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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   461 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 12, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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The Australian govt seems dead-set on banning and censoring more and more.

Yes. It's ham fisted and seems to mirror Canada's trajectory. I can appreciate that ASIO is given an unenviable job as the security service and if I took the King's shilling in Burgess's role I would advocate for more tools to do my job more efficiently. But this seems wrong and just looks like the govt pushing to make their lives easier.

Once the apps get a reputation as compromised, only the stupid and uninformed will use them (which to be fair is probably no small percentage of the criminal/terrorist franchise). The rest of the targeted will quickly find other comms methods (eg multiplayer videogame lobbies) and the rest of us will be stuck with 'this is why we can't have nice things'.

The E-safety commissioner wanted to globally censor videos of the stabbing on twitter because Australians could use a VPN to get around the national-level restrictions.

She's completely clownish and operates on Think of the Children OS v1.0.

All we seem to do is ban things - development, mines, pipelines.

Yes, because its convenient for those working in those roles. At the risk of opsec, I have experience working with the public service and know the mentality. How do we make our jobs easier on a limited budget without having to investigate the issue in depth? Let's ban it. Nanny state, safetyism etc.

I can extrapolate this to the EU which does this writ large.

Nobody ever wants to leave things alone, they have to work hard making a mess out of uncomfortable, sometimes unpleasant realities

Yes. There are edge cases. I am actually cautiously supportive of the social media ban for children because of the difficulties a lack of a ban would make for good parenting in isolation (eg telling your 12yo daughter she can't Instagram while she suffers social exclusion from her peers; it needs to be everyone).

But I also know that there's a reason no one likes to upload their docs to the net. No one can keep them safe. Data breaches everywhere. Also who the hell would ever provide ID for porn access?

It's a big mess, but that is no excuse for convenient shortcuts to Do Something.

Yeah banning social media is easier and more workable than porn, I'd be in support too if I wasn't worried about a slippery slope. Even just debundling this stuff from phones might be a good idea, it's not necessary to be installed on start up. Got a new phone recently and they auto-installed tiktok on it. It wasn't even a Chinese brand!

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