Posts by Emma Hart
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I presume that the censors office is governed by legislation (the er... can't remember what the Act is called now), and is largely at arms length from the government in terms of their decisions as a result.
The current legislation (by far not just in NZ but pretty much everywhere) is full of subjective terms - sort of 'offensive to a reasonable person' and assumptions about material's intent. So to some degree it's open to interpretation.
With Emma Solution (and boy does that make me feel weird), that problem, however slight, should be eliminated, because something is either criminal or it isn't.
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Funding for the ACMA-like body, any heinously complicated process is going to cost money to administer, where is it from?
Well, any kind of monitoring or policing body is going to cost. I feel that if you're policing for less it should be cheaper, but I strongly suspect that's not what happens in practice. I don't know why it would be more expensive.
I would suggest that it should have similar status and guidelines as the office of the censor, which seems to me to typically do a fairly good job balancing individual rights and concerns of the state.
Here it does, but there've been cases over the years in the US and Australia where the Censor has become politicised. How aggressively certain material (gay porn vs straight porn, for example) is sought out and prosecuted can vary with the current governing ideology.
(Also as an aside I find it weird that the people who come into your house and seize your PC are Customs .)
In the interactions I've had with the NZ Censor's Office I've found them helpful and cooperative and reasonable. I'm not sure what ensures that they stay that way. That would push me in favour of an independent body like the PCE.
Except for this. Maybe censorship should be politicised. If voters decide they want a United Future government or whatever, shouldn't that government then be able to dictate that censorship is conducted as those voters apparently want? I'm not sure I know the answer to that.
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The definition if Scifi we use at Bardic Web goes thusly:
In defining the scope of the science fiction genre, we speak of the effect of science on society or people, that is;
· the effect of imagined science
· the imagined effect of actual science
· imagined technology based upon actual science
· imagined technology based upon imagined science
· the effect of science on imagined societies
· the effect of science on imagined individualsIf the society, the person, the technology, and the scientific knowledge base in the story are all standard and realistic (drawn from observed reality), the story would be classed as mainstream, contemporary fiction rather than as science fiction. In some cases, the term "science fiction" generally refers to any literary fantasy including a scientific factor as an essential, story-orienting component. Science fiction is not necessarily futuristic.
Which might make that point - scifi as a subset but different from spec-fic, which includes fantasy - except that if you look at Paul's original objection, he uses the word 'fantasy', not scifi.
Also we don't really give a toss if the distinction between scifi and fantasy gets all soft and blurry, because it is. We just don't want people jamming scifi into the non-spec genres.
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Well, at the risk of hectoring you, you're wrong, still wrong when you insist you're right, and you're no less wrong by labouring your mistaken point.
This made me snorfle.
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My impression of the Emma System would be that illegal sites would be targeted by the law. So the list should stay pretty short over a long period of time (possibly places that are illegal in one country but not in another?).
Indeed. Sites should come off it because they're shut down, except if it's something that's illegal in one jurisdiction and not in another. Eg the age of consent in the US is 14, or 15, or 16, or 18.
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How do you manage this, investigate everyone?
Not arguing, just kicking the idea around a bit...
Exactly what I'm after, dude.
This is what the ACMA does: investigates sites it receives complaints about. Anyone can lay a complaint, including an employee of the ACMA. But instead of black-listing the site, the ACMA-like body would, if the complaint seemed warranted, refer it to the police in the appropriate jurisdiction. This would require the cooperation of the ISP, but not that the ISP assume the job of dispute resolution or law enforcement.
It wouldn't be easy, it'd be heinously complicated, but it is now. It'd be simpler if there were some over-arching international agreement - a sort of International Whaling Commission for porn.
And yes, the illegal list. There are two ways to go about this that spring to mind. One, the illegal list isn't public, but it is subject to private audit. Two, the illegal list is produced centrally by an agency like the ACMA, and filtering companies have to publish anything they add to it.
It'd be incredibly tricky to determine if, say, a film clip featuring a man appearing to be strangled was real or simulated, consensual or non-con. But I don't think that means that you take the easy way out like the British have and ban and prosecute simulation or consensual rough sex.
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I'm pretty sure that's still Russell's job...
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Okay, fine, I give up, sci-fi is going to cause the death of civilisation.
Heh, someone should totally write a book about that.
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I suspect that that demographic will still be shrill in their demands for the whole thing to be sanitised & steam-cleaned.
And you know what really doesn't go down well? Suggesting that if they don't want their kids to ever encounter sex the first thing they should do is stop having it right in the house where their kid lives.
My potential career in the diplomatic service was never really a goer.
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So, let me see if I've got this right: If you expect any degree of transparency or accountability from a government agency (an agency, as far as I can tell, that alternates between bullying and lying about its activities), you're virtually dishing out kiddie pron to every teenage boy in Australia?
I have lost count of the number of times Conroy has implied that his opponents are paedophiles.
"If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree."
Leaving aside the issue of internet censorship, what are the chances of this actually working?
Working meaning all 'bad' sites blocked, all 'good' sites not blocked and a well managed process around the whole thing that allows for updates and doesn't annoy people.
Nil.
Hence my revamped Plan for the Internet, for which the base assumption is this: net filtering cannot be done well. It's not being done well anywhere, but it is being done badly in a whole bunch of places. Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Finland - all their lists have sites on them that shouldn't be, and sites not on them that should be. Those lists were all ostensibly drawn up to combat child pornography, but they've all had mission creep right from the start. Australia has just joined two other countries in being the only ones to censor WikiLeaks - China and the UAE.
Australia's even demonstrated that filtering doesn't really affect paedophiles. They busted a paedophile ring there last year, and Conroy trumpeted it as the kind of stuff that would be stopped by the filter. Only they were trading images solely by peer-to-peer file-sharing, which the filter doesn't filter.
Filters also create a false sense of security. They get used instead of supervision and education.
So here's my plan to deal with rude things on the net.
There is no national ISP filtering at all. None.
Any parent who wishes to filter their internet connection can access free home filtering software. This is the scheme Australia used to have. Trouble was no-one could be bothered using it. All filtering software companies, however, must produce annual public lists of all the legal sites they block. This can't be used as a shopping list for paedophiles, because it doesn't have child pornography on it. But if you want to filter the Peaceful Pill site or the AIDS Quilt site, you have to be prepared to say so.
Producers of child pornography are aggressively prosecuted. (That's actual child pornography that involves harm to actual children, not fiction or drawings.) This might sound like a no-brainer, but in Finland, if a child pornography site is detected, it's added to the black-list. The end.
Same goes for producers of any material - sexual or not - which has involved the commission of a crime in its production, but not material which looks like it might have, but actually didn't.
IT instruction in schools includes education on how to use the net safely. That would include what to do about avoiding content you don't want to see, but also how to deal with bullying, and issues around disclosure of private information. I'm against aggressive filtering in secondary schools, because you can't teach kids how to cope in the real net if you keep them in a sandbox all the time.
We have to get over this fixation on the medium. My son goes to school a block from Chch's sex district. That doesn't mean pron is going to ooze out of shops and brothels and destroy his childhood. Likewise, there's sex on the net. But if you want the net sanitised, then how can you not apply the same standard to the real world?
Likewise, we need to get the paranoia out of the issue. (Oh, thank you press releases from Watchdog reproduces verbatim by Stuff every school holidays, your shrieking helps so much.) I've been using the net for twenty years and I have NEVER run across child pornography, even though I spend a reasonable amount of time around sexual material.
I know there must be a bunch of flaws in my ideas, but I can't think of a better place to test 'em.