Would the government in Australia really block access to Second LIfe??? New enforcement on non-approved content is reported in the Sydney Herald: "Mark Newton, an ISP engineer and internet filtering critic, said the move to extend the filtering to computer games would place a cloud over online-only games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, which aren't classified in Australia due to their online nature."
It would certainly be ironic/just to see SL censored as SL itself is trying to enforce its own weird censorship regime with Zimbo, the porno/narco/ultra-violence ghetto for "adults".
Further the Sydney Herald reports: "Australia is the only developed country without an R18+ classification for games, meaning any titles that do not meet the MA15+ standard - such as those with excessive violence or sexual content - are simply banned from sale by the Classification Board, unless they are modified to remove the offending content."
Linden Lab is really trying to have it all ways (and not that all ways that I know, you know, that I know you are thinkin) with their "adult" content virtually isolated from the "education" content. Can they stay clear of the problems that other online beneficiaries of redlight type activities face such as Craig's List?
And still what about the Land Bubble? Can it really be fair game when Linden Lab is the market-maker on the SL land market and holds ALL the data about pricing and shares none of it? Shouldn't there be some disclosure to buyers of Land, especially from Linden explaining that the capacity is unlimited and all information shows that the price/value of digital asset storgage is going DOWN over time. Blah, blah openspace blah. QQ
But back to Australia, would they really block out SL? It would be hard to manage the content by content issues, but certainly they can block the asset servers. Many other countries try to restrict online content/services and people do in fact find their way around it. But what would this mean to people like Paisley Beebe who live in Oz, but run companies on the SL platform. What about the SL land owners and store owners?
The Oz community is a major part of the online community and it is really hard to imagine that so many people could be cut-off. ;0
(ty Prad for flipping this over)
image above: Cover thy nakedness--no!
<- *click*
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Comments
Banning SL
Fri, 06/26/2009 - 04:21 — Paisley BeebeI think its just scare mongering from that particular commentator. It does highlight a huge flaw in the legislation being proposed...I don't pretend to have watched this thing played out in great detail. But about a year back the Govt offered a free Net nanny for families which was so easy to break even I broke it...easy just do a roll back on XL and your in...so stupid. They should have got a 15 year old hacker to design it...maybe that would have worked.
When my oldest Step son now 26 started playing computer games back in the early nineties they had no ratings on most of them at all, and yes I wanted it for him at 12 so I could say no M15+ games till your 15! at least at home...I knew he was playing shoot em dead games like rednecks at other boys places...I couldn't believe then there were no ratings, but Australia can be very behind when it comes to internet technology, I think its because we don't have good internet, and we are only now just getting downloadable movies...very slow because the internet has been slow. People don't want to wait for 7 hours for a movie to down load which is what it was a few years ago..and it cost a fortune to down load them...iTunes only started offering downloadable TV series about a year ago.
Do I think there is a chance I'll get locked out of SL ? no not at all, I do believe that common sense will prevail we have a very vocal press and very vocal internet users. The luddites in charge will have to find a far better system to rank games and to censor if we need it. Banning over M15+ games is only because they haven't figured out a way to get the ratings on them and they are behind with doing it. The technology has once again spead past them before they have had time to turn around.
We are getting a supposedly better broadband with a huge national roll out said to take 8 years to complete...In Sydney I recon I'll be on it in about 4 or 5...I don't even have cable and Im in a suburb of Sydney..in a highly populated area :)
Not Worried Paisley
The Australian government has
Fri, 06/26/2009 - 04:27 — Shockwave Plasma (not verified)The Australian government has been trying to find ways to filter the internet since at least 1999, that's when I worked in an ISP there. While we are generally reguarded as quite a liberall society there is also a very loud minority of kill joys, we call them "Wowsers" in Australian speak.
You can see this story about the Worlds Biggest Luddite dating from 2001 here:-
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/28/this_man_must/
and just to be consistant, we now have the ISP villain award finalists
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3996-ispa-announce-internet-hero-and-villain-finalists.html
Unfortunatly the media act like a bunch of 14 year olds when it come to any story to due with sex, and any Internet story is usually overblown tripe. When you join them together you usually get some rubbish that makes me ashamed to be an Australian.
There is also a political angle that some independant members of the Senate hold the balance of power, and they are fundi Christians, who want to implement this type of mind control, naturally this is for our own good.
The thing that was overlooked by the commentator was
Fri, 06/26/2009 - 05:00 — Alan Hargreaves (not verified)The thing that got overlooked by the commentator was that Refused Classification is not the smae thing as Not Classified. There is a world of difference.
Just think about it for a minute 99.9 (add however many 9's you like) percent of the internet does not have an Australian Content Classification. Are they just going to pull the plug on Australia. I don't think so.
alan.
Chicken Little
Fri, 06/26/2009 - 10:12 — Connie Sec (not verified)Yes..repoting some ISP engineers OPINION as a FACT, then using Maybe's and But's like some Blogs do, to draw the bow that SL may be banned is I feel rather lazy and a waste of cyberspace.
Just cos it's written in some Fairfax Newspaper doesn't make it so.
Well, they'd better bloody
Fri, 06/26/2009 - 16:39 — Winter JeffersonWell, they'd better bloody wait until after the Swansong, or I'm going to have to move to New Zealand for a month or so.
All jokes aside, I don't think it will really go through. But there is that possibility, especially when you throw around the terror words "child pornography" - you can use that as a lever to get anything you want in politics. My state in particular - Western Australia - has a history of nannying it's residents. The sad part is that it seems to be the way the majority of people want it. I prefer to parent my children myself, not hand all the decisions of what they can and can not have access to over to the hands of the government.
Um...
Fri, 06/26/2009 - 17:09 — Dusan Writer (not verified)RaR - seriously, we all know how much you despise SL, how much you long to see it fail, how it did you wrong, it did us all wrong, it's just a walking time bomb of failure. *yawn*
But how does the Australian government's insane move towards this type of censorship, which really has nothing to do with SL "wanting it all ways" (and I have no idea, you know that I know that you're thinking WTF you mean, do you have a typo in there somewhere?) justify another slam on SL's um land bubble?
You really need to get a new routine.
@Dusan--despise is a bit ott,
Tue, 06/30/2009 - 19:43 — RightAsRain Rimbaud@Dusan--despise is a bit ott, but I think the OpenSpaces rip-off is and the "good news" about them not raising prices as much as they were going to, but now are not, after they scared half the grid away is astoundingly insulting to any customer. So I would say that we are pretty disappointed, like many others. Not sure how much you pay Linden Lab each month ( or how much your Immersive Workspace deal generates for you), but we pay a lot and well, we are not satisfied at all. That does not mean by the way that we wish them to fail. In fact we have/had a vested interest in them succeeding. But this is not an interesting topic.
My point about SL wanting it all--is about how they also are using Censorship to acheive their objectives of supporting the porno/ultra-viollent/narco "adults" activities and also being a partner of choice for universities, ngo's and even the military. So really if they are hit by censorship it would be ironic and perhaps the kind of random thing that more usually they drop down on their customers/users/supporters.
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