Sorry for the rant, but for those who are interested here goes..
1. Internet
Currently the oz goverment is trying to censor the internet. I'm amazed how many people don't know or care that this fight is happening right now. Senator Conroy's justification is to 'stop Child Porn'. Their method is to filter all web addresses.
The problem is that 99.9% of CP is not distributed by the web. It is done thru VPNs, SSH, and peer to peer connections to name a few. I used to work for QLD Police in computer forensics, I can personally attest to this. Stopping web traffic (as opposed to internet traffic) won't make a lick of difference to the war on CP. (Which is something that I really really really loathe). The problem is that most punters think the web
is the internet.
The downside to the rest of us is that it will slow the internet by up to 30%, and the government will control what you see. Other countries where this is done, like Thailand, started out using the CP justification and now bans 10000 sites for political reasons (they say things against the government or monarchy).
See
http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/SaveTheNet/442 One of the main reasons this bid to censor the internet started was as a promise to appease senator Steve Fielding and his family first party. Family First represent the rise of the religious right to political power in australia and if you only need to look to america to see how scary that can become. They represent CityLife and Hillsong churches, where huge groups of amway-loving happy clappers happily hand over up to 30% of their gross income each week. These churches have little to spend the money on, apart from disgustingly opulent 'churches' with multimillion dollar AV setups. They have plenty left to pour into politics.
2. TV
As for the TV side of things, groups such as 'Australian Family Association'
www.family.org.au/index.phphave hordes of righteous followers wielding and bible in one hand and a pen in the other. Every episode of The Chaser or John Safran's is followed by hundreds of letters of complaint. For example they mounted the campaign to stop the teen lesbian scene in home and away in the name of 'morals'.
The main problem here is that we (normal people) don't write to support what we like so they only ever hear one side of the story.
"Dear ABA, seeing Denise Richards in the pool scene in 'Wild Things' last night has really made my week... keep it up!"3. Video Games.
I'm 33. I'm not allowed to buy an adult video game in australia. We have no category for games that rate over an MA, and so have to be censored to fit MA.
So.. what's the final irony in all this?
All efforts at censorship fail.
1. For the internet, people will just use secure proxies, tunnelling, tor, or other emerging technologies to get around the censorship. As an example of this, I was in Turkey recently and Youtube was censored there. (The whole site!) And yet every young person knew how to access it with a few extra seconds effort. There goes the government's millions...
2. TV - again, with the help of the internet, people will get what TV they want regardless of local censorship laws.
3. Games - people just buy the uncensored version from Hong Kong for half the local price. Or get a pirated copy for nothing. The irony here is that they would have purchased a legitimate copy if it was available uncensored.
That's my views, debate away..
that accompany the sex stuff, but not the killing stuff.
[}:)]