Home » Posts tagged 'censorship' (Page 9)
Tag Archives: censorship
Links for June 17th 2008
Interesting links for June 12th 2008 through June 17th 2008:
- Blogger arrests hit record high [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Since 2003, 64 people have been arrested for publishing their views on a blog, says the University of Washington annual report. In 2007 three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues than in 2006, it revealed.”
- Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network [Tech Crunch] – “April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore … Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.”
- Save Jericho Again: TV Campaign Info – The fan fight to save the now twice-cancelled US TV series Jericho continues, with dedicated Jericho nuts this time raising funds for a series of tv advertisements and billboard trying to save the show and get a new network to pick up the series.
- Sexually Frustrated Superheroes: Superheroes Who Can’t Have Sex [io9] – Which comic-book superheroes can’t have sex? Any why? (And I can’t believe there is an alternative future Spider-Man comic in which Mary-Jane dies after sharing too many bodily fluids with Marvel’s favourite hero!!).
Australia’s Internet Censorship Regime
The first big concern for 2008 is that the newly-elected Rudd Labor Government in Australia has introduced laws requiring across-the-board filtering of the internet by ISPs. While the plan may have some good intentions behind it, if implemented in the way currently envisaged it will almost certainly make the internet in Australia slower, make internet services more expensive and likely infringe on privacy and civil liberties of Australian net users (seriously, a PIN number of equivalent to log on to the internet – why not have just been honest and kept the Australian ID card?!).
Not good.
For an overview of the changes, see Bookbuster; and for a good wrap-up of the increasingly negative media response, check out Peter Black’s solid overview here. Facebook users might want to join the Australian ISP filtering plan is stupid! or People against mandatory internet filters in Australia groups.
Update: As you might expect, the most sensible response thus far from an Australia politician to Labor’s internet censorship plan has been from Senator Andrew Bartlett:
As with every aspect of the measure, until the full details are known its impossible to judge. However, comments like Conroy’s make it much harder to be confident that the government is doing anything other than populist pandering, putting up a feel-good measure which will have no practical impact but create the illusion of doing something effective.
(My italics.)
Australia Bans ‘Soldier of Fortune: Pay Back’ Videogame
As Asher Moses reports in The Age, Australia’s censors have banned yet another videogame:
Australia’s draconian classification regime for video games has taken yet another scalp, with local retailers banned from selling the upcoming shooter title Soldier of Fortune: Pay Back. The highly anticipated game, which was to be released on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, was refused classification by the Classification Board for being too violent. Aside from Singapore, which is reviewing its classification system, Australia is understood to be the only country in the western world that does not have an R18+ rating for games. As a result, games that do not meet the MA15+ standard – such as those with excessive violence or sexual content – are simply banned from sale. This is despite recent figures from the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia (IEAA) showing the average Australian gamer is 28, and over 50 per cent of gamers are over the age of 18.
While Solider of Fortune: Pay Back certain sounds very violent, the decision by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) should, of course, have placed this game in an R18+ category, if only Australia had such a rating for games. Instead, games like this are refused classification altogether, implicitly suggesting that videogames are meant for kids (by having no adult game category) despite, as Moses notes above, the average age for gamers being well over 18 in Australia! Really, it’s time for the OFLC (and the Governors General at State and Federal levels, who’d need to push such a plan) to take note of the actual demographics of game players in Australia, and update the ratings system accordingly.
Of course, as comments on The Age‘s Screen Play Blog suggest, officially banning this game will likely result in it being downloaded illegally or simply purchased overseas – and legally – in pretty much any other English-speaking country.
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.