>The draft was open to public comment and 343 submissions were made.
>Of these, only one was in favor of the regulations. The rest either demanded revisions, or were completely against the bill. Despite the cascade of disapproval, the final draft of the law was barely subject to any scrutiny.
>On the last day of sitting before the Christmas period, a revised version of the bill was presented to the Parliament. It featured 173 amendments, but members were barely given any time to review them.
>The official reason was that the laws needed to be rushed through to prevent potential terrorist attacks from happening over the holidays. This was an especially dubious claim, since Australia already has a host of anti-terrorism laws.
>If the authorities required the new capabilities to force companies into building backdoors, then this also should be viewed with skepticism. Since the laws were passed on December 6, it is unlikely that any company would have been able to provide the necessary tools ahead of Christmas.
>On top of this, ASIO, the Australian spy agency, acknowledged there was no specific threat over the period, and it did not raise its warning level.
Absolute bullshit and our spineless "representatives" should be ashamed.
What kind of society are they supposedly defending?
it's definitely a big change in attitude from previous governments (conservative and otherwise) - i still remember Labour trying to introduce mandatory internet censorship a decade ago.
Encouraging given Australia's reputation as a the Wests's biggest nanny state. It will still be easier for Aussie teens to watch hardcore porn than to play Witcher 2...
There was their attempt at the Great Firewall of Australia, while mostly censorship was not just censorship.
But honestly there were so many things, it sounds funny but I can't even think of particular examples right now.
Oh, smoking is a good example. Doing their best to push adults out of being able to smoke. You can argue it's as justified as you like, but it's still nannying.
There's a lot the country restricts because it thinks it knows what's best for its citizens.
The crazy thing with smoking is that now organized crime have taken over selling cigarettes causing more crime. God forbid they actually help people by doing things like providing affordable living accommodation! Though I think Australians only have themselves to blame as they do tend to worship the self proclaimed experts, and look down on the US for our tendency not to.
> In 2019, 26.5% of Australia had travelled overseas with the percentage growing y/y:
Yeah, that doesn't matter. Most of that percentage is young Australians who buy a $2000 'round the world' ticket with 8 stops or whatever, and they just get drunk in every place. Most of them are not really bothering to explore the countries or cultures, and have no context to claim Australia is 'the best country in the world to live in'.
> And the reputation of being the best country in the world comes from city/country rankings which routinely have our cities in the top ten:
There are plenty of different lists, but sure, Australian cities often make it into the top 10. But not 1st place, sometimes not even the top 5. Which means Australia is among the best, but certainly not the best, which is the claim many Australians insist upon. Hell, there are plenty of countries with all the same advantages but less censorship and less jacked up prices, so that disqualifies Australia right there IMO.
Out and proud USA #1 folk aren't hard to come by, abroad or at home in the US, the notion of American Exceptionalism is championed proportionally just as much (likely more) than a blind adherance to Australia the Lucky Country.
On those two phrases alone the pro American Exceptionalism crowd do seem at their core to be true believers while the majority of those flying the flag of Australia the Lucky Country are all too aware that Horne coined the phrase with a sneer as a back handed complement.
> You seem to have a very selective memory on this.
I wouldn't say it's selective. Just the result of spending extensive time in both countries. Is it not just as possible you're being defensive?
> Out and proud USA #1 folk aren't hard to come by, abroad or at home in the US,
Right, and my point was the minority of Americans who travel tend to learn the world is a bigger place and their country has a lot of issues.
> while the majority of those flying the flag of Australia the Lucky Country are all too aware that Horne coined the phrase with a sneer as a back handed complement.
Not my experience at all. They say it just as seriously as the Out and proud USA #1 folk you refer to, maybe with a little more awareness and less zealotry, but not that much less.
> Australians insist it's the best country in the world to live in, when most have barely traveled anywhere.
Australian here. A couple of international trips ago I visited Berlin and went on one of those free walking tours. I was the only Australian in the tour from what I could tell.
The tour took in the Bundestag (German Federal Parliament). The guide proudly pointed out its glass roof as to demonstration the Germany's post Nazi commitment to a transparent democracy. He said that a staircase spirals up the roof. He then joked that in practice, this means when the federal parliamentarians look up, what they see is a bunch of Australian's gazing down on them.
I thought it was funny. It had a eery ring of truth to it as no matter where you go, you meet fellow Australians. To put this in perspective, Australia has 0.3% of the worlds population and most of us, as you say, are home. So it's downright weird to keep hearing Australian accents no matter where you go.
BTW, have you travelled anywhere, or is this "most have never travelled anywhere" just something you've heard?
> So it's downright weird to keep hearing Australian accents no matter where you go.
No stranger than hearing English or French accents IMO. Or Canadian. etc.
> BTW, have you travelled anywhere, or is this "most have never travelled anywhere" just something you've heard?
I've been to just over 60 countries so far, and spent about 7 years basically backpacking straight, and plenty at hostels.
That's what colored my cynicism of "Australians travel so prolifically" - most of the time they just had short stops in a city and were there to get drunk. Maybe doing some guided tours as you point out, but rarely going off-road or actually traveling, meeting locals, learning about the culture, etc. You could say many Australians are tourists few are actually 'travelers', if that makes sense.
> Australia has a free health care system and smokers are disproportionate in their use of limited resources.
Many countries have a similar health system, and there are other solutions that don't impact liberty like taxing cigarettes and putting that money back into the health system. Which is already done of course, making your argument moot.
The first claim in the article states that early death and taxation that is the cost saving (and other claims refute that). Taxation is probably the major method of discouraging cigarette usage. So even if you accept the argument that smokers are paying their way through taxes and dying young, they only do so because of onerous government policies.
* Extreme drug and supplement regulations (in Ireland I can't even get melatonin or St John's Wort without prescription)
* Extreme focus on safety at the expense of freedom. Again in Ireland, it'll take minimum one year but more likely 18 months to get a driving license, and we're subjected to endless government messaging about driving safety even though we have one of the highest levels of road safety in the world. Correlation maybe but if that's the case, they've succeeded and should stop nannying us now
* Strict control of public venue closing times. It's frustrating being at a festival and everything shutting down at 11pm because it's a Sunday night
* extreme levels of control in the form of bureaucracy - I'd say Germany is the winner here. Getting anything legal or administrative done is a struggle
There's a lot more I could list, some big, some small. But the overall feeling is that the state has decided how you should live and wants to control all sorts of minor insignificant parts of your life that they shouldn't have any say in. How dare the government decide whether I can take melatonin or not? It's a small thing, but one of hundreds that add up.
> * Extreme focus on safety at the expense of freedom. Again in Ireland, it'll take minimum one year but more likely 18 months to get a driving license, and we're subjected to endless government messaging about driving safety even though we have one of the highest levels of road safety in the world. Correlation maybe but if that's the case, they've succeeded and should stop nannying us now
This makes absolutely no sense. If the additional instruction has lead to one of the highest levels of road safety in the world, you're proposing that they should become less safe because it's more convenient for people?
You've got New Zealand using CSAM laws to prosecute people who watched the Christchurch video, Canada using emergency power to freeze protestors' bank accounts, and the UK with ubiquitous video surveillance and butter knife control...
The whole Anglosphere really seems to be in a race to the bottom.
you just need one crazy individual for a shooting, but a whole system of state and private actors (that should've known better) to implement censorship.
This is too narrow a view. The guy wasn't (just) crazy, he was radicalized by an international online far right hate community.
I would venture to say that literally no mass shootings, anywhere, ever, has been the result of "one crazy individual". Certainly none of the ones that make the news. There's always a community, however loosely defined, that radicalized them into thinking that murdering people is a viable solution. That level of descent into madness requires support.
There's a direct line between christchurch and jacksonville. They even put the same decorations on their killing implements. There's absolutely a community around these murders.
For starters, I’m certainly right that it is a crime for New Zealanders to read the document, and if an exemption process that individuals could leverage to access it, that wouldn’t change that fact.
However, you’ve linked to a process that educators can use to screen restricted films to their students.
There’s no legal way for any New Zealander to know the content of his manifesto, and certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt. I haven’t read it, and I’m not especially interested in the topic all together. But all of the commentary I’ve read about it to me seems either massively reductive or highly politicized. I have no certainty at all about the particulars of his motive.
I have little interest in how New Zealand is run, but if I did this would be a massive concern for me. For the interested parties, the details of his motives are incredibly important. That was the basis of new liberty-revoking legislation in New Zealand, and you think that New Zealanders should have no reasonable doubt that their politicians and press (who may or may not have even read it themselves) weren’t portraying it in a way that simply suited their own agendas? Believing that the government should be the only party allowed to interpret crucially important information is very undemocratic.
What made him desire fame to such a radical degree that he figured shooting people was worth it?
Radicalization can take many forms. It's not just religion or racism. And the vast majority of radicalized people don't kill anyone, they just become toxic to those around them and spread the radicalization.
He had a projected IQ of about 66. I don’t know if you’ve engaged with many people with intellectual impairment, but it doesn’t take much for “dumb idea” to gain traction.
He wasn’t radicalised, look it up. He was just an evil git that should never have been allowed near a gun.
I intentionally didn't mention the internet in my comment. That's the main modern source of radicalization, sure. But people found a way before it too. In person, through books and mailing lists, by phone, by tv, whatever.
But censorship of the Christchurch video is "due process and the rule of law"?
I can point you to the New Zealand Act of Parliament that allows this to happen? I can link you to the reporting on the court cases?
The fact you don't like it doesn't mean it's not "due process and the rule of law" as decided by the people of New Zealand over the last 70 years or so (a lot of our law seems to date from the 60s or so, I assume this sort of this was discussed a bit in the general zeitgeist before then).
The government making a list of contraband information is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. The fact that it was used to censor the Christchurch video, or any other evil, matters not.
Also, individual laws and court cases can very much trample on due process and the rule of law. It doesn't matter how long standing they are.
Having parliaments and courts doesn't automatically result in a free society. It requires constant effort by the people to keep those institutions in check. When we fail to do that, then "the race to the bottom" ensues.
Ah! Now we are getting to the crux of the matter. You consider a set of values a necessity for a free society. That is (mostly) orthogonal to rule of law. Rule of law might be one of those values, but is not sufficient by itself.
As for the other values, you think absolute free speech is necessary for a free society. New Zealand disagrees with you.
Edit: the US government disagrees too, actually. So I guess you are not free either? (Assuming your location here.)
You seem to think that it's possible to have a free society that locks people up for possessing information that the government deems objectionable. Words mean things, and sometimes, those meanings aren't up for debate.
Whether governments think this is okay is irrelevant. Governments have labeled all sorts of things as consistent with due process and the rule of law. Censorship, mass surveillance, waterboarding, drone killing, you name it. It's supposedly justified because there's laws and institutions that "authorized" it. I don't buy that. That's rule by law, not rule of law.
Also this is kind of besides the point, but when governments police the possesion of information, that's not only a freedom of speech issue. It's also a freedom of thought issue.
Bad example. Yelling fire in a crowded theater may be questionable, but there is no law prohibiting me from using the word "fire" in a discussion or on a protest sign.
Your response sums up my objection to these kinds of policy. You frame my arguments as some kind of attachment to the most heinous crime in spite of any clarifications I make. Governments operate the same way. Any questionable policies they enforce, it's always for the people. Opposition are terrorists and child abusers.
I made my arguments very clear. I don't support crime, ever. But that doesn't mean I support taking away individual rights essential to a free society.
I disagree that you argument is as clear as you say it is. This is what I'm trying to ask you: do you think that there is any speech, any expression, that can/should be a crime?
You believe in free speech, good, so do I. But in a reasonable society everything has limits the only question is where those limits are.
I'm not doing the "think of the children" thing, I'm trying to probe the edges of the argument you are putting forth.
There are some people that think that possession and distribution of CSAM should not be illegal on free speech ground. That's a position I don't share. Where do you stand?
Or, to remove you objections to that line of argument, what about revenge porn? Is that speech that shouldn't be punished? What rights does the subject of the revenge porn have and do they counter any free speech right the publisher has?
This is a subtle and complex subject, I don't believe there are simple answers.
> New Zealand using CSAM laws to prosecute people who watched the Christchurch video
Can I get a source on that? I can't find what you described with a quick Google search (using "New Zealand CSAM Christchurch" as my search term). I do find some prosecution made against people who distribute the video (one of them with caption "target acquired"), but they were under terrorism-related law.
It seems absurd to go after mere viewer of the video, let alone using CSAM law of all laws as the basis of prosecution.
It defines "objectionable" content with CSAM as the first category, and then a number of other categories that would be First Amendment protected speech in the US. Possession alone carries a 10 year prison sentence, possession with intent to distribute is 14 years. The Christchurch shooting video and manifesto were both classified as objectionable by New Zealand's Chief Censor (I'm not joking, that's actually their job title) [1].
My point was that they are prosecuting people for political and journalistic speech under the same law they use for CSAM, with equally severe penalties. Hope that is a more clear explanation.
As my other reply states, this is a complete misunderstanding of the situation in NZ. Either you are ignorant of the NZ context, or wilfully ignoring it.
Your response below did not address the substance of my argument. I linked to primary sources, people interested in this discussion can go read them and come to their own conclusions.
the substance of your argument is that you don't understand that different countries/societies/cultures/jurisdictions have different historical experiences/legal traditions/ founding principals/values/politics that make words like censorship very contextual.
I don't think anyone in this whole discussion claimed that?
Just people disagreeing about where to draw the line on what censorship is acceptable and what is not. The US and NZ draw that line in different places.
It seems to me that Americans in this discussion are trying to win some kind of moral argument, where as I'm just explaining how the world is, not how it ought to be.
NZ didn't prosecute anyone for only watching the video. Some were prosecuted for sharing (edit: or possessing) it though. One ended up with jail time[0].
Charges were laid in 35 cases [0], and a 16 year old pleaded guilty to possession of the video [1]. I'm not sure if the disposition of the other 33 cases has been determined or reported on by news outlets.
Thanks, I've updated my comment to say "sharing or possessing". Although I doubt anyone got prosecuted for possessing without ever sharing - how would you get caught?
They were attempting to subpoena tech companies and websites where the video was reuploaded, demanding user information and IP logs for anyone who accessed the video. I'm unsure of how many video hosts actually complied, given how many companies don't have a presence in NZ. Apparently at least a few, given how they were able to charge at least 35 people.
From there, it's a basic request to the ISP for subscriber information, and a day or two later the police are seizing the poor schmuck's electronics. If they find christchurch.mp4 or manifesto.pdf, that's a 10 year prison sentence.
It's not even a rounding error in our national murder rate. We are currently at over 20,000 murders per year in the US, and it's rare for more than a handful to be linked to white identity extremism in a given year. The real "threat" was that a bunch of IC employees would end up redundant after ISIS imploded. There are an awful lot of highly paid IC employees and consultants who hopped on the new counterterrorism bandwagon after their old cash cow dried up.
Besides that, even if it were a real threat, censoring speech is not the solution. I'm not sure if you have read the Christchurch manifesto, but it's garbage. Seriously NZ is doing the author a favor by censoring it. That way he gets to play the political persecution card and people are less likely to actually read it.
See that big spike at the end there? That's white identity extremism. The deadliest crime in NZ history, the one event that more than doubled NZs murder
rate that year, was white identity extremism. It might be a bit of a problem.
That tends to happen when you have a small population and an outlier event occurs in a given year... Your entire country is the size of a large US city. If you calculated NYC's murder rate and included 9/11, it would also be pretty abysmal in 2001.
9/11 got us the Patriot Act, the TSA, an invasion of a completely unrelated country that killed around 600,000 people, and a few trillion dollars in unnecessary military spending. Knee-jerk responses generally don't end well, speaking from experience.
You won't get a source because it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of New Zealand law and attitudes towards censorship.
In NZ we have the Classification Office. This is the government organisation that classifies publications (books, movies, games, even technically websites IIRC?). The Classification Office issues a rating (PG, M, R16, R18, etc.) and it is a crime to provide restricted publications to people that are under the restricted age.
It takes quite a lot to get a publication outright banned. In some cases the Chief Censor will issue it a "only at film festivals and academic settings" rating.
Note: only egregious distribution tends to get any attention, let alone prosecution. People importing objectionable material for sale, that sort of thing. Back in the day when video stores were still a thing, 15 year olds would rent R18 porn and no one went to jail.
Yes, CSAM is the sort of thing that would be rated objectionable (I.e. banned) but the NZ censorship regime is not "CSAM laws", it is much broader and more comprehensive than that.
In this case the Chief Censor banned the Christchurch shooting video because of the harm that its distribution would do to the community [1]. This sort of decision is normal and expected in NZ.
The rest of the world does not look like the US. We don't need to bend laws past their original intention when we already have a functional system for dealing with these kind of issues.
(I'm sure someone will pipe up to tell me I'm a slave in Stalinist Russia because I can't watch snuff films.)
This is a very harsh response. You can disagree and still have a civil discussion. Many cultures are represented on Hacker News and we can all learn something from each other.
Edit: Okay, not quite as bad now after you edited out the last line. Thanks.
<<I'm sure someone will pipe up to tell me I'm a slave in Stalinist Russia because I can't watch snuff films
Honestly, I am more concerned that you think it is kosher to have others not see/read it. You can choose to see/not see what you will. NZ is a lot of things, but I would not call it normal.
Oh, while we are at it. Have you ever wondered about why it was restricted? Because the manifesto from that guy actually predicted NZ gov response quite well.
This guy was successful terrorist ( as in, he achieved his stated political goal with violence ).
>it is a crime to provide restricted publications to people that are under the restricted age.
Does this imply that parents, or those delegated by them, would be commiting a crime by showing their children material out of the government's chosen age range? That strikes me as absurd.
Furthermore, how does this work with broadcast TV or Radio? Do the receiving devices need to implement a control?
Actually, this also makes me wonder, will a public library check ID for books that teens check out?
> Does this imply that parents, or those delegated by them, would be commiting a crime by showing their children material out of the government's chosen age range? That strikes me as absurd.
Technically, yeah. And on the face of it, that doesn't sounds great does it? But again, that ignores the reality of the NZ justice system. I wouldn't think any parent has ever been prosecuted for that sort of thing. There are many safety valves like police discretion, prosecutor discretion, judicial discretion. If it got to court my assumption is that the offender would be discharged without conviction [1]. Basically given a telling off by the judge.
Any cases of a parent, or anyone just guilty of showing restricted stuff to a child, that resulted in fines or jail time would include large scale offending (distribution for profit probably), or some other abuse. I could certainly see a parent that was showing porn to their kid, as part of the sexual assault of that kid, getting a conviction for this, but only as part of a larger case involving a bunch of yuck stuff I don't want to think about.
Without doing a bunch of research, the other circumstance I could picture a parent being convicted would be in the dark times of the past. It wouldn't surprise me much to read that Mrs. Poorlady of Mangakino was convicted of supplying a minor restricted material in 1962 and fined £100. But all countries have weird pasts, McCarthyism was a thing.
And lastly: yes a library would check your id. Libraries do stock DVDs and will absolutely not hand R16 movies to 15 year olds. But it is rare for books to get ratings.
Books are assumed to be ok, and most go unclassified. But books might be submitted for classification if the publisher thinks it is borderline. Or if a member of the public submitted it.
So yeah, if a book was submitted for classification, and that book got a restricted label, and the library thought the book wasn't trash and was worth stocking, then yes, they would check id if you look like you could be under the restricted age.
Nit-picking, but Witcher 2 is now legal in Australia. It was banned at the time because there was no MA classification available (something that has since been rectified).
And to counter the positive disposition of this nit, they banned Rimworld, not for the part where you can set up a human trafficking and organ harvesting farm, but for the part where you can smoke a green leaf for positive mood.
IMO the least-bad way to keep "objectionable material" out of the hands of minors is to focus on positive signals from devices, ex:
__________
1. Parents control what hardware the kids have access to. Perhaps not perfectly, but at least it is something the average person can see in meat-space and interact with without requiring special knowledge.
2. They buy devices for their kids that support a parental-lock feature, which (if enabled) causes the device to always send metadata outwards, such as HTTP headers. This metadata encodes some standard like "I'm a minor in Jurisdiction X" or even "I am currently approximately Y months old in jurisdiction X."
3. Online sites/services can comply simply by recognizing these signals and throwing up "denied" pages, without any kind of authentication and no need to build profiles of users or track activity.
__________
Sure, it's not perfect (kid borrows adult device, non-compliant sites, proxy sites that subvert the rstrictions) but it's better than nothing while avoiding massive rating-bureaucracies or forcing shitty backdoors into software. Also, the costs will tend to fall on the same people who want the feature.
Some pain-points will remain like whether to support a country where people under 28.75 years are not allowed to see ankle skin, but that's unavoidable complexity from the problem-domain--bad laws as opposed to bad software.
> 2. Buy devices for kids that support a parental-lock feature, which when enabled causes the device to always send metadata outwards, such as HTTP headers. These would encode "I'm a minor in Jurisdiction X" or even "I am approximately Y months old in jurisdiction X."
I like the concept, but I can see bad actors abusing the heck out of these headers in so many ways.
> I can see bad actors abusing the heck out of these headers
I disagree: Whatever evil they're already committing, a signal of "client device has parental lock enabled" would only make them very slightly more effective at committing it.
Those kinds of bad actors are already filtering for minors based on much more impactful means, like how/where the site is advertised and what it purports to offer.
In exaggerated contrast, I can't imagine some would-be-molester making a baroque plan to set up a Tax Advice Forum with a hidden code-path for parental-locked devices, one that metaphorically tells the user they've won a free giveaway to candy in a white truck.
Most sites you can find from google will be blocked simply from the RTA label[0] being on the page - which all the major mobile OSes seem to support, and I imagine (proxy-based) desktop control software does as well.
I've been putting together a small write-up on these headers [1] and my own crazy conspiracy theory as to why I think they are not utilized any more just so I could keep track of the discussions. They have existed for quite some time and are trivial for both website operators and clients to implement. As a funny side note there is code looking for RTA headers in yt-dlp [2] One could even get a small sample of sites using the header without a Shodan login [3].
I am pleasantly surprised to see AU is not going to be added to the growing list of people forcing a login to a centralized database.
I wonder if this is a problem that can be solved with zero-knowledge proofs. The website needs to verify that I am a part of a certain group (over a certain age, particular gender, have a certain net worth, whatever) but I don't want to connect that information to my identity on the site. Is it possible to set it up so that the organization performing the validation is also unaware of the type of validation that I am performing and with whom?
For example, to validate my age (or net-worth or gender) with a site, I generate a one-time key which the site can send to the validation authority and receive back a Yes/No response for the request? In this example, the site would not have any information about my identity but the type and target of validation would be leaked to the validating authority. Is it possible to design a system that would let both sides perform this operation completely blind to each other?
This isn't really a zero knowledge proof and could technically be de-anonymized and requires a third party service but you could easily set up a trusted verifier that generates one direction hashes which validates whatever claim you're trying to make. And if you trust the verifier to not leak back your personal details and the adult website trusts the verifier's verification, then all you need to do is send the hash to the adult website and they can validate that the hash is valid by checking against the verifier.
How about this scenario - There is a site A that wants me to prove my age. Site A generates a one-time key for this request. This key is completely random and does not include any information about the identity of A or myself. The key does include the type of request being made (ie age/gender/income/etc verification)
I take this key to a trusted verifier, B, that has my age information. This trusted verifier uses the key from A to generate another response key. I enter the response key into site A which decrypts it using the public key of site B.
In this model,
1. Site A has performed the verification (as long as it trusts Verifier B)
2. Site A does not have any additional information about me
3. Verifier B does not know the origin of the request
Of course, in an area, where only certain websites perform particular verifications (eg adult websites performing age verifications), there is some information leakage to Verifier B about my behavior
This adds even more convenience to the scenario I proposed. The user can "pre-verify" their attributes and then reveal them as requested. The verifying authority has no knowledge of who is requesting the attributes and even when they are being used.
Considering the UK National Air Traffic Systems (NATS) cant even prevent an extra dot or two from crashing their airspace, messing up most of the airlines in the world, not to mention countless passengers, pilots, aircrew and their families, I think Australia is wise to stand back from this challenge.
Personally I think state sex education should explain, the emotional side to sex, instead of just the mechanical properties, but sticking to the mechanics is easy for the cash strapped teachers to explain.
They should also explain how people will use sex to blackmail and manipulate others in a variety of ways. Spooky hackers are big into kink shaming.
There is a lot of cross boarding data sharing, it is after all a global business.
They should also explain how easily life long diseases are spread and the state makes no effort in helping protect people from those infected who choose to lie about the state of their health to others, and women might pass this onto their kids. Condoms do break.
That porn can be a relief which minimises exposure to disease risks, but some forms of porn portrayed can involve participants out of their face on drugs, and the content uploaded will be from people who have not been drug tested. Some porn is documenting self harm and some porn is people who have been trafficked and sometimes drugged against their will.
Social media platforms with unpaid moderators, like Reddit and porn sites where users can upload content can be slow to remove illegal sexual content from the front page of their site, or most popular content web pages, and that this can spark curiosity in people who want to know more about it.
I kind of suspect none of the above will happen though, and I'm sure plenty of people will still be arguing over what algorithms to use in order to safe guard identities.
116 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] thread>The draft was open to public comment and 343 submissions were made.
>Of these, only one was in favor of the regulations. The rest either demanded revisions, or were completely against the bill. Despite the cascade of disapproval, the final draft of the law was barely subject to any scrutiny.
>On the last day of sitting before the Christmas period, a revised version of the bill was presented to the Parliament. It featured 173 amendments, but members were barely given any time to review them.
>The official reason was that the laws needed to be rushed through to prevent potential terrorist attacks from happening over the holidays. This was an especially dubious claim, since Australia already has a host of anti-terrorism laws.
>If the authorities required the new capabilities to force companies into building backdoors, then this also should be viewed with skepticism. Since the laws were passed on December 6, it is unlikely that any company would have been able to provide the necessary tools ahead of Christmas.
>On top of this, ASIO, the Australian spy agency, acknowledged there was no specific threat over the period, and it did not raise its warning level.
Absolute bullshit and our spineless "representatives" should be ashamed.
What kind of society are they supposedly defending?
Try going to thepiratebay.org using your isp dns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_in_...
Australia is the only county with a link to it's own page on the list of banned games by country... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games_by_...
And one of two pages with a link to it's own page on the list of banned movies by country, along with China... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_films
But honestly there were so many things, it sounds funny but I can't even think of particular examples right now.
Oh, smoking is a good example. Doing their best to push adults out of being able to smoke. You can argue it's as justified as you like, but it's still nannying.
There's a lot the country restricts because it thinks it knows what's best for its citizens.
It's different from claiming it's the best country to live in, as so many claim while grilling and nursing a beer.
https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/australian-population-gro...
And the reputation of being the best country in the world comes from city/country rankings which routinely have our cities in the top ten:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2023/06/21/ran...
Yeah, that doesn't matter. Most of that percentage is young Australians who buy a $2000 'round the world' ticket with 8 stops or whatever, and they just get drunk in every place. Most of them are not really bothering to explore the countries or cultures, and have no context to claim Australia is 'the best country in the world to live in'.
> And the reputation of being the best country in the world comes from city/country rankings which routinely have our cities in the top ten:
There are plenty of different lists, but sure, Australian cities often make it into the top 10. But not 1st place, sometimes not even the top 5. Which means Australia is among the best, but certainly not the best, which is the claim many Australians insist upon. Hell, there are plenty of countries with all the same advantages but less censorship and less jacked up prices, so that disqualifies Australia right there IMO.
The difference is Americans who bother to travel are normally self-aware enough not to claim it, while the Australians that do, are not.
Out and proud USA #1 folk aren't hard to come by, abroad or at home in the US, the notion of American Exceptionalism is championed proportionally just as much (likely more) than a blind adherance to Australia the Lucky Country.
On those two phrases alone the pro American Exceptionalism crowd do seem at their core to be true believers while the majority of those flying the flag of Australia the Lucky Country are all too aware that Horne coined the phrase with a sneer as a back handed complement.
I wouldn't say it's selective. Just the result of spending extensive time in both countries. Is it not just as possible you're being defensive?
> Out and proud USA #1 folk aren't hard to come by, abroad or at home in the US,
Right, and my point was the minority of Americans who travel tend to learn the world is a bigger place and their country has a lot of issues.
> while the majority of those flying the flag of Australia the Lucky Country are all too aware that Horne coined the phrase with a sneer as a back handed complement.
Not my experience at all. They say it just as seriously as the Out and proud USA #1 folk you refer to, maybe with a little more awareness and less zealotry, but not that much less.
Australian here. A couple of international trips ago I visited Berlin and went on one of those free walking tours. I was the only Australian in the tour from what I could tell.
The tour took in the Bundestag (German Federal Parliament). The guide proudly pointed out its glass roof as to demonstration the Germany's post Nazi commitment to a transparent democracy. He said that a staircase spirals up the roof. He then joked that in practice, this means when the federal parliamentarians look up, what they see is a bunch of Australian's gazing down on them.
I thought it was funny. It had a eery ring of truth to it as no matter where you go, you meet fellow Australians. To put this in perspective, Australia has 0.3% of the worlds population and most of us, as you say, are home. So it's downright weird to keep hearing Australian accents no matter where you go.
BTW, have you travelled anywhere, or is this "most have never travelled anywhere" just something you've heard?
No stranger than hearing English or French accents IMO. Or Canadian. etc.
> BTW, have you travelled anywhere, or is this "most have never travelled anywhere" just something you've heard?
I've been to just over 60 countries so far, and spent about 7 years basically backpacking straight, and plenty at hostels.
That's what colored my cynicism of "Australians travel so prolifically" - most of the time they just had short stops in a city and were there to get drunk. Maybe doing some guided tours as you point out, but rarely going off-road or actually traveling, meeting locals, learning about the culture, etc. You could say many Australians are tourists few are actually 'travelers', if that makes sense.
As they absolutely should.
Australia has a free health care system and smokers are disproportionate in their use of limited resources.
No, they shouldn't, lol. No excuse for it at all.
> Australia has a free health care system and smokers are disproportionate in their use of limited resources.
Many countries have a similar health system, and there are other solutions that don't impact liberty like taxing cigarettes and putting that money back into the health system. Which is already done of course, making your argument moot.
Do they?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Finance_Balance_of_Sm...
This seems to suggest by killing the smokers earlier, the government avoids paying expensive pensions, among other things people need later in life.
Obviously I don't support smoking, just nitpicking here.
Smokers despite being a net-positive contributor to the government's tax revenue doesn't change that they are a net-negative drain on society.
* Extreme drug and supplement regulations (in Ireland I can't even get melatonin or St John's Wort without prescription)
* Extreme focus on safety at the expense of freedom. Again in Ireland, it'll take minimum one year but more likely 18 months to get a driving license, and we're subjected to endless government messaging about driving safety even though we have one of the highest levels of road safety in the world. Correlation maybe but if that's the case, they've succeeded and should stop nannying us now
* Strict control of public venue closing times. It's frustrating being at a festival and everything shutting down at 11pm because it's a Sunday night
* extreme levels of control in the form of bureaucracy - I'd say Germany is the winner here. Getting anything legal or administrative done is a struggle
There's a lot more I could list, some big, some small. But the overall feeling is that the state has decided how you should live and wants to control all sorts of minor insignificant parts of your life that they shouldn't have any say in. How dare the government decide whether I can take melatonin or not? It's a small thing, but one of hundreds that add up.
This makes absolutely no sense. If the additional instruction has lead to one of the highest levels of road safety in the world, you're proposing that they should become less safe because it's more convenient for people?
The whole Anglosphere really seems to be in a race to the bottom.
I would venture to say that literally no mass shootings, anywhere, ever, has been the result of "one crazy individual". Certainly none of the ones that make the news. There's always a community, however loosely defined, that radicalized them into thinking that murdering people is a viable solution. That level of descent into madness requires support.
This is an extremely narrow and naive view of the breadth of what humans can and will do.
You say that, and maybe it’s true. But it’s impossible for any New Zealander to know that given it’s a crime for any of them to read his manifesto.
However, you’ve linked to a process that educators can use to screen restricted films to their students.
No, it's illegal, not impossible. Many illegal things are trivially easy.
Besides, we don't need first hand sources to know things beyond a reasonable doubt.
I have little interest in how New Zealand is run, but if I did this would be a massive concern for me. For the interested parties, the details of his motives are incredibly important. That was the basis of new liberty-revoking legislation in New Zealand, and you think that New Zealanders should have no reasonable doubt that their politicians and press (who may or may not have even read it themselves) weren’t portraying it in a way that simply suited their own agendas? Believing that the government should be the only party allowed to interpret crucially important information is very undemocratic.
One guy, with issues, two guns, 35 dead. Motivation was revenge and fame. No community required.
Your statement is just wrong.
Radicalization can take many forms. It's not just religion or racism. And the vast majority of radicalized people don't kill anyone, they just become toxic to those around them and spread the radicalization.
He wasn’t radicalised, look it up. He was just an evil git that should never have been allowed near a gun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...
And even today a number of the shooters had specific targets in mind e.g. fellow students, teachers etc.
So driven more by individual rage and easy access to weapons.
The government on the other hand…
Crime existing is no reason to strip away our rights by dismantling due process and the rule of law.
I can point you to the New Zealand Act of Parliament that allows this to happen? I can link you to the reporting on the court cases?
The fact you don't like it doesn't mean it's not "due process and the rule of law" as decided by the people of New Zealand over the last 70 years or so (a lot of our law seems to date from the 60s or so, I assume this sort of this was discussed a bit in the general zeitgeist before then).
Also, individual laws and court cases can very much trample on due process and the rule of law. It doesn't matter how long standing they are.
Having parliaments and courts doesn't automatically result in a free society. It requires constant effort by the people to keep those institutions in check. When we fail to do that, then "the race to the bottom" ensues.
As for the other values, you think absolute free speech is necessary for a free society. New Zealand disagrees with you.
Edit: the US government disagrees too, actually. So I guess you are not free either? (Assuming your location here.)
Whether governments think this is okay is irrelevant. Governments have labeled all sorts of things as consistent with due process and the rule of law. Censorship, mass surveillance, waterboarding, drone killing, you name it. It's supposedly justified because there's laws and institutions that "authorized" it. I don't buy that. That's rule by law, not rule of law.
Also this is kind of besides the point, but when governments police the possesion of information, that's not only a freedom of speech issue. It's also a freedom of thought issue.
I made my arguments very clear. I don't support crime, ever. But that doesn't mean I support taking away individual rights essential to a free society.
You believe in free speech, good, so do I. But in a reasonable society everything has limits the only question is where those limits are.
I'm not doing the "think of the children" thing, I'm trying to probe the edges of the argument you are putting forth.
There are some people that think that possession and distribution of CSAM should not be illegal on free speech ground. That's a position I don't share. Where do you stand?
Or, to remove you objections to that line of argument, what about revenge porn? Is that speech that shouldn't be punished? What rights does the subject of the revenge porn have and do they counter any free speech right the publisher has?
This is a subtle and complex subject, I don't believe there are simple answers.
>Words mean things, and sometimes, those meanings aren't up for debate.
Wittgenstein would like a word (heh).
Can I get a source on that? I can't find what you described with a quick Google search (using "New Zealand CSAM Christchurch" as my search term). I do find some prosecution made against people who distribute the video (one of them with caption "target acquired"), but they were under terrorism-related law.
It seems absurd to go after mere viewer of the video, let alone using CSAM law of all laws as the basis of prosecution.
It defines "objectionable" content with CSAM as the first category, and then a number of other categories that would be First Amendment protected speech in the US. Possession alone carries a 10 year prison sentence, possession with intent to distribute is 14 years. The Christchurch shooting video and manifesto were both classified as objectionable by New Zealand's Chief Censor (I'm not joking, that's actually their job title) [1].
My point was that they are prosecuting people for political and journalistic speech under the same law they use for CSAM, with equally severe penalties. Hope that is a more clear explanation.
[0] - https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0094/latest/...
[1] - https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/news/news-items/res...
Please stop.
Just people disagreeing about where to draw the line on what censorship is acceptable and what is not. The US and NZ draw that line in different places.
It seems to me that Americans in this discussion are trying to win some kind of moral argument, where as I'm just explaining how the world is, not how it ought to be.
[0] Philip Arps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Arps
[0] - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/397953/charges-laid-in-3...
[1] - https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/crime/16-year-old-admits-p...
From there, it's a basic request to the ISP for subscriber information, and a day or two later the police are seizing the poor schmuck's electronics. If they find christchurch.mp4 or manifesto.pdf, that's a 10 year prison sentence.
Besides that, even if it were a real threat, censoring speech is not the solution. I'm not sure if you have read the Christchurch manifesto, but it's garbage. Seriously NZ is doing the author a favor by censoring it. That way he gets to play the political persecution card and people are less likely to actually read it.
But... we aren't talking about the US?
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NZL/new-zealand/murder...
See that big spike at the end there? That's white identity extremism. The deadliest crime in NZ history, the one event that more than doubled NZs murder rate that year, was white identity extremism. It might be a bit of a problem.
Honestly, I don't see what you are trying to point out?
In NZ we have the Classification Office. This is the government organisation that classifies publications (books, movies, games, even technically websites IIRC?). The Classification Office issues a rating (PG, M, R16, R18, etc.) and it is a crime to provide restricted publications to people that are under the restricted age.
It takes quite a lot to get a publication outright banned. In some cases the Chief Censor will issue it a "only at film festivals and academic settings" rating.
Note: only egregious distribution tends to get any attention, let alone prosecution. People importing objectionable material for sale, that sort of thing. Back in the day when video stores were still a thing, 15 year olds would rent R18 porn and no one went to jail.
Yes, CSAM is the sort of thing that would be rated objectionable (I.e. banned) but the NZ censorship regime is not "CSAM laws", it is much broader and more comprehensive than that.
In this case the Chief Censor banned the Christchurch shooting video because of the harm that its distribution would do to the community [1]. This sort of decision is normal and expected in NZ.
The rest of the world does not look like the US. We don't need to bend laws past their original intention when we already have a functional system for dealing with these kind of issues.
(I'm sure someone will pipe up to tell me I'm a slave in Stalinist Russia because I can't watch snuff films.)
[1]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/397953/charges-laid-in-3...
Did Orwell know about you?
Edit: Okay, not quite as bad now after you edited out the last line. Thanks.
Honestly, I am more concerned that you think it is kosher to have others not see/read it. You can choose to see/not see what you will. NZ is a lot of things, but I would not call it normal.
Oh, while we are at it. Have you ever wondered about why it was restricted? Because the manifesto from that guy actually predicted NZ gov response quite well.
This guy was successful terrorist ( as in, he achieved his stated political goal with violence ).
Does this imply that parents, or those delegated by them, would be commiting a crime by showing their children material out of the government's chosen age range? That strikes me as absurd.
Furthermore, how does this work with broadcast TV or Radio? Do the receiving devices need to implement a control?
Actually, this also makes me wonder, will a public library check ID for books that teens check out?
Technically, yeah. And on the face of it, that doesn't sounds great does it? But again, that ignores the reality of the NZ justice system. I wouldn't think any parent has ever been prosecuted for that sort of thing. There are many safety valves like police discretion, prosecutor discretion, judicial discretion. If it got to court my assumption is that the offender would be discharged without conviction [1]. Basically given a telling off by the judge.
Any cases of a parent, or anyone just guilty of showing restricted stuff to a child, that resulted in fines or jail time would include large scale offending (distribution for profit probably), or some other abuse. I could certainly see a parent that was showing porn to their kid, as part of the sexual assault of that kid, getting a conviction for this, but only as part of a larger case involving a bunch of yuck stuff I don't want to think about.
Without doing a bunch of research, the other circumstance I could picture a parent being convicted would be in the dark times of the past. It wouldn't surprise me much to read that Mrs. Poorlady of Mangakino was convicted of supplying a minor restricted material in 1962 and fined £100. But all countries have weird pasts, McCarthyism was a thing.
TV and Radio aren't "publications" for the purposes of the Act. That is up to the Broadcasting Standards Authority. See: https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/classification-info... and https://www.bsa.govt.nz/
And lastly: yes a library would check your id. Libraries do stock DVDs and will absolutely not hand R16 movies to 15 year olds. But it is rare for books to get ratings.
Books are assumed to be ok, and most go unclassified. But books might be submitted for classification if the publisher thinks it is borderline. Or if a member of the public submitted it.
So yeah, if a book was submitted for classification, and that book got a restricted label, and the library thought the book wasn't trash and was worth stocking, then yes, they would check id if you look like you could be under the restricted age.
[1]: https://www.willislegal.co.nz/discharge-without-conviction/
It's worse to have an unenforced law on the books than no law at all.
And the population will mostly support it.
__________
1. Parents control what hardware the kids have access to. Perhaps not perfectly, but at least it is something the average person can see in meat-space and interact with without requiring special knowledge.
2. They buy devices for their kids that support a parental-lock feature, which (if enabled) causes the device to always send metadata outwards, such as HTTP headers. This metadata encodes some standard like "I'm a minor in Jurisdiction X" or even "I am currently approximately Y months old in jurisdiction X."
3. Online sites/services can comply simply by recognizing these signals and throwing up "denied" pages, without any kind of authentication and no need to build profiles of users or track activity.
__________
Sure, it's not perfect (kid borrows adult device, non-compliant sites, proxy sites that subvert the rstrictions) but it's better than nothing while avoiding massive rating-bureaucracies or forcing shitty backdoors into software. Also, the costs will tend to fall on the same people who want the feature.
Some pain-points will remain like whether to support a country where people under 28.75 years are not allowed to see ankle skin, but that's unavoidable complexity from the problem-domain--bad laws as opposed to bad software.
I like the concept, but I can see bad actors abusing the heck out of these headers in so many ways.
I disagree: Whatever evil they're already committing, a signal of "client device has parental lock enabled" would only make them very slightly more effective at committing it.
Those kinds of bad actors are already filtering for minors based on much more impactful means, like how/where the site is advertised and what it purports to offer.
In exaggerated contrast, I can't imagine some would-be-molester making a baroque plan to set up a Tax Advice Forum with a hidden code-path for parental-locked devices, one that metaphorically tells the user they've won a free giveaway to candy in a white truck.
0: https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq
I am pleasantly surprised to see AU is not going to be added to the growing list of people forcing a login to a centralized database.
[1] - https://bender.ohblog.net/Internet-Crap/20230829-Think-Of-Th...
[2] - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/yt_dlp/extracto...
[3] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R...
For example, to validate my age (or net-worth or gender) with a site, I generate a one-time key which the site can send to the validation authority and receive back a Yes/No response for the request? In this example, the site would not have any information about my identity but the type and target of validation would be leaked to the validating authority. Is it possible to design a system that would let both sides perform this operation completely blind to each other?
I take this key to a trusted verifier, B, that has my age information. This trusted verifier uses the key from A to generate another response key. I enter the response key into site A which decrypts it using the public key of site B.
In this model, 1. Site A has performed the verification (as long as it trusts Verifier B) 2. Site A does not have any additional information about me 3. Verifier B does not know the origin of the request
Of course, in an area, where only certain websites perform particular verifications (eg adult websites performing age verifications), there is some information leakage to Verifier B about my behavior
Personally I think state sex education should explain, the emotional side to sex, instead of just the mechanical properties, but sticking to the mechanics is easy for the cash strapped teachers to explain.
They should also explain how people will use sex to blackmail and manipulate others in a variety of ways. Spooky hackers are big into kink shaming.
There is a lot of cross boarding data sharing, it is after all a global business.
They should also explain how easily life long diseases are spread and the state makes no effort in helping protect people from those infected who choose to lie about the state of their health to others, and women might pass this onto their kids. Condoms do break.
That porn can be a relief which minimises exposure to disease risks, but some forms of porn portrayed can involve participants out of their face on drugs, and the content uploaded will be from people who have not been drug tested. Some porn is documenting self harm and some porn is people who have been trafficked and sometimes drugged against their will.
Social media platforms with unpaid moderators, like Reddit and porn sites where users can upload content can be slow to remove illegal sexual content from the front page of their site, or most popular content web pages, and that this can spark curiosity in people who want to know more about it.
I kind of suspect none of the above will happen though, and I'm sure plenty of people will still be arguing over what algorithms to use in order to safe guard identities.