The Australian government is investigating implementing age verification to access porn online following a failed UK age verification scheme. Children's charity eChildhood claims that "a third of students aged eight and under attempted to access online pornography in the past six months" including through advertising popups. No mention has been made about how effective the Australian plan will be and what exact measures may be taken to block access online.
The UK proposed making users visiting porn sites prove they were 18. The government abandoned the plan in October after a series of major technical issues.
The Australian report said three "crucial factors" needed to be sorted out to succeed where the UK scheme failed.
These included ensuring a level playing field for regulation, making age verification easy for consumers to use and raising public awareness of the need for age verification.
[...]Advocacy group Collective Shout said UK research found 28 per cent [of] children aged 11 to 12 had seen pornography online. In the 15 to 16 age group, the number jumped to 65 per cent.
The Internet routes around damage.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by ikanreed on Friday March 06 2020, @07:11PM (8 children)
The Liberal party seems to be on a 10 year lead time to the awful thing that's going to happen in the US.
They got infinite uncritical support from a huge NewsCorp panoply in 1992, we got it in in 2000.
They got started with concentration camps for immigrants around 2005, and we got started in 2015.
I look forward to this one coming here in 2030.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 06 2020, @07:53PM (3 children)
Concentration camps for immigrants come and go throughout the centuries, nothing new... hopefully they are getting better (meaning less frequent) overall, but so far they're still with us. The Japanese in the US during WWII is a recent example, but all kinds of immigrant discrimination has been going on - more or less everywhere - more or less forever.
Political-press collusion has also been around since there has been a press, and before there was a press the people who carried news by voice were doubtless more corrupt than printed words on paper. Here, I think we've made real progress in the form of the internet which does allow various perspectives to at least be sought out by those interested enough to do so.
The great firewall of China, and various other attempts to "control" content on the internet will continue to happen here and there - I think like international trade, countries will find it hard to shut it off altogether - the value of a functional internet is so much greater than the value of a draconian filter.
What this _does_ do is give the authorities yet another law they can smack people around with, whether it achieves any other aims - it does legally permit harassment of those who would expose the children to porn. Quite a few people in the world have "moved on" from the place where images of people's naked bodies was just an inconceivably unacceptable transgression against all that is good and right, unfortunately our legislators still mostly fall in that age bracket where porn was something "those other, low people" did.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 06 2020, @07:56PM (2 children)
Despite my over-the-top comment below, calling immigrant detention areas "concentration camps" is exactly the kind of ADL/SPLC "Oy Vey, dis iz anuddah shoah!" hysteria that turns political moderates anti-Semitic.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday March 06 2020, @08:52PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Pav on Sunday March 08 2020, @01:35PM
The original "concentration camps" were created during the Boer War by the English to prevent the civilian population from supporting (willingly or not) the Boer troops... although many died of disease etc... this was not intended. The US/Japanese camps were the textbook definition of a concentration camp, as were the ones in Vietnam, as are the Australian camps. They are after all camps meant to concentrate a certain group. The German WWII camps started as concentration camps, but then became extermination/death camps.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 06 2020, @07:54PM (3 children)
The real travesty is that we're putting our illegal immigrants in concentration camps rather than shooting them on sight. When people would rather live in a concentration camp than in their home country, it speaks to what kind of people they are and why they should not be allowed to live here.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gawdonblue on Friday March 06 2020, @09:34PM
That might be the most profound EF contribution ever. Deep sarcasm and a deep caring for humanity all in one post.
I wonder if he meant it?
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday March 06 2020, @11:10PM
Well, you could say that life on the inside of the imperial death star is much better than outside.
I'm always fascinated by the first batch of immigrants ragging on the following batch, and so on...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2020, @09:50AM
Who is "we" and "our" here?
Concentration camp definition is - a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.
So, that describes Manus Island and that island in the middle of the ocean.
What else do you do? Thousands of people arrive on your shores. A lot you don't know where they came from. What diseases they have. Why they came. What their motives are. Sometimes they are genuine refugees who really do need shelter in another country and just want to live out their lives in peace without bullets flying overhead or being thrown from a building because they happen to be gay.
But.
There is a limit to resources. There is a limit for how much can be done and the time it can be done in. If a country allowed anyone in then they wouldn't have a country any more. It's sad, but it's true.
What do we do?