Disregarding all issues of child porn (which has been the key factor in the Australian internet censorship debates), the advent of censorship, particularly in western countries, has become an international issue. The linked article covers the security aspects of the filters fairly well, but for me the more worrying issue is false positives.

In recent weeks, we've seen how UK ISPs managed to censor the wikipedia, and as noted in the article on Thailand's blacklist, even the most innocuous things, such as Charlie Chaplin videos, have been blocked (for a laughable reason, too - I don't know about you, but I've never seen Charlie Chaplin speak out against anything, let alone any Thai Royalty... actually, come to think of it, I've never seen him *speak*).

Once it starts, it's not so easy to stop. We need to stem the growth of censorship, or other countries like the United States will have something to use as a precedent. We all know that politicians don't *need* precedent, but do you really want to make it easier for them?

Actually, quite a number of those "[pannings]" were for issues unrelated to the content, like the paging, or the website not working under Opera. They've come a long way in a short amount of time on things like that (particularly the web browser support - we now test under more than triple the amount of browsers we used to). The Slashdot onslaught, in part, prompted that, so I say, if further articles mean that the site improves further to become a better source of news for sites like Slashdot, all the better.