been told that pornography was just a form of literature that her husband liked and that it was a private thing that he liked to do then she would have had a chance of coming to terms with it.

This is the kind of nonsensical rubbish that churches are putting out. This is steering the government's internet policies.

Link:

Ten Qld men charged for child porn

Police have charged ten Queensland men for trading and possessing child pornography.

The charges were laid today following a three-month operation by Taskforce Argos targeting the trade of child exploitation material via the internet.

Link:

This is policing, Senator Conroy. This will be more difficult with your filtering in place.

Censorship's goals...

Two Azerbaijani bloggers face up to five years jail for posting a video of a donkey giving a press conference, the latest crackdown on the vibrant Internet of the ex-Soviet Union.

SMH Link:

SMH: Conroy urged to 'end net censorship farce'

The Federal Government's internet censorship trials have been repeatedly delayed over the past nine months, leading to claims from the Opposition that the Government is deliberately withholding the results to avoid embarrassment.

SMH Article:

Give it up Conroy. It's a dead duck.

Mr Illingworth's case gets weirder...

It is not often that I agree with the ACMA:

"[T]he Australian Communications and Media Authority, responding to a complaint about the video on July 9, sent the clip to the Classification Board, which classified the content MA15+"

Where is the case now? If it is classified as M15+ why does Mr Illingworth have to answer any qustions?

This is a death sentence for this man. This case will kill him. All of this tax money wasted on killing an innocent man. WTF!?

I cannot praise Asher Moses enough for standing up for Mr Illingworth and standing up to the government interfering with normal Australian socialising innocently with friends online.

SMH Article >