Nonsense

I've added Stigherrian to the blog roll - but more out of anger than anything else.

He had yet another piece about Internet filtering in Crikey today (in the subscriber section so I haven't linked it). The following is the comment I've offered to Crikey (that they chose not to publish)

Re: Conroy attacks BitTorrent: Ruins Australia online Stilgherrian is now well reowned amongst Crikey readers as an Internet censorship hater, but you really should be reading what he writes before you print it. His opening paragraph critices the Government's filtering plan without showing any recognition of what the plan entails - so that he continues to repeat the nonsense that the "filter" won't work.

The Government has never anounced a plan to ensure everyone is safe, just that it wants to implement something that looks like the existing classification scheme (that applies to books, movies etc) to websites. The fact that it can be by-passed by other means (e.g. by e-mail or snail mail) isn't the point. And the point of a technical trial is to see what happens.

I'm reminded of the might with which telcos claimed that they could do nothing about Internet dumping in the early part of the decade, only to find via this morning's SMH that Optus was up to their necks in it.

Your correspondant goes on to claim that Conroy's comment about possibly filtering peer-to-peer traffic amounted to a plan to block all BitTorrents, then goes and quotes one legitimate BitTorrent user to get a reaction to the inaccurate conclusion. All of it is garbage.

Meanwhile if Stilgherrian really believes his rhetoric on censorship let's see him start a campaign to have all Refused Classification material allowed into Australia as X+ because - using his logic - existing restrictions won't guarantee that none of it will get in.