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Australian Net Filter Protest Site Returns
An anonymous reader writes "The Stephen Conroy 'Minister for Fascism' website, whose stephenconroy.com.au domain was forced offline by the Australian Domain Name Administrator, has now reclaimed the name after the initial 14-day injunction expired. During those 14 days, the protesters managed to comply with the Australian domain name registration criteria. However, contrary to auDA's own rules and contrary to public quotes by the auDA CEO, the protesters were continually refused the domain. Now, however, it seems that they have unequivocally shown that they have the right to the domain and have re-registered it."
The parody/satire defense doesn't work in this case, because a reasonable person familiar with his politics might well believe that Stephen Conroy is currently serving as the Minister for Fascism in Australia's government!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
An injustice occurred, and now it's been righted. I suppose I could say "goodo" or "w00t" or something. I mean, it's just a little weird, because I'm used to attacking wrongs, not praising rights.
Oh, wait. "managaed" in TFS is a typo. There, I've justified my comment.
On a more serious note, I mean it when I say "good for them." I do admit that it's a little weird for a parody/criticism website of a person to use a URL that is not obviously parody/criticism. But I tend to err on the side of the little guy when he's pitted towards the big guy.
(Also, it's a little ironic that the issue behind the website's existence is online censorship.)
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
AuDA is the epitome of an organization that is operating outside its moral guidelines.
AuDA should be removed and a responsible organization put in its place,
Sorry, Australia. You allow this crap to control your access to DNS. You hurt yourself only, not the real world.
E
Given his stonewalling of public questions, his inability to answer parliament questions in question time, his personal time spent with the Australian Christian Lobby, and his departments attempt to get the IIA to shut Mark Newton up, I'd say he's well and truly doing that role.
YAY! About time. I still don't understand the motivation of AuDA. Maybe they're a bunch of jerks.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Kevin Rudd isn't sitting up in The Lodge scanning the opinions of contributors to this site. OTH he is surely paying close attention to public opinion and the opinions of certain members of parliament who hold the balance of power.
I think it is important to avoid giving Rudd and Conroy ammunition at this point. Do not behave like a bunch of idiots. Public opinion is fragile. I am reminded of the pilots dispute of almost 20 years ago. The Government swung public opinion their way early on and the pilots never had a chance.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Forgive my ignorance .. i assume he is the shadow minister for fascism then?
In 1944 George Orwell wrote: "It would seem that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox hunting, bullfighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
Recently on Slashdot the term has become significantly less specific.
The domain name is stephen-conroy.com. I'd say, that's trademark infringement. Like, you could own stephen-conroy-sucks.com, but, having a site that has the capacity to mislead people in order to get hits is as wrong as calling something Cheerios when it is not.
The irony here is that they basically are saying that someone is a fascist in order to protect their right to lie. I wonder if, really, the rest of the their message is actually honest.
This is my sig.
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"Keep in mind that there is no "right" or "wrong", merely different points of view, all equally valid."
Bollocks!
Complete nonsense. If your point of view is that it is fine to have non-consensual violent sex with children under the age of 6, then you are clearly wrong, and your point of view is not valid at all.
[INSERT A BILLION OTHER EQUALLY RIDICULOUS EXAMPLES]
Conroy's desire to control and censor the population easily satisfies the modern, post war, definition of fascism, as it is popularly used.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, the business name was granted to them before auDA took their domain away.
It appears that they always did have a valid reason to have that domain and auDA's actions were taken hastily and in a manner that could have denied them the domain. The fact that they did not clearly state their valid reasons is in fact a very good argument AGAINST hasty action. Had auDA acted in a fair and reasonable manner the dispute could have been dealt with and resolved without needing all this hullabaloo.
auDA behaved like a bunch of pricks rather than like a responsible authority.
Mod parent up. AuDA are in fact a bunch of retards for many reasons, but this is not one of them. Simply, the domain as registered did not originally meet the criteria for a .com.au domain (a valid, registered Australian business).
Didn't know they got around this by actually registering a business called STEPHENCONROY. That is pretty funny :)
The "strict rules" are a bunch of baloney when you can spend fifty bucks or something to register a vaguely related business name for no particular reason, and thereby hold the domain. They might as well just give up on the rules and make it a free for all.
I might add that I had problems with auDA ages ago because they wouldn't let me register the exact name of my company, which I had owned from well before the internet was popular, just because my company name was considered "generic" or some crap. I appealed and won, but I still consider auDA to be a bunch of retards.
Are you stating that only a business can get a domain name from this group? That in itself is censorship. If this is the case, then things in AU must be in worse shape than I previously imagined.
> i assume he is the shadow minister for fascism then?
Sorry, I don't have "root" for Australia, so I can't read /etc/shadow to find out...
DISCLAIMER: I have a direct relationship to stephenconroy.com.au.
The real issue here is that the domain administrator chose to give us less than three hours to explain our eligibility for the site before closing it down. This is contrary to their published policy as well as other documented instances of this arbitration process, which all seem to indicate that generally ~ 1 week is provided for the respondent to make representations regarding their eligibility. We became aware of another policy complaint lodged with auDA on 21-12-2009 where they responded to the complainant stating that their investigation would take up to 30 days. To this date we are still unaware of any reply form auDA regarding this, which seems to indicate a direct contrast between the way this and our complaint was handled. We specifically asked auDA about how this complaint was different a number of times and these questions were all flatly ignored in return correspondence.
Further to this, auDA flatly refused to rationally consider to any statements regarding our eligibility following the initial three hour period. This seems to indicate that the 14 day 'pending-delete' period the domain was placed in is superfluous, as all arguments following the initial 3 hour period were ignored. Again, we questioned this, as well as the extremely short 3 hour takedown window, a number of times and again all questions were flatly ignored in return correspondence.
Your comment regarding laws seems a little ill-conceived: there are no 'laws' regarding domain registration criteria in Australia - this is handled solely by auDA as an independent body with absolutely no regulatory oversight whatsoever. They make the rules, enforce them how they see fit, and are accountable to nobody. As is quoted on our website:
"This incident reflects worrying concerns about the power that private domain name regulators have to silence critical political speech without going through legitimate legal channels." -- EFA
If nothing else this whole scenario (which, as we're been repeatedly saying, is ultimately a red-herring in the whole censorship debate/movement) has brought international attention to the Anti-Censorship cause. At times we've been taking tens of thousands of hits per day from all over the world, many of which it's rational to assume are from people who were previously unaware of the fight going on here. Love us or hate us, we want exactly the same thing as everyone else -- to see this whole filthy thing dropped. Our methods may have been to date somewhat more guerilla than others, but we're getting the word our en masse.
Sticking to those (informal) definitions, US is a full fledged facist state today. Along with Russia, to some extent China and some others. It seems that facism sadly became a dominant form of government in the world.
You are wrong around the registration requirements for .com.au domain names. Simply selling advertising relating to the domain name is enough to show a 'close a substantial connection' and qualify and the stephenconroy.com.au. name could easily meet these requirements. Things have changed since the auDA took over, and the auDA has allowed the .com.au domain name space to become full of parked monetised websites.
He's saying that only a business can get a .com.au name from this group. The "com" is short for commercial, meaning a business, so this does not seem to be an unreasonable policy.
What on Earth would have been wrong with, for example, stephen-conroy.org.au?
DISCLAIMER: I have a direct relationship to stephenconroy.com.au.
OK, cool; perhaps you can answer the obvious question. Why did you want stephenconroy.com.au and not, for example, stephenconroy.org.au? Since you are not in fact a business, the latter (or some variant thereof) would have been the more correct choice.
and Conroy has taken lots of it ;-) considering that drivel.
to code or not to code, that is the question.
I always wondered why your lawyers never put the point up "but then AuDA needs to take more domains/websites offline as there are so many websites that claim they have got something to do with the domain name but when you look closer they have not. I get frustrated when Google searches return results that have got nothing to do with what I am searching for and is biased by "incorrect" domain names.
to code or not to code, that is the question.
The first people in this country from the general public to hear about this filter tells the story of what it is all about. Here's the link you can draw your own conclusions.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
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Oh for Mod points. Arctanx is right. There are at least three quite separate issues here:
a) Stephen Conroy's policies are woefully misguided. They will have the opposite effect on child protection to that publicly claimed, causing an increase the pain and suffering of many children.
b) Even so, registering this protest site is not a good response. Have the site, but put it in stephenconroysucks.com.au.
- I much prefer Australia's rather stricter DNS rules to the loose ones in the US. This is not a freedom of speech issue, it's a truth in advertising issue.
- Applying for a business name as a workaround is not a good thing. It will make the laws either a) more complex, or b) more vague so that they cover all the misleading behaviour.
c) Regardless of whether the AuDA rules are good, the AuDA implementation looks like it needs some work. Having said that, I'm a fan of stricter policing of au DNS rules. Noone was taking the server down - they were simply saying it can't have a particular domain name.