"nytimes.com is the second most submitted domain on HN" -- perhaps, but the sample (HN audience) is remarkably different from the population in general.
Check out http://locationindependent.com/blog/ - written by a couple that are "still travelling between some of their favourite countries including Thailand, South Africa and the Caribbean"
We are... as an Aussie living overseas I am still amazed by these laws, and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a lot of protests/action against them. Maybe protests have been banned as well?
I think most people don't realise what's at stake. Many just don't care, many others hear the talk about protecting the children, and swallow it, hook line and sinker.
I think in places like this forum, where most people are pretty web/tech savvy, it's easy to forget that we are still the minority.
When this latest round of censorship stuff reared its ugly head, there was some talk from parts of the pro-censorship side that the country should instate a policy of relegating certain web content to different ports. So rather than the standard port for HTTP being port 80, instead certain web content could only be served on a particular port and of course this would make it easy to block said content by blocking its associated port.
Yes, you read that right. So like you'd have a porn port (lets say port 69) and a gambling port and eventually I guess you'd have a political decent port before too long.
This is the level of understanding we're dealing with. Born in an earlier time, I'm sure these people would be spending their days burning witches after making sure they were witches by determining that they weighed the same as a duck.
Pretty much every major ISP in the country has told the government that they have their heads up their proverbial asses if they think this is going to work.
There is plenty of talk on whirlpool about this and throughout various local news sites.
Unfortunately, as someone mentioned above - this is a political move to pander to some more conservative independent seats, so that the current government can get more of their own agenda's pushed through.
What if you set up an intermediate magazine service? People subscribe to magazines through you, paying a hefty premium. They get their magazines with all the ads town out of them a day later than usual.
I doubt that model would hold considering the fact that ad-blockers are too cheap to subscribe to a service like that, but why not just pay the magazine a little more in subscription fees?
The aura of anti-advertising among the tech crowd is somewhat sad. The ads are on consumers' side in terms of keeping the price of content down. That being said, I too use Adblock. :) Advertisers need to bring the annoyance level down a notch (especially with those automatic-popout-video-player-banner-deals-with-broken-mute-buttons).
To me the big problem with ads on the web is that they move (or even popup/over) when you are reading text so I use Adblock. Ads in print don't move so there is no problem IMHO.
