Clean Up the 'Nets

The earwax eating Australian Prime Minister who I wrote about a couple of months ago is now pursuing a massive internet censorship campaign.

There are a few thoughts I had while reading the article.

The first was that it was an opt-out censorship rather than an opt-in censorship. That means that an Australian internet customer must call their provider or - even worse - someone in the government and request that their pornographic websites be unblocked. This seems like it could raise privacy issues somewhere along the line.

My other thought was regarding the fact that blocked sites must be manually logged into the filter for them to be blocked in this censorship system. Even if you're able to filter all of the dirty sites one day, the filter wouldn't stop the most inappropriate site on the planet the next day as long as it was created - or its web address was altered - after the filter's original calibration. This means that someone's job (or some peoples' job) is to browse the net looking for newly minted porn sites and logging them into the filter.

Those would/will be tax dollars hard at work.