Of course, it hardly needs to be said that these cases all revolve not around just any hentai, but hentai featuring characters who appear to be underage-- it's distressing how many media outlets are quickly using the catchall of “hentai” to refer specifically to materials that obviously contain underage children in sexual situations, whose legality has long been debated even by hardcore anime fans.
There's also some talk of “voluntary Internet filtering,” which is currently in a trial stage and which is intended to censor “only images of child abuse.” The trial has included as many as 600,000 people who were having their access filtered-- I'd love to see some of the data from that trial. That said, it looks like all the filtering is being done by real live people, which hopefully means that Mom and Dad's video of baby Bobby falling down and saying something adorable about it isn't being unfairly censored as “child abuse.”
Any New Zealanders out there reading? What do you think about all of this?
And ps. What the hell is that bird?
I live in Australia, and I'm counting on the fact that, if New Zealand is saying no, Australia may as well be the next country to do so too since we live practically next door(provided that America may also in the the near future say no).
Our country is bored anough to trial another Internet Filter to stop "the spreading of obscene, inappropriate and unsafe material on the Internet" which includes blocking of internets sites (almost anything) that is deemed "inapprropriate in the eyes of our current government. At least thats what we have been told. The last filter tested by the previous government got hacked within 1 hour or so by a 16 year old highschooler. It cost $84 million, and it got hacked in 1 hour. gg Australia.