Slashdot Mirror
Australian PM Has Parody Site Shut Down
babbling writes "The Australian Government has shut down a parody website that mocked Australian Prime Minister John Howard. The website featured a satirical speech that 'apologised' for the Iraq war. The site was down for two days before a phone call from Melbourne IT advised the owner that it had been shut down 'on the advice from the Australian Government'. A mirrored PDF copy of the "apology speech" is available."
MelbourneIT representative: "To us it looks like a phishing site."
Not bloody likely.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Shut down this Al-Qaeda Portal.
Attack Iran. They want to sell oil for Euros.
Feloniously as always,
President-VICE Richard B. Cheney
It's the way of the world, folks. Our corporate masters can't have you exposed to a different world view, now can they. And, of course the citizens who should be protecting the old "democratic" system are way too busy.
Politicians are in the public eye, and should expect satire and public attention. No one forced them to be politicians. Danish cartoons causing bloodshed, and now this. Does the Australian government think its people so dumb that they can't distinguish parody from sincerity?
What a miserable miserable world we live in.
This is a Bad Thing, and it's quite possibly unlawful.
It's also rather counter productive since it gets a lot of people looking at whatever all this fuss is about.
Politicians should grow some thicker skin in Oz. Hard to imagine a more thin skinned bunch, what next, censorship, oh, wait, that's exactly what it is.
50 years ago, March 17th, 1956, Fred Allen, born May 31, 1894 in Cambridge MA to irish catholic parents, famed comedy writer and radio comedian, died of a heart attack while walking his dog.
I'll toast him with a pint of Guinness. Thanks Fred, for all the laughs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It would have been better to request that the material clearly be labelled "parody" or "fiction", because some wankers might be confused and think Howie is a nice guy.
He said that after two days of silence, a customer service representative from Melbourne IT today informed him by telephone that the site had "been closed on the advice from the Australian Government"
People know censorship when they see it.
People do not like being censored.
I suggest if you are an Aussie and this bothers you, vote John Howard and his friends out of office.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Don't they have free speech in Austrailia?
This wouldn't happen in the USA because we have free speech. Except if a lesbian is offended, then it's sexual harrassment. Or on campuses with a speech code. Or it you want to advertise cigarettes. Or alcohol. Or if you want to run political ads, then it might violate campaign finance reform, even if it's exactly like this John Howard web site.
So this wouldn't happen in the USA in the early 80s. We sort-of had free speech back then.
I'm probably going to get marked as a troll or something but the site (see google cache elsewhere) does indeed try to look identical to the real site and links everything but the speeches to the original site, down to the copyright notice.
Copying material for satire is probably legal in this case, but he should not have misrepresented ownership of the text he wrote.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Well at last he's doing something about sedition instead of just talking about it. I'd better stop thinking freely.
Any Australian would know this is a fake speech because the Mr Howard is pathologically unable to apologise for anything.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
The current Australian government's reputation doesn't help them though...
Particularly they have a very poor reputation as far as "supporting civil liverties on principle" is concerned. It is one of the few governments that is entirely happy for the US to keep its citizens who are terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay (on the grounds that that way Australia doesn't have to deal with them). Their attitude towards assylum seekers is notorious worldwide. And the opposition aren't actually much better - they have just successfully campaigned to remove accountability for controversial drug approvals from the Health Minister [who might have to justify himself to the Australian people] and pass it to an entirely unaccountable "panel of experts". I wonder how long before John Howard realises that so long as you pass all the unpopular decisions to an unaccountable "panel of experts" then no voter can ever reasonably complain about anything you do!
Satire doesn't have to be "Ha Ha" funny. I'm American. I follow world politics fairly loosely, and I can tell that the Australian PM, wossisname, Um, Howard Dean? Nah. Oh, yeah, John Howard didn't write that. His political allies would shit kittens, then have him commited to the loonie bin for saying those things.
We would, but there's nobody to vote into office. All we can chose from is a bunch of near-identical lying pricks.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
This is one of those tricky intersections of "rights" and "law." Note that "rights" are things we have whether the law recognizes it or not. That's the classic liberal "natural law" version, and it's what most modernized democracies found their legal system on. Among those rights are speech, especially the right to speech of a political nature. The law protects IP because such laws ultimately benefit everybody (in theory), but this guy MIGHT be breaking IP laws to make a political statement. My take would be that his political statement isn't being silenced, just this particular method of making it. The guy could probably re-package or re-do the web site to make it more clearly a parody and get around the IP laws on this. What pisses me off is that it was just SHUT DOWN rather than trying this very reasonable intermediate step.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
America has problems, yes, but when another country demonstrates their similar inperfections to the world, can't we hold them accountable without trashing the US in the same breath?
How about just a "Boo Australia" in this case?
I think the full blame should fall on Melbourne IT. When they received the request to have the site taken down, they should have asked the Government staffer what law the site was breaking, and when the staffer replied "None, we just don't like it" (or something to that effect), they should have told the staffer to go jump.
It's an easy enough misunderstanding: a phishing site looks like a genuine site, but isn't.
Parody sites look like genuine sites too. That's the general point of parody.
Yes, he's missed the point that phishing is about data capture not misinformation but I wouldn't rag him too hard, he's in the right ballpark.
"The right ballpark"????? For Chrissakes....he's the chief technology officer at Melbourne IT. If he doesn't fucking understand what a phishing site is, Melbourne IT Needs a new CTO.
What's more likely? That a CTO of a major ISP actually doesn't understand the concept of a 'phishing site', or said CTO is prevaricating because the Government is breathing down his neck? You do the math.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
We'd all do better off without such hateful speech.
Betterment through censorship is a one step forward-two steps backwards maneuver.
damaged by dogma
In the U.S. we're supposed to be a beacon of freedom and tolerance. When we don't meet these ideals, they should be pointed out. In fact, people are doing us a favor for pointing out our flaws because it's possible we don't see them ourselves.
Let me use an analogy... If I have some food on the corner of mouth after I eat, I hope my friends will tell me about it, and not just ignore it because some guy down the hall spilled his entire meal on his tie.
People from around the world point out our flaws because we're disappointing them. After we did so much to liberate the world from tyranny in the 20th century, they want us to continue in the 21st. And if we don't meet that benchmark, then they want to tell us to get better.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It's also bad press. Anyone/thing that can look at themselves and make fun of themselves or accept a good making-fun-of always comes out looking better in the end. In fact, they'd be smarter to publicize that they support the proprieter's free speech rights.
Trying to stifle speech, on the other hand, never, ever looks good.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It's not just Arabic sounding names. There is no way to dispute being on the list, so there is no way to find out if the lists are abused. I know someone named David Nelson who managed our data center and is subjected to additional review, because someone else with a common name made it on the list. Here's a reference for this problem:
g 26610.html
http://archives.californiaaviation.org/airport/ms
Yes but in the US all we need to look for is proper spelling and grammar to tell Bush didn't write it.
This is not true and you know it. Didn't your mother tell you not to tell lies? The health minister had a right wing Christian agenda. That's why many people in his own party voted against him.
For non Australians, what *actually* happened, was that the Health Minister had veto power over a *single* drug - the abortion pill RU486 - and that veto power has been removed. The only reason the Health Minister even had such a veto was because several years earlier the Government had traded it for the support in Parliament of a Christian fundie independent MP, since at that time they needed it to have legislation passed.
The situation has *nothing* to do with "accountability" and everything to do with anti-abortion agenda of the Christian Right. Parent post should be modded "-1, Blatant Misinformation".