Well I just noticed a Lateline stream on the ABC site and now I don’t have to turn my TV on to watch the only show I watch at night. Apart from Four Corners on Monday I have no reason to turn the idiot box on at all apart from watching a DVD. Australian TV has given me the shits with its lack lustre digital TV. Reception is shit house where I live so unless I watch some commercial network the quality for the only non commercial networks is well below par and only just watchable with a lot of snow to contend with. Well SBS is semi commercialised these days but still, it has great content that’s actually worth time watching but I can’t get it so I’m stuck with ABC current affairs and poor analogue signal.

For some reason the internet is infinitely more interesting than watching TV so a live stream of Lateline is a convenient window to have open whilst I feed my addiction to the web, besides I need something to use my bandwidth on as I struggle to find anything even worth downloading half the time. I have a quota of 40 gigabytes per month but at the end of the month I feel compelled to use it on something, after all I did pay for these bits of data. So streaming some video in a legitimate manner will allow AFACT, RIAA, MAFIAA, ARIA and all the other acronyms of Industry henchmen and their puppet Senator Conroy to rest easy in their eternal pursuit to shut-down the inter webs of the disease of P2P networks while pretending to protect the children from unsavoury material that doesn’t side with the morals of the less liberal in nature.

This filter that Conroy is selling as the cure to immoral behaviour is surely an ill conceived idea and one that is doomed to just fuck us less prudent individuals over for the sake of placating some unknown group of people that deem naked flesh a sin. In all the time I’ve used the internet I’ve never come across kiddie porn nor is coming across porn an everyday occurrence unless I’ve specifically searched for it. Although Myspace seems to be filled with much nudity from spammers and what not and some torrent sites have adult material flashing up but if you’re just generally searching for something normal it’s  unlikely to come across porn and you’d have to dig pretty hard to find kiddie stuff so what exactly is this filter supposed to be protecting us from? Some horny teenager is easily gonna find porn even with a filter in place. Everyone knows about proxies so it will just maybe be annoyance to that teenage boy who has his dick in hand ready to upload a bit of his own on-screen if he misses that sock, so we all have to be penalised with slower internet because some Christian do-gooder has got it into his head to free us from temptation. Before the internet, porn was readily available, all I had to do was go down to the news agency and get a stick mag – too easy.

Isn’t filtering something parents ought to be doing by adequately supervising their kids and informing them of safe practices and educating them of danger. The real problem is not with the internet nor websites that show a bit of flesh but active predators who use  social networks to groom their prey and a filter isn’t going to protect against the cunning of some evil fucker looking to snare an innocent into his lair. No filter ever protected me from pedo’s at the local athletics club so putting a cross through xxx.com isn’t going to save little Billy from some pedo from having a go through a forum or Myspace or Facebook or Twitter or a chat room or MSN or Yahoo or Skype or whatever form of communication the internet comes up with.

Isn’t the filter just a lame excuse to do nothing and perhaps give time starved parents a sense security even if it is a shallow and even false sense. If the Governement and do-gooders really wanted to do something useful in protecting children from sexual predators they’d spend the money trying to catch the pedo before he gets his hands on little Billy but ultimately it is so much easier to place a a string of text in notepad than it is to resource a full blown crackdown on pedo rings. And the notepad option also has the benefit of appeasing the multi billion dollar stake holders of copyright by making it a few more clicks harder to download that new Britney album or that latest episode of Lost.