Grah, that letter makes me angry!! Also you have no idea how much it took to stop me bailing up Clive Hamilton yesterday and asking him why the hell he likes to construct such terrible straw man arguments that make CAPPE look bad over this. Seriously. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/01/2433845.htm Truth is, I didn't want to make a scene, so I'm hoping the whole thing will just go away :(
Actually the pubic hair issue that he mentions is an interesting one. As you know readers of fark.com are typically overweight middle-aged white males sitting alone in their parent's basements masturbating to porn on the Internet. As such it is interesting to read about their opinions on pubic hair, because they are certain to have some (opinons). Recently (the last few years) there has actually been a resurgence of interest in "natural women", with trimmed or completely untouched pubes. I think this the natural continuation of a cycle that reached its zenith (or nadir depending on your point of view) in the 1990s with the trend for completely-shaved women. This preference is not uncommon, but farkers expressing it often have their views compared with pedophilia.
Still, I agree that his article destroys strawmen. The debate about whether we should be censoring, rather than whether we can, is alive and well -- just look at the recent fracas surrounding our lack of R classification for video games.
Yeah, the pedophilia thing doesn't make sense, but farkers rarely do. They're good at expressing their opinion somehow though.
I don't know about the genetic priming thing. There was apparently a trend a while back among women to prefer men with little to no body hair, wasn't there?
Filtering technologies have been adopted by ISPs in a number of countries including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway and Finland, predominantly to filter child pornography. In these countries ISP filtering has not affected internet performance to a noticeable level.
That's because (in Sweden, Norway and Finland at least), filtering is achieved by using DNS blacklists, which are simple to implement and have almost no performance impact because they can utilise existing infrastructure (you can easily set up a blacklist in BIND). They're also trivially bypassed by changing your DNS server, or by using a hosts file. The UK uses a blacklist too, but it's IP-based and harder to circumvent.
OTOH, the Australian Government is considering the use of content-based (or analysis-based) filtering systems, which require new infrastructure and are slower, not to mention more complex, less accurate and in most other ways wholly incomparable to blacklists.
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Truth is, I didn't want to make a scene, so I'm hoping the whole thing will just go away :(
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Still, I agree that his article destroys strawmen. The debate about whether we should be censoring, rather than whether we can, is alive and well -- just look at the recent fracas surrounding our lack of R classification for video games.
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I don't know about the genetic priming thing. There was apparently a trend a while back among women to prefer men with little to no body hair, wasn't there?
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That's because (in Sweden, Norway and Finland at least), filtering is achieved by using DNS blacklists, which are simple to implement and have almost no performance impact because they can utilise existing infrastructure (you can easily set up a blacklist in BIND). They're also trivially bypassed by changing your DNS server, or by using a hosts file. The UK uses a blacklist too, but it's IP-based and harder to circumvent.
OTOH, the Australian Government is considering the use of content-based (or analysis-based) filtering systems, which require new infrastructure and are slower, not to mention more complex, less accurate and in most other ways wholly incomparable to blacklists.
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