Australia's game classification system has no "adult" category, so many games sold without any controls at all elsewhere in the world are flat out banned ("Refused Classification") here.

So if what Conroy has announced here goes ahead, a whole pile of product pages at Amazon (among others) are going to have to go on the blacklist. (Leisure Suit Larry is among the games banned in Australia.

The problem is that many of the proposed filtering solutions work by routing traffic to IP addresses that host prohibited pages to a proxy server. As we saw with the Internet Watch/BT/Wikipedia debacle, this approach is likely to cause problems with high traffic sites (and may well overload the proxy server).

Danny.

I've written a review of The Futurological Congress , but not of his other books, which include some other gems. Cyberiad is a great piece of fun, and His Master's Voice has dated much better than most of the alien contact stories from the 1960s.

http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/online_artcls/pornography/prngrphy_rape_jp.html

Within Japan itself, the dramatic increase in available pornography and sexually explicit materials is apparent to even a casual observer. This is concomitant with a general liberalization of restrictions on other sexual outlets as well. Also readily apparent from the information presented is that, over this period of change, sex crimes in every category, from rape to public indecency, sexual offenses from both ends of the criminal spectrum, significantly decreased in incidence.