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AU Authority Moves To Censor Net Filtering Protest Site
An anonymous reader writes "On Friday the Sydney Morning Herald reported that an Internet censorship protest site had been set up under the banner 'Stephen Conroy: Minister for Fascism' and was ironically registered under the very name of the Australian Communications Minister responsible for trying to mandate the compulsory filtering scheme in federal law, stephenconroy.com.au. Within hours of the story being published, auDA, the Australian Domain Name Authority, had shut down the site, giving the owners only 3 hours to respond to a request to justify their eligibility for the domain. Normally auDA would allow several days to weeks for this process. An appeal to request an extension was denied, with no reason given. The site was quickly moved to a US domain, stephen-conroy.com in order to stay active while the dispute with auDA is resolved."
I think this is somewhat justified. Sure, where do you draw the line but this site was registered under a false name -- that of someone in Parliament. There's always the mature way and the immature way to handle things, and in this case with the people who created the same, they took the immature route. There's a time and a place for things, this sort of thing is more suited to personal jokes between friends and groups on Facebook.
I'm no fan of Stephen Conroy's Great Wall of Australia, but the owners of the site in question can't have any claim to legitimacy if they fraudulently use someone else's name to register it.
You can't censor in secret anymore. Either you can pull a China/North Korea/Cuba/Most of the Middle East and just outright limit, filter and forbid in the open and go full tilt enforcement while not hiding the fact you're being a douche about it, or you can go hands off and only enforce your countries top level domain. Few people in the US use a .us top level domain, though the popularity is increasing. .com is for the world and can be hosted anywhere nearly transparently. It's time Australia figures that out.
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You're only allowed to register .com.au domains that correspond to the names of businesses that you own, or your own name. This isn't censorship so much as rule enforcement.
AuDA is a fascist organization [organisation]. They do what they want, use their funds to hire high-powered lawyers, and out-spend those who seek to use their services within their fascist rules or even those used by the rest of the Internet world.
I think Australia is a beautiful wonderful place, and have many friends there. When they can free their government from AuDA and their Big-Content masters, it will be a better place.
Oh yeah I need a punchline to get the karma masters happy. AuDA and Australia fascists: step off.
E
...that Bob Brown is the best choice for PM, The Greens really have the only policies that make sense. Can you all imagine no Labor or Liberal bastards calling the shots and the country actually being run by someone who cares about it rather than these insane power hungry pollies with mad personal agendas to fulfill.
If something isn't true, it doesn't make it a fallacy.
I'd like to hear the details of this before I take it at face level. As much as I am opposed to Conroy and his barmy internet filters as an Australian I do also recognize that .com.au has different requirements than a .com domain, and still take stories like yours with a pinch of salt. Please back it up.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I suspect someone within the AU registry side-stepped some processes to get the domain through.
This may sound strange to americans, but over here in australia, com.au is fairly strictly regulated.
Good to see .com is still up though, I agree with the cause :)
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You are wrong about the commercial requirements. These are very minimal. Just placing some ads on their website selling Steve dolls or Steve posters etc would be enough to meet the auDA monetised website requirements.
If I act/dress like Steven Conroy goose-stepping through the streets, THAT is parody. If I create a passport with his name on it, then that is fraud.
They should have registered the site in their own name, then it would be parody and they would probably win in court (don't know aussie laws on parody but presuming they are as similar to EU/US laws as you can expect from a continent of criminals).
Mind you, the fact that the registry changed its normal procedure for this case shows that this is a real attempt at suppression of critical thoughts. Then again, everyone knows not to use local registers for anything, they are all corrupt but without the global oversight the .com.org.net have to work under.
But if you want to parody/critize, you need to know what battles to fight. Like the show "Have I Got News For You". They can only do what they do because they got lawyers watching the entire show, who decide what joke/satire is worth it and which isn't. You can make far harder satire, if you give the enemy only the satire itself to fight. Not accidental criminal/libel stuff that they can use to shut you down.
For instance, I can say that George Bush is the monkey whose brain was served in The Temple of Doom, but if I then hint "which leads him to cheat on his wife" I am opening myself up to much to attack. This side is now attacked because it faked the registry, neatly allowing the attacked to side-step addressing the charge of facism.
Just as my post may now be modden down for attacking Bush, or the criminal aussie remark, rather then the main point I am trying to make.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... the domain name being registered was stephen-conroy-facist.com.au or stephen-conroy-destroys-freedom.com.au or something like that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars