Zombies! Hundreds Of them
On the 27th of March, the Zombie horde returned to Sydney, as the Second Australian Gamers United Zombie Walk brought over 500 zombies, and about 40 or so Zombie Hunters, together to protest against Australia’s absence of an Adults Rating for Video Games.
Now considering the departure of South Australian Attorney General, Michael Atkinson, personally I would have thought that a protest march for an Adults rating was a rather moot topic, considering that both the Ratings biggest opponent was now gone, and the fact that his replacement was actually in favour of the Rating. Thankfully, Australia has another electronic issue that sits hard with a number of the advocates for an R-18+ Rating; that would be of course, be the Mandatory Internet Filter.
Considering my history of covering both the Internet Filter, and the Ratings debate, I was given the choice to participate in any of the discussions that would come up in the course of the day, or simply participate in the march; naturally I chose to help out, also considering, I’m naturally loud person, apparently loud enough to be heard, even further than a loudspeaker, which when mustering over 500 people is apparently actually a good thing when the group kept getting separated.
Despite a small detour caused by an unknown bylaw, which didn’t seem to be an issue during the last march an some rather candid pictures with the police who informed us that we were unable to travel through Darling Harbour, the organisers had to change the route on the fly, but thankfully, it didn’t seem to slow the march down.
Roughly three and a half hours following the start of the march, the marchers pulled themselves back to the fountain that served as the initial meeting point, where everyone took the chance to sit and recover from the over 20,000 steps that they had just stumbled through; At the end of the March, I hung around the fountain, to chat with the organisers; and yes, it did take a lot out wearing all that black tactical gear; I also noticed that there was more than one Zombie that had passed out or had decided to fall asleep in the gardens.
In all, it was an amazing turnout, with at least four times the number of zombies than last time; hopefully, this act, will cause some ripples in the rest of the community.
Actually, Conroy, they do…
A few weeks ago, during an interview, Stephen Conroy reaffirmed the Government’s stance to not disclose a list of websites that have been blacklisted; stating that “We don’t disclose when books, music or video games are banned, so why should we do the same with the internet,”
Unfortunately, Minister Conroy, that information is disclosed; when a game, book, movie or CD is banned, all the vendors are notified that they will not be able to sell these items to the public, they in turn tell the public that they cannot purchase these items. It is after all the reasoning behind the R18+ movement, because the community at large is aware that these games are being banned. Despite that once these items become banned, they are often highly sought after, and obtained from other countries, usually Indonesia or New Zealand with little or no legal recourse. Despite the legality of obtaining these banned, the method of notification and obtaining them still exists, and raises the lack of knowledge in the Communications Minister.
The main issue associated with not revealing the blacklist, or even just new additions to the blacklist, is the lack of information about what would happen once a website is on the blacklist. Considering that a number of companies that exist almost exclusively online, the there is a chance that a harmless online distribution company may end up on the blacklist by way of accident or malicious activity; they have no detailed legal forum to appeal the decision, or even legislation to inform them that they have even been put on the list.
Another issue that is highlighted by the reluctance to release the blacklist relates more to the effectiveness of the Filter, as opposed to the secrecy. The basic concept of this filter is to block ‘harmful’ content at the ISP level, meaning that you shouldn’t be able to access websites that are on the list. Ideally then, there shouldn’t be a problem with releasing a list of websites that you can’t access, right? Unless, of course the filter isn’t the perfect fix that the Government is promoting it as.
It might, however have something to do with, the Ministers announcement of 16 April, stating that it would not be an offense to bypass the Filter. Yes you read that right, the Mandatory Internet Filter, is mandatory, as long as you actually use it. Now I would have thought something called Mandatory would be, I don’t know, Mandatory, and it being an offense to try and bypass it. It it will be perfectly legal to bypass the filter, a feat that can be accomplished quite readily, by way of VPN or Proxy Servers, negating the actual effectiveness of the filter, to the point where it shouldn’t even be called the Mandatory Internet Filter, but the Optional Internet Filter.
A number of my fellow bloggers have begun to speculate that the Filter is becoming a political foil, something that will be dragged along until just before the next election, only to be dropped; I’m unfortunately a little more sceptical, the Government would not have used the Filter as an election promise in one election only to drop it in the next as an election ploy seems a little redundant in the world of politics
Mandatory Internet Filter
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Mandatory Internet Filter
R18+ Classification
Stephen Conroy