Not being a regular poster here, I try to only put my foot in my mouth, 
when I feel it is an important issue.
Having said that, my email is quite simply a "me too" post as I agree 
with Kim in relation to Telstra's arbitrary "censorship" which, let's 
face it, is simply a pitiful attempt to cover their backsides through 
any means necessary. Ethics? I can't see any evidence that these were 
referred to.

What if the site mix up had involved the redirection FROM a business 
site NOT involving porn? Would Telstra then be paying compensation to 
the owner for lost business? I doubt it, so at the end of the day they 
have simply decided for their users what their opinions SHOULD be in 
this case.
What's next? reducing access to any sites Telstra's execs decide people 
SHOULDN'T be viewing?

All hail the Thought Police!
Here endeth the "me too"

Trent

Kim Davies wrote:

>Quoting Jonathan Ah Kit on Tuesday November 23, 2004:
>| 
>| Surely there are easier ways of doing this filtering instead of spoofing 
>| the DNS, such as (are they common in .au? I can't recall offhand) 
>| transparent proxying. It'd filter it out less users, surely, but doesn't 
>| involve spoofing DNS.
>
>Spoofing the DNS on your caching resolvers is probably pretty easy too,
>and probably the easiest.  Just make them authoritative for the zone.
>
>| Though does raise, of course ethical issues too. Though I can't imagine 
>| too many users wanting at the moment to visit a pr0n star's site over an 
>| Idol winner. Dunno.
>
>I think the nature of the content is irrelevant to the discussion of the
>ethics. It is about an ISP hijacking someone elses traffic just to cover
>up their own marketing department's mistakes. According to the press
>reports, the site being hijacked contains perfectly legal material.
>
>If we were to draw a parallel from the phone world, if Telstra published
>an erroneous telephone number in an advertisement (lets say 131313 for
>the sake of argument), I doubt it would ever be acceptable from them to
>redirect that number for their customers to the correct number. It seems
>it is only the wild-west frontier of the Internet where it is okay to
>play god.
>
>kim
>
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