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Wikileaks Pages Added To Australian Internet Blacklist
cpudney writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has added several Wikileaks pages to its controversial blacklist. The blacklisted pages contain Denmark's list of banned websites. Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine as the hosts of the popular Australian broadband forum, Whirlpool, discovered last week when they published a forum post that linked to an anti-abortion web-site recently added to ACMA's blacklist. The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian government's proposed mandatory ISP-level Internet censorship legislation. Wikileaks' response to notification of the blacklisting states: 'The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.'" So Australians aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see?
Any Australians fined yet for coming here?
We need to find a document showing who is responsible, then put it up on wikileaks where everyone can see ..... Oh.
Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)
So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?
Has someone on the Aussie's Government been playing Paranoia recently?
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
Eh, what?? A $11k fine for breaking a secret law? How are you supposed to stay clear of it if you can't read the list of things you can't do?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
At least in Denmark, you can drive a little ways and get your Internet uncensored.
For those unlucky souls in Australia who can't access their favorite aberrent websites don't really have any good recourse.
So you can't see what pages are on the list, but if you happen to link to one you pay $11,000 per day...
Welcome to BDA - Banana Dictatorship of Australia!
Looks like Australia is going fascist *instead* of the USA.
Dick Cheney must be drooling at this.
This is probably one of the things he always wanted.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Why don't we just block Australia from the internet altogether until they learn to use it properly?
The blacklist is secret
These guys just don't "get" it still, do they?
Step 1) Run a simple web spider that checks availability but never actually pulls content, from within Australia.
Step 2) Run the same spider in any non-censoring country.
Step 3) Compare the two lists.
Simple as that. Nothing more than a few hundred megs of shotgun-requests, and you can map the portions of the web that look dark but shouldn't.
...but when did Australia become the poster boy for blatant censorship and policies akin to fascism? I lived there for awhile back in the early 90s and it seemed like such a laid-back, friendly place where pretty much anything goes so long as it doesn't hurt anyone.
The irony of all this is I remember getting a "talking to" by a fellow in a bar who held up McCarthyism as one of America's saddest moments because it directly attacked free speech and free thought of individuals in the name of the "commie boogyman". With news like this coming out of Australia, I'm wondering if I'm going to see him again on TV in some show trial, being accused of thoughtcrime.
Actually, no, I won't, because unlike the McCarthy hearings, the ones in Australia would probably be censored.
The vast majority of the list looks like kiddie porn sites or links to kiddie porn sights. You know, teenagers and younger being exploited.
Frankly, the Danes and the Australians are doing the "liberal" thing in trying to block these sites. If they block everyone, they reason, the sites will go out of business and the exploitation will stop. That's admirable.
But... since I'm an American.... I would rather let the people go to these sites, determine who is getting their jollies off looking at this stuff, and then let's round up all these sick f--- people and kill them.
This is my sig.
The anti-abortion website was purposely reported to ACMA (the gov dept looking after the censorship) to test the waters in reporting websites.
All it took was one email.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
welcome to what it feels like being an american during the bush administration. pariah, object of scorn and derision. you do realize what a joke this makes your country look like right?
1. sites blocked not for pornography, but ideological reasons
2. harsh punitive financial punishments just for linking
3. secret lists you, as a common citizen, don't have the right to see
i now think of australia the way i do iran and china in terms of freedom of expression. you better clean this disgrace up, you blokes can't let this continue, it is an embarassment
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Streisand effect strikes again!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
By far the nastiest and most insidious threat to democracy in Australia is the Catholic far Right. Their home has traditionally been the "right" of the ALP, although some Catholic militants, like Tony Abbott have gone joined the opposition conservative parties.
In years past, they've played mostly a spoiling role in Australia politics. As fascists, they know only how to destroy, not build, so they formed a right-wing fringe political party (the Democratic Labour Party, which in Whitlam's immortal words, was neither democratic, nor liberal, nor a party) kept the ALP out of government for 25 years and the country stagnated for decades under a conservative government. After B. A. Santamaria died and after the fall of Communism, they went back to infiltrating mainstream political parties.
These days, their strongholds are right-wing unions (the SDA , of which I was a member -- if I had known my union dues were being siphoned off by Phalangists and militant anti-abortionists, I would've quit instantly...), and the right wings of the ALP and Liberal parties.
Democracy and rational debate has always been anathema for these fascists. Their malign and destructive influence has been out there for all to see, although there has been very few political forces organised enough to challenge them head on.
If there's a vicious anti-democratic force in Australian politics, chances are, militant right-wing Catholics are behind it.
Hopefully this will not come to be in Australia or not be up held upon legal review. Two things I find are disturbing:
1) You will be held accounting for violating the law, but you can't see the law to know how to avoid violating it.
2) All of western democracies have shown a sharp turn towards the police state in the last decade. Something they all used to stand up against and accuse non-democracies of being evil for the same polocies.
Think Deeply.
I am watching my country turn into a fascist police state before my eyes.
Government Knows What's Best For You. Shutup, do your shitty little job, pay your taxes, and be thankful we haven't shipped you off to gitmo yet. Sit back and enjoy the pre-approved content and advertising.
I honestly don't know what to do anymore. These fuckwits are ruining the planet and there's nobody to stop them.
If you stand up against them, you're a child pornographer or a terrorist. Not that that even matters anyway, since they have billions and billions of dollars with which you can never compete, and an army that makes the idea of uprising or revolt laughable, especially given the fact that most of the population is not armed.
200 years ago, some american dudes got pissed at the way the Brits were doing things. Good for them, they just moved to another country and started over.
What the fuck can we do? That option is off the table. We can move to a different country, but all countries are heading in the same direction pretty much. We are stuck here under an oppressive government with no hope for improvement, no possibility of living somewhere that truly values freedom.
If the bill gets voted down this time, it's only a matter of horse trading or another election cycle until some other knows-whats-best-for-you little bitch comes in and puts it up for another vote. Eventually, it will get through.
I'm looking for options. I want to know what we can do to crush these corrupt fucking assholes before they destroy us all.
It's simple enough to proxy through SSH and have access once again and (short of blocking SSH traffic) the Though Police can do very little.
Iain.
If you look in the original Whirlpool thread where someone posted their submitted complaint about Wikileaks site (As a test to see if they would block it) the response they posted is an automated reply to all online ACMA complaints. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1158941&p=44#r873
This whole thing is fud.
I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.
This has nothing to do with fascism. The problem with fascism wasn't censorship. Censorship is bad, fascism included censorship as a matter of course, but it's not what was particularly bad about fascism. Soviet Russia wasn't fascist. It was bad too, just not in the same way.
Today the United States are much closer to fascism than Australia, yet they enjoy incomparable freedom of speech.
Militarization of the economy, dubious appeals to patriotism, booming prison population, the collusion between corporate interests and government, that's fascist-ish.
Censorship, that's what you find in China, which is not nearly as bad as the US in the areas I just listed (but by no means any better overall, don't get me wrong.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Link?
do we realy need these people around claiming to represent a consensus ? we have the technology,but we gotta do it "before" they have thier way with it .The best bumper sticker seen yet"politicians and diapers should be changed often ,and for the same reasons."
The Finnish police have already censored the Wikileaks page on Finnish internet censorship; see my comment at the appropriate talk page.
This is genuinely frightening. Information like this needs to be disseminated so widely and so quickly that would-be info-Nazis don't have the time or resources to censor it or prosecute the thousands upon thousands of people who are helping to get it out there.
Anybody with sufficient technical expertise to suggest how this might be accomplished would enjoy my undivided attention.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Amen.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
The "Catholic far Right"? Damn I'd heard it was the gay alien flying pigs that were behind it all!!!!!!!1111one!!!!eleven!!!111!
That was probably the most paranoid posting I've ever read and I read a lot of Slashdot!
Seriously, did you forget to take your lithium this morning?
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Kiddy porn sites should be blocked (the ludicrous comparison someone made to the war on drugs is just sickened me)
So should sites on making bombs etc. But should racist sites? Should sites the promote nationalism? Sites that promote racial integration? Pro and anti- abortion sites. I have personal opinions on all of those cases but it is a matter of personal opinion.
The real problem is who exactly decides that site X is kiddy porn or not because I certainly don't trust my government not to abuse that power (nor any quango they might create to avoid FIA requests).
I'm an adult I should be able to chose. I should also be accountable for my choices.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Is because it is self indulgence and traditionally our culture is against self indulgence. When people are focused on their bodies, they aren't doing anything productive, and more importantly, are fixated firmly on themselves and not the world around them. That's a good value and to some extent gay activism will always bump into the charge that identifying oneself so strongly with one's sexuality is to accept a narcissistic lifestyle that is sorely at odds with the values that actually worked to make the country prosper.
Violence, on the other hand, can actually be useful. Violence is about a life not centered around self. Indeed, depersonalization is required to a degree to accept violence, and depersonalization is often useful. There is a bad guy, go get them. There is an animal attacking, go get them. The earth is doing something, so we engage in some act to right it. IT cements the idea that we can alter the world around us, whereas, sexuality only seeks to see that we are pleasured within whatever world we are in.
This is my sig.
Has someone on the Aussie's Government been playing Paranoia recently?
What is your security clearance, citizen?
Citizen, plus good you unpraise crimethinker. Plus ungood you post in oldspeak. You go plus speedwise ACMA center for transport to joycamp.
So you're blocked if you link to a banned site.
Are you blocked if you link to a site which links to a banned site?
Are you blocked if you link to a site which links to a site which links to a banned site?
Are you blocked if you link to a site which links to a site which links to a site which links to a banned site?
Are you blocked if you link to a site which links to a site which links to a site which links to a site which links to a banned site?
I wonder how many links from the Commonwealth's site it takes to reach a banned site?
Let me get this straight. So you're not allowed to see which sites are on the blacklist but if you link to one you get fined $11,000 a day? How the hell are you supposed to avoid linking to something that you don't know you're not supposed to link to? All Australians are stupid and I'll justify that statement. Those Australians who work in government are stupid for putting together such a stupid thing. And the rest of the Australians are stupid for allowing such a government to exist at all.
Now what the search engines will **do** with it is left as an exercise to the reader...
But in the meanwhile, it's interesting to see how will each search engine will react (and how fast) to them having snarfed the list (and the pedosites)...
Yeah, it's called progress. Don't like it? Move to Afghanistan where it's still legal to beat your woman and stone apostates.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So Australians aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see?
Not only that, it appears that they aren't allowed to see what it is they aren't allowed to see what it is that the Danes aren't allowed to see.
"politicians and diapers should be changed often ,and for the same reasons."
The attribution for this quote appears to be Mark Twain (Samual Clemens)
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Max Headroom: Have you any idea how successful censorship is on TV? Don't know the answer? Hmm... successful, isn't it?
Cheviot: Override Censor? Good God, Murray, I'm the Chairman, not the Creator!
Max Headroom: Now, I'm no librarian, in fact, I don't know what star sign I am. But, as a famous person once said, "You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And as I -- another more famous person -- once said, "If you don't teach them to read, you can fool them whenever you like!"
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Both my coworker and I run RHEL5.2 on our workstations. Both of our X servers crashed when we tried to view the wikileaks page on Denmark's ban list.
I smell a conspiracy!!
Or a bug.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
i herd you liek blacklists so we put a blacklist on our blacklist so you couldnt browse things while you couldnt browsing things.
someone in australia obviously does want this shit
someone with power and support
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am wondering (aloud) how this will apply to bookmarks stored on servers, bookmarking services and ultimately bookmarks on computers in Australia. Not too much a stretch in all this.
a murderer isn't as bad as an adulterer, because the murderer would never cheat on his wife
the guy invaded a country on false pretenses for crying out loud
and i especially like how you label me as an anti-american american, simply because i detest bush
as if bush represents true america, as if rejecting bush means i am rejecting america
how exatly does that work in your mind? that because i reject what bush did, this means i am against my country?
why in your mind does what bush did=the only valid representation of the usa?
in truth, bush is a defiling of the america i know, and the only truly unamerican people are people who expect blind obedience to some ashole who wasn't even elected with the popular vote in the first place, and just because i quesiton the legitimacy of that asshole, that means i am... unamerican? really?
blind unquestioning obedience is the american way? is that your argument
do you know how many REAL americans died fighting exactly this kind of douchebag thinking?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No wonder our world is going to hell. This amount of control and censorship is unacceptable.
I wondered whether to test and see if the IWF had added the Danish sites to their own blacklist but frankly the implications if they hadn't would be a tad unfortunate. So I don't know.
Sadly it's impossible to test whether all the entries on the Danish site are child pornography or not without going to look at them. Even then, there's a chance that the some entries had such material on them when added to the list, but have had it since removed.
Nonetheless unless someone checks, there is no assurance that the list is not being used for political purposes. Clearly the Thai list is.
So although Wikileaks has simply shown that the Danish government is doing exactly what it claims, that is in itself a valuable and reassuring action.
I want to know which web pages the IWF is banning in the UK. I want that list published. I want someone to go through it and check that everything on it should be there. I don't want to be that person.
Who wants to start a satellite internet company? Even with it's horrible upload speeds, looks like they (and all of these other countries thinking of imposing mandatory censorship) could give satellite a chance to make a comeback. Good thing Australia doesn't have a strong space program...yet.
"That's right I said it. The Moon! And we ain't stoppin there! Read my lips. M A R S. Mars Bitches!"
but there is something wrong with censoring everything
this is why "please think of the children!" as an excuse to limit all media consumption everywhere is bullshit
but that doesn't mean, at all, that videogames, or movies, or anything else that might have content that is very violent or sexual, shouldn't be limited when used with children
you can say the kids will get it anyway, you can say that what someone else might find objectionable for their kids you don't find objectionable for yours, you can say this job is entirely the job of only the parents
all of this is true
but the problem is that there are some people out there who think censorship of material when it comes to children is just as bad as censorship, period. no, totally wrong. when it comes to children, censorship of material is ENTIRELY coherent, valid, appropriate
if you don't understand why this is true, why society and/ or the parent must protect children from material they are not mature enouugh to understand in its proper context, then it is possible you are a child yourself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I had a look at the list and the first one I clicked on is ls-studio.org/. Seems to be a site that intermediates for appartment rentals
Bart
Seriously this may sound like an extreme and difficult reaction, but the problem is so immense I can't see it any other way. Find a niche, talk about things the people care about but the parties ignore. Find like-minded friends who will also run. You may only get a seat or two, but if people see you as authentic "change", you could see a nice boost the next election.
Once we get better at it though, we ought to be able to detect bad genes before child birth or even have some sort of birth control that even prevents the egg from implanting if it has undesirable characteristics. Why even have genetic disease, criminal behavior, and other problems when you can simply prevent those people from being born? You could just vaccinate women against carrying defective children to term, with some sort of an executioner nanobot.
This is my sig.
Simply linking to addresses in ACMA's blacklist attracts an $11,000 per-day fine (snip) The blacklist is secret, immune to FOI requests and forms the basis of the Australian (snip)
So you receive a letter on your mailbox saying that you were fined in AUD $11,000 , for linking to a site that you didn't know you could link, and if you knew that you couldn't link to it you would be even more penalized because that information is not for your security level?
Hmm, since the blacklist is secret, they might reasonably claim that they can't tell you which of your links is on the blacklist. So, $11,000 per day until every link on your entire site has vanished. Profit!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
who are more mature than some 40 year olds
but all we can do is apply general rules
and, generally speaking, a child understands nothing of social contexts. its the lack of an ability to place what they see and hear in the proper reference of the world they live in that makes the material unacceptable. their mind can't process the material in a way an adult can, because they don't understand what an adult understands about the conditions that makes the material acceptable or tolerable. their experience of the world is too green and unexperienced to process certain violence or sexuality they might find in the proper way
meanwhile, your average adult understands (hopefully) enough about their world to understand the various contexts in which the creation and consumption of some ultraviolent and ultrasexual content is acceptable. in fact, its a pretty good definition of maturity itself: the ability to process sex and violence properly, responsibly, and appropriately. meanwhile, your position seems to assert that cognitive and social maturity is unattainable. therefore you fail to make a valid point, because it is attainable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. the idea is that the government crackdown is officially on pornography, but then they also crackdown on sites not related to pornography
2. you can make a clearly logical delineation between simple social concepts that have been around for ages, like drugs and prostitution, and broader ideological trends and ideas where the word "ideology" is more appropriate
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Communist Soviet Union opposed fascism (Molotov-Riebentropp notwithstanding, they supported republican Spain).
Not all authoritarian regime are fascists, just like not all diseases are lupus.
China spends MUCH less of its GDP on its military (1.4% vs 4% for the US.)
I think you'll find that people with the most problems with freedom of expression are the right-wing (and extremely conservative) Catholics like Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon. The people doing the oppressing here are the conservatives and their enablers, not the small-l liberals.
Fairness Doctrine.
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
That site is not accesible in the Communist Monarchy of Sweden. :(
FRA: STFU GTFO
Heres a thought. If those sites weren't blocked and the "party van" was going after the sick fucks who were going to those sites and clicking thru a bunch of images on a regular basis, then that would solve the problem fairly quickly.
Or is sweeping a bunch of pedos browsing cp under the rug and then claiming that "nobody is looking at cp" (presumably because they are now sitting outside primary schools fapping in a van) the better solution to the problem?
Christ, its not hard to find out who is visiting these sites, and its not hard to tell the difference between me seeing something on 4chan I regret seeing, and someone who has a long history of browsing this material...
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I agree. Every ausfag should report in, and head over to your image board of choice (guro?). Then submit links to individual images. Keep those bastards working. Theres no way the censors can keep up with /b :D
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
What support? So far there's next to no support for this at all. Just some maniac's pipe dream.
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Simple low-profile solution: Get a couple friends together. Pool some money. Rent a cheap server in a foreign colocation. Run squid there. VPN in. Voila, freedom. More drastic solution: Write a worm. Unleash it. Let it set up a proxying botnet for you.
And to further my point about six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon blacklisting, here is a link that eventually leads to the banned Danish list.
I think I should be pretty safe, though... the last step before getting to the list? The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Oops.
(Props to the Whirlpool poster for discovering this hilarity).
I don't know (nor care) what you call "communism," but Soviet Russia has been called "communist" by billions (literally) of people, and there and then the state owned the corporations.
For me, the worst of this (yet another) Aussie gov't act of idiocy (no less than a previous gov't's "Children Overboard!" scandal; I'm not trying to take sides here) is:
IT WASTES BLOODY TIME THAT COULD BE BETTER USED!
Not only will Conroy's dabbling with imaginary
taps on the WWW-feed pipes leading to Australia
slow the Internet for all (if filtering happens),
but it take time from the National Broadband Network.
---
Call me cynical, but - just maybe - that is the whole idea of such a dim bureaucrat being placed into such a ministry's seat.
It probably helps Telstra to have such a dim-wit
in the minister's chair.
Ouch!! I tend to think of Australia as a forward and progressive country like Canada. My original post has certainly opened my eyes to Australia's shocking drive to the bottom. Too bad ... really .... I hope some Australian press read and comment on this someday.
The wikileak pages have been blacklisted by the Australian ACMA as they contain links to blacklisted sites. This article contains links to the blacklisted wikileak pages. As a good, moral Australian citizen I have reported the Slashdot article to the ACMA with the request that it also be blacklisted. I accessed the Slashdot article via an RSS feed from Google Reader, so I have requested that it be blacklisted too. I did this two days ago and haven't yet received a ruling from the ACMA. I wonder what they will say... if ever...