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Web filters to censor video games
Asher Moses
June 25, 2009 - 5:05PM
The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block websites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds.
Separately, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has been nominated by the British ISP industry for its annual " internet villain" award, competing alongside the European Parliament and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Australia is the only developed country without an R18+ classification for games, meaning any titles that do not meet the MA15+ standard - such as those with excessive violence or sexual content - are simply banned from sale by the Classification Board, unless they are modified to remove the offending content.
So far, this has only applied to local bricks-and-mortar stores selling physical copies of games, but a spokesman for Senator Conroy confirmed that under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.
This means that even Australians who are aged above 15 and want to obtain the adult-level games online will be unable to do so. . It will undoubtedly raise the ire of gamers, the average age of which is 30 in Australia, according to research commissioned by the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia.
Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said the Government clearly went far beyond any mandate it had from the public to help parents deal with cyber-safety.
He said Australians would soon learn this the hard way when they find web pages mysteriously blocked.
"This is confirmation that the scope of the mandatory censorship scheme will keep on creeping," said Mr Jacobs.
"Far from being the ultimate weapon against child abuse, it now will officially censor content deemed too controversial for a 15-year-old. In a free country like ours, do we really need the government to step in and save us from racy web games?"
Senator Conroy's spokesman said the filter would cover "computer games such as web-based flash games and downloadable games, if a complaint is received and the content is determined by ACMA to be Refused Classification". All games that exceed MA15+ are deemed to be RC.
The filtering could also block "the importation of physical copies of computer games sold over the internet which have been classified RC", the spokesman said.
Ron Curry, chief executive of the IEAA, said the move highlighted the "unacceptable situation" of not having an R18+ classification for video games. The industry has been fighting for changes to classification laws for years.
"It's through the introduction of an R18+ classification that adults will have access to age appropriate material and parents will have the full tool kit to understand the suitability of content for their children," he said.
Mark Newton, an ISP engineer and internet filtering critic, said the move to extend the filtering to computer games would place a cloud over online-only games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, which aren't classified in Australia due to their online nature.
He said the online distribution of such games has historically been exempt from customs controls on RC material because they have only ever covered physical articles.
"That exemption is the only reason why multi-player games with user-generated environments are possible in this country; without it, it'd only take one game user anywhere in the world to produce objectionable content in the game environment to make the Australian Government ban the game for everyone," said Newton.
Nine ISPs are trialling the web censorship plan, which will block all content that has been "refused classification" by ACMA. Results of the trials are due to be published in July.
In Britain, Senator Conroy was nominated for the annual internet villain award "for continuing to promote network-level blocking despite significant national and international opposition", George White, press officer with Britain's Internet Services Providers' Association, said.
"We would be delighted if Mr Conroy wishes to attend the Awards and collect the trophy should he win," Mr White said.
Senator Conroy's spokesman refused to comment on the award.
SMH 25-6-9
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/web-filters-to-censor-video-games-20090625-cxrx.html
. . . . . .
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Pandemic pandemonium: pass the paracetamol
Is that swine flu, would you say, or swine flew? Last Monday I collected the child from school, as you do, fully equipped with clothes change, chilled water and a snack, ready to warp-speed her off to if-it's-Monday-it-must-be-drama. But the child wouldn't eat, would barely drink, was shivering and had a headache so bad we canned drama, which she adores, and laid her out instead under five doonas and a snoring Burmese cat.
"I think I've got swine flu," was her only utterance which I, ever the devoted mother, ignored.
By Wednesday, medicated by bed, paracetamol and high-rise stacks of Asterix comics, she was clearly on the mend. Then the email arrived.
It was from school, two attachments. One, from that well-known health authority the NSW Education Department, bore the familiar injunction about kids returning from overseas needing a further week off school. The other was more specific, advising that a child from our school was recently in a situation where there had been community or school transmission of influenza and that "if your child is feeling unwell with any flu-like symptoms take them to emergency or ring your GP".
Sigh. I'm on deadline, and seven hours in casualty, crammed with people who probably really do have swine flu, isn't what I need. She's clearly not dying, so it's not about my child's health, it's about community responsibility. H1N109 is, after all, a notifiable disease, and we're talking pandemic, right? So I feel I should do, well, something.
I call the GP, explain the situation, thinking they'd have been briefed, have some decision-tree pinned by the phone. After all, I can hardly be the first to make such a call.
"I dunno" was the essence of it.
I read the email, aloud.
Uh, maybe call emergency?
"Will they," I ask, "be able to test for it on the spot?" I'm wondering how I'll know to keep her home for a week before it's all over.
"Yes, they'll take a swab."
"But that'll take a week to, like, fruit, right? Or is there an instant test?"
"Uh, yes, I think there's an instant test. Why don't you call emergency? Bye."
Anyone who has experienced hospital knows it's a brave thing to put the words "instant" and "emergency" in the same paragraph. But, still in the spirit of community service, I call the Children's Hospital emergency number. The receptionist sounds entirely nonplussed like, why call us? and gives me the Swine Flu Hotline.
As it happens, I've recently heard an excellent Richard Aedy interview on the rollout (such a confident image, that, like kicking a broadloom carpet out across the country) of the national HealthDirect hotline. Every phone-in, I now recall, will be triaged remotely by a registered nurse who, fully Google-mapped with their closest medical service, will instruct them in that direction, or not. That's the theory.
So it is with a warm sense of our starched and bosomy health system that I dial the Swine Flu Hotline.
"Uh, we're really a general information service," says the disembodied voice. "What's your postcode?"
I, always a sucker for a total non-sequitur, tell her it's Redfern, 2016.
Silence.
I add, helpfully, "I know my nearest hospital."
"Uh, you anywhere near Liverpool?" she says finally.
Fighting the urge to quip, "Is that Liverpool, Sydney or Liverpool, England?", I answer, "No, not really. But I do know the nearest hospital. It's Randwick. Or possibly Camperdown. Or I suppose St Vinnies. Or Sydney City."
"You near Parramatta then?"
"Uh, no. We're five minutes from Central, as in station."
"Well, we're really a general information service for the public."
The tone is peremptory, but I'm not ready for that.
"Isn't there some responsibility to report this disease? How can you know if it's a pandemic without some protocol for diagnosing and recording cases?"
"We're a general information line. You should probably call the local emergency."
"Yes, thank you. I've done that. They said to call you."
"Or you could try Health NSW. I could give you their number."
This strikes me as an unlikely remedy so I decline, politely, and call the school. "Is this serious," I ask? "Does someone actually have swine flu? A child in my daughter's class? Someone she knows?"
"I'm sorry, I know that but I can't tell you for privacy reasons."
I do not swear or tear my hair but reflect wistfully that thus is apathy forced upon us. I am close to giving up, but my curiosity is piqued and there's one more call to make. It becomes half a dozen but eventually yields the information that yes, there is an "instant test" for H1N109. It takes a few hours, not a few days, and it's available at Prince of Wales and Westmead.
So that's something. But it does not allay my sense that, however expertly the nanny state may stamp out both personal responsibility and cultural pizazz, any time you really need her, nanny's out to lunch.
Meanwhile, reports are incoming that a new human flu virus in pigs causes strange feathered irruptions on their shoulders.
This first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Elizabeth Farrelly
. . . . . .
I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
http://www.ebearweb.net
Bujinkan: Martial Arts of the Samurai and Ninja
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Stephen's Snaps
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This week Careel Bay.
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Asher Moses
June 3, 2009 - 11:56AM
The Rudd Government's internet censorship policy will cost about $90,000 per blocked web address to implement and the Government has admitted it has not developed any criteria to determine whether trials of the scheme are a success.
The Opposition, Greens and online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia are concerned the lack of success criteria is a sign the policy itself has no clear goals and is instead being dictated by what the technology will allow.
Nine ISPs are trialling the web censorship plan, which will mandatorily block all content that has been "refused classification" by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Results of the trials are due to be published in July but, in response to a freedom of information request, the Government has admitted that "there are not success criteria as such".
"This exposes a major shortcoming in the Government's approach," Opposition communications spokesman Nick Minchin said.
Greens senator Scott Ludlam said: "It sounds as though we'll filter as many sites as the technology allows us to ... that's the reason I think people are so concerned about this in that it seems to be really open-ended."
EFA spokesman Colin Jacobs said: "The pilot seems to have been a political exercise in deflecting criticism. Without any benchmarks, the Government can claim it was a success regardless of the cost or performance issues that ISPs encounter."
ISP engineer and filtering critic Mark Newton said: "If I spent several hundred thousand dollars on a technology trial at work without having any idea about what the trial was attempting to test, I'd probably be out of a job."
The ACMA blacklist of prohibited URLs, which forms the basis of the Government's censorship policy, contained 977 web addresses as at April 30, according to ACMA.
The Government initially planned to censor the entire blacklist but, after widespread complaints that the list included a slew of legal R18+ and X18+ sites, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, backtracked, saying he would only block the "refused classification" (RC) portion of the blacklist.
According to ACMA, 51 per cent of the blacklist, or 499 URLs, is RC content.
Based on the Government's budgeting of $44.5 million to implement the filtering scheme, this means the policy will cost $90,000 per URL.
"For the cost involved with implementing a mandatory filter, you could perhaps get far more powerful results in relation to striking at the actual heart of the problem, by increasing law enforcement resources to assist with the actual targeting of the producers and distributors of abhorrent content," Senator Minchin said.
Although the new Government plan to block just RC content will not prevent adults from surfing for porn, it is still fraught with difficulty as the RC category includes not just child pornography but anti-abortion sites, fetish sites and sites containing pro-euthanasia material such as The Peaceful Pill Handbook by Dr Philip Nitschke.
Sites added to the blacklist in error were also classified as RC, such as one containing PG-rated photographs by Bill Henson.
Senator Ludlam is concerned that the Government is testing an expanded blacklist of 10,000 sites - a 20-fold increase on what it intends to block - despite having not defined the objectives of the policy.
He said that, if the objective was to stop the flow of child porn, filtering sites on a blacklist would not achieve this goal because the blacklist would never capture even close to all of the child-porn sites on the web and would be ineffective against peer-to-peer file sharing.
"It's like trying to stop the drug trade by blocking one set of traffic lights," Senator Ludlam said.
He noted that this week's arrest of 16 Australian men for accessing a web video of an eight-year-old Russian girl being raped was the result of "people booting down doors, not a net filtering outcome".
Senator Conroy's spokesman, Tim Marshall, did not respond to a request for comment.
SMH 4-6-9
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/internet-filter-445m-and-no-goal-in-sight/2009/06/03/1243708489312.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
. . . . . .
I have the power to channel my imagination into ever-soaring levels of suspicion and paranoia.
http://www.ebearweb.net
Bujinkan: Martial Arts of the Samurai and Ninja
http://www.ebearweb.net/bujinkan/
Stephen's Snaps
http://photo.ebearweb.net/
This week Careel Bay.
Simply nice photos, Landscape, Seascape, Underwater, The Northern Beaches Sydney.
