Hmmm

"The list is maintained by the Independent Reference Group which actively reviews banned URLs each month to eliminate false positives."

How can they do that if all the ISPs are filtering out the banned URLs?

Ugh!

Dick move, New Zealand. Dick move.

'Chief Censor'?

Seriously? Wow.

Fucking Dickwads

This is fucking Horrible !!!

And this is also gettinng me quite angry so i will leave my comments just infront of the keyboard !

URLs?

Well that's interesting. So changing your DNS could conceivably put the Chief Inquisitor^HCensor out of the loop?

Oh, and any thoughts of getting foreign, qualified IT people to work in NZ is probably a pipe dream going forward. Have fun playing with the No. 8 wire down there, I think I'll stay in the civilized part of the world.

Hmmm....

"Cynics have also noted that the launch of the filter comes not long before the eighth round of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations, due to take place in Wellington, New Zealand in April."

How long before music blogs and such like quietly end up on this list of filth and depravity?

It's the basic concept that's wrong...

Yes, sure, some internet content is loathsome, potentially harmful, illegal, etc. No argument, but I must have missed the part where the government of a representative democracy has shown this to have actually caused serious harm to its citizenry.

To let a government, any government, acquire the ability to look over our shoulders to see what we're reading, and pro-actively and secretly block off sites of its choice, is not what happens in countries whose rulers hold a basic respect for its citizens, their intelligence, rights and freedoms. Does anyone imagine that the list of blacklisted sites and topics will become shorter with time? Give anyone unchecked power and it WILL be abused.

The real question for me is,...

who in govt sees who tried to access what website, and which size of boots will they use to kick down your door at dawn?

Methinks Amnesty Int.l will be busy in NZ for a few years to come

Just out of interest ...

Just out of interest in this minefield of stat-porn, does anyone have an idea of the number of sites blocked by the Chinese to protect their citizens against the very same sort of evil?

Crude censorship?

Reminds me of when I was living in a certain Middle Eastern country (almost pre internet days) we could get English language magazines, but they were censored with black markers! There must have been a room of people somewhere making sure naughty images and words didn't get through... of course things did. Annoyingly the markers often went through on to multiple pages.....

You couldn't help feeling that those who wanted 'naughty' stuff would quite easily get around this rather crude censorship.

The same is true today, this country wide filter will do nothing more than encourage people to use more sophisticated means of getting their 'fix'. This will surely make the authorities job of proving someone had been using illicit sites that much harder? Encryption technologies and sophisticated software to hide what you're up to is where people will go and then we will have a hard time prosectuting suspected offenders.

What's even more of a problem...

...even here in the UK, and every other country that thinks it can control such things, is the inevitable lack of public involvement.

Ten years ago or more, if I'd accidentally encountered child porn, I'd have instantly informed my isp and any relevant authorities. In these days of knee-jerk legislation and cheap-pinch policing, I wouldn't dare. I'd erase my tracks as best I could and keep my mouth shut.

In fact, it's becoming increasingly likely that many of the 'paedos' caught by the plod these days are those who have simply chanced upon dodgy images or are victims of malware, and have no idea how to clean their caches and HDs. How often have we seen reports of prosecution 'expert' claims that no-one can have images on their HDs that they don't know about - something anyone who's owned a PC for more than a month knows is pure rubbish.

The real offenders are far smarter.

Only legal smut now?

So, living in NZ, does this filter mean that if I view a site it's not illegal? Obviously all the illegal sites have been filtered away - so any smut I can view via the web, I can't be prosecuted for?

down to zero

I leave you all alone for a short while and this is what you come up with? A wellywood sign (cringe) and "thefilter".. I used to to think you were a forward thinking people after I read about the whitehouse but now I think you have lost your guide. Sad. So sad.

This is a part of a more general approach

They are slipping the censorship idea through the back door, under the pretense of protecting our children.

Once the mechanism is up, it's just a matter of deciding which sites to block.

So sure, some sites break the law, but who knows what the law is going to be in a few years? Today it's child pornography, understandable, tomorrow the book publishers push for a law that makes it illegal for you to order books from international sites, because it violates some obscure copyright law, and then you can't access Amazon anymore.

Does that sound so inconceivable?

And I'm not even talking about the danger of outlawing political views, which is a pretty standard example.

More to come I hope

Great work by the New Zealand Government - There is absolutely no good reason why there should not be a ban. Since its been in place for some time, it appears the governance model and false positive management is working as designed.

Democracy does not mean lack of censorship. There is plenty of media censorship in pretty much every democracy of the world.

Thin edge of the wedge

Today kiddie nasties...

Tomorrow porno...

Next year political association....

It's gonna be dark soon, and they mostly hunt at night. Mostly. ...

And there I was

considering moving to New Zealand to escape our Aussie firewall bullshit... at least OUR politicians don't hide the fact that they're trying to control our lives!

OK, New Zealand's out. What price Canada? Are they in on this Western-democracy-turned-Orwellian-police-state bullshit as well, or dare I ask if it's safe for an enterprising Aussie to come over there?

Mate, Cambodia's looking pretty good right about now...

Like in the USSR

There were a lot of secret laws that existed and anyone who enquired about the law about a subject that had to do with State Security,Industrial Espionage or similar , would be paid a visit by the NKVD or KGB.

So the abuse goes on?

So they have 7000 child abuse sites and they want to stop people going to those sites rather than stop all those children being abused?

Wouldn't it be much better for the children if they actually went after the people who upload and maintain those sites? Instead of spending all that money introducing net filters and paying a select few to look at child porn on a monthly basis, they should be talking to the countries where those servers are located, talking to the the registrars, setting up man in the middle attacks and finding the bastards who are creating the child porn - at least that way some children might actually be saved. This is more like turning a blind eye.

So logically this has nothing whatsoever to do with saving children from abuse but just a way of introducing a mechanism for information control.

Anyone set a date for the revolution yet?

Thinking of the children

Don't two thirds of the worlds children live in warzones, or starving, dying from lack of clean water, living in a dictatorship?

Just saying, is all.

Laughable really..

Unless I am misreading this, the filter applies only to websites / URLs. So it will have no effect on any other method of obtaining dodgy material, e.g. peer-to-peer networks, so whats stopping anyone of a mind to from just using bittorrent or whatever instead?

Seems like a huge amount of bureaucratic meddling to produce a pretty negligible result in the end, while simultaneously shuffling in a secretive piece of government censorship that is potentially open to abuse in the years to come.