Oh son your an embarrasment...
This sort of sh*t really does make it embarrasing to be an Aussie.
For some reason, both sides of the political spectrum here want to fsck up the 'net.
The liberals also tried to go down the censorship, - uh I mean filtering - route.
Ironic he says claims that Google has a "trust us to know best" postion, when teh Aussie govt is not willing to publish it's ban list.
Apparently that is to stop those who would otherwise not know about the sites visiting them.
Of course if the filtering system works as well as claimed then knowing about the URLs would not be any help, unless of course you could get aroujd the system.
Of course the govt have also claimed that would be non trivial to do, so there really is no reason not to trust us Aussi'es with our own block list - is there?
As for google collecting wireless info.
If people want to keep their data private they should.
The number of unsecured wireless nertworks inAdelaide (a small Australian captial city) is incredble.
If they want to blame industry, they should blame the wireless access point industry, who ship WAPs in an insecure config (i.e. no encryption) because it would be too expensive to support WAPs with encryption turned on.
Blaming Google for collecing info that people are voluntarily publishing is beyond farcical.
Fscking clown.
In the 90s we had an adjective down here based on the then current Communications minister.
That was to Alston something. E.g. that badly implemented thing has really been Alstoned.
I think we have a new adjective.
The Aussie govt is really Conroying this issue.
If the govt really want to do something about net safety and risk reduction, then education including the concepts behind SSL, phishing, spamming, the 411s, wireless network security and the like would be a far better way to help protect the community.
I.e. actually provide people with the witherwerall to protect themselves from a wide variety of threats, instead of trying to implement a system which only concentrates on a very narrow area of net risk and has no chance of doing it well.
This would as far as I know be a revolutionary step in terms of community net risk reduction, instead of yet another destined to fail net filtering program.
Joke alert - this guy is not a minister he's a joke. And if I don't laugh, I'll cry.