Australian Web Filter To Censor Downloaded Games 200
Xiroth writes "The Australian Federal Communications Ministry has confirmed that they intend to use the planned filter to block the download of games that have been refused by Australia's classification authority, the OFLC. As an Electronic Frontiers Australia spokesman noted, 'This is confirmation that the scope of the mandatory censorship scheme will keep on creeping.'"
Re:Refused? (Score:2, Informative)
Who decides what games even get looked at for classification? What if they just haven't gotten to the game you want yet?
According to the article, somebody from the public needs to make a complaint;
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".
I'm sure there will be special interest groups of many varieties saving the children from various categories of filth and immorality. The Internet will be a much more polished facade of reality than it is now.
Australia is a Failed State (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. The Australians are afraid of breasts (Ref: Conservatives MPs... want topless... bathing banned on NSW beaches [news.com.au]). The world is has gone mad.
Re:Their censor software was written by a Lunix us (Score:3, Informative)
"Lunix is the crappiest OS since the days of Dos 6.2"
Honestly, what did you expect from a small Unix for the Commodore 64 microcomputer [wikipedia.org]? Frankly, I think its features list [sourceforge.net] is pretty damned impressive considering the hardware they're targeting.
Amazon pages will have to be blocked (Score:4, Informative)
So if what Conroy has announced here goes ahead, a whole pile of product pages at Amazon [amazon.com] (among others) are going to have to go on the blacklist. (Leisure Suit Larry is among the games banned in Australia [classification.gov.au].
The problem is that many of the proposed filtering solutions work by routing traffic to IP addresses that host prohibited pages to a proxy server. As we saw with the Internet Watch/BT/Wikipedia debacle, this approach is likely to cause problems with high traffic sites (and may well overload the proxy server).
Danny.
Re:Refused? (Score:1, Informative)
the hookers didnt appear in the Australian version of Duke 3d.
The game had a "parental lock" mode, the aussie version shipped with the parental lock in always-on mode.
(had to get a crack off the internets to show me the hookers).
They ofcourse still appeared in the game; they were just invisible. So whenever you went into a bar with the dancers, you could kill invisible things.