G'day,
Last night on the news some bloke from the new Federal Government has declared that they are going to censorship what we can and can't see on the net.
Now I'm not saying that child pawn is something I'd ever want to look at, but it has me concerned where in the sand do you draw the line? I'll give an example, several years ago working in an design studio the studio manager decided to put a filter on a set of words (she was very evangelical) to the extent that when I wanted to search an online photolibrary for shots for use in an ad for a client i was hamstrung as to what i could view. Photo libriaries like getty Images work on a set of descriptive words that apply to and aid a search for a particular image. If that image had one of the words that was banned under the filter then I couldn't view that image, even if if was something as trivial as a beach, because it might have the words "bikini" or "woman" within the search words associated with it. I eventually got the filter lifted because it was restrictive in what we could or could not search for.
Travel in time to this morning, I opened up Azureus with Vuse to continue some downloads and I can't see the content in it anymore (see attached screenshot) and I got the message "Access to the specified resource () has been forbidden." Why is it all of a sudden forbidden? I could view the programme in it's entireity yesterday and since last nights announcement I can't. The area now blocked off had the words " mature content", "bath" and other stuff so :: ! Now in the programme I had the choice to close off the section if I wanted to, the same as I would if I wanted to set up a filter on my browsers.
So why should I or you be told what you can and cannot have access to? And once you start shutting access off, where do you draw a line in the sand as to how far you go? The first example I gave is a perfect example of this - the intent was good, but the effect was restrictive beyond sensibility.