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Aussie Internet Censorship Minister Censors Self
An anonymous reader writes "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, the minister attempting to ram the great firewall of Oz down everyone's throat, has been removing all traces of the unpopular legislation from his main website with a JavaScript filter. From the article: 'It was revealed today a script within the minister's homepage deliberately removes references to internet filtering from the list. In the function that creates the list, or "tag cloud," there is a condition that if the words "ISP filtering" appear they should be skipped and not displayed.' Bear in mind, this is the same minister that tried to get the ISP of tech forum Whirlpool to pull the site after users there posted a response email from the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority)."
Unfortunately, I don't think it's intended to silence Conroy.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
And in English, LCD is Lowest Common Denominator. Fits.
There's federal elections later this year so I imagine the government will be wanting to keep this particular piece of extremely unpopular legislation on the down-low for the rest of the year so that they can do what they did last time and trot it back out after the elections with the statement that they received a mandate from the people to implement it, despite it not actually being a major part of their platform.
After all, no political party in a supposedly free country would want to start campaigning with something as undemocratic on their books as a secret censorship blacklist run by the government with no judicial oversight and no right of appeal which blocks 'undesireable' content as defined by the government's whim at that particular time of the day. Any competent opposition could make it into a very major issue.
I am so embarrassed to be an Australian right now...
I'm getting tired of endlessly debating the filter with those who dont understand the wider ethical, moral and technical reasons on why its a bad idea. The center piece of their argument is "it stops you downloading childporn from www.kiddytown.com". If you're against that then you're as bad as a child molester. Around and around the argument goes and no matter how many well based points, researched articles or IT professional blogs you gently push them towards, it just comes down to "gotta protect them kids."
We're tried being nice and polite, no one listens. Either way no one is listening. I'm looking forward to running in the street laughing once the general populace work out what they've signed up for. A big fat "I told you so" from the entire IT industry would be in order.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
If I understand TFA correctly, he's pulled references to internet filtering from his website. He's done it through a script, rather than by completely deleting the reference, which suggests to me this is meant to be a temporary change. Maybe the internet filtering pages need some work and he doesn't want to display them at the moment. But I can't see any way it's morally worse than, say, deleting the internet filtering link altogether. In fact, it doesn't seem to be evil at all. So what's the fuss?
It seems that 'geeks', 'gamers' and 'youths' generally can't seem to understand that when you complain rudely, the powers-that-be aren't going to listen.
Many of us hear on /. feel that all complaints are ignored by politicians unless they are complaints linked to an politician's income source. Whether the complaint is kindly worded or not makes absolutely no difference. Rational discussion appears to have little place in modern politics.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
from when I was down there (USN) in 1976 -- folks were pretty much left to act like adults and be responsible for themselves. Now the whole country seems more farked up than the U.S., or even Britain!
Maybe they should start referring to him as Kim Jong Conroy?
So much for the concepts of "Freedom" and "Democracy" for Oz...
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
Here's what the tag cloud looks like with and without the censorship
http://i46.tinypic.com/v79v7c.png
When you click the link for "ISP Filtering" it takes you to a "power by google" search
http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/search?q=ISP Filtering
The fact that a Senator is trying to hide his filtering advocacy from his constituents should tell you all you need to know about the proposal. Most Senators (at least in the USA) go out of their way to trumpet their initiatives and achievements.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Indeed - but the surveyed people are naturally assuming that the filter would actually work. They are giving their opinions on a magical hypothetical filter that would block 100% of illegal content, block 0% of legitmate content, resulted in no slowdown of internet access speeds, and that could not be abused or misused by future governments.
If such a filter existed, then hell, even ~I~ would tentatively support it. So when a non-technical person is simply asked "would you like illegal websites blocked", then no wonder 80% of people say yes. But in the ~real world~, that can't be done without other negative effects and potential risks.
Those people aren't going to come forward and apologise because they still believe they're right, and that Sinead O'Connor is evil.
Religious fundamentalists are bad news no matter what religion they're from.
This is hyperbole a bit but it has a grain of truth (OK an entire wheat feild of truth) but it's not that high.
The vast majority of child sex attacks in Australia are carried out by people who were close to the victim, had authority over the victim and/or were trusted by the victim (cant remember the actual numbers but it was +80%). This is what makes it so hard for actual investigators to get convictions, the victim has a vested interest in protecting the attacker. So the attacker is likely to be a family member, close friend or other authority figure such as orphanage directors, religious or educational authorities yet the only one of these that goes through any kind of police check or has any kind of real investigation against them are the teachers.
If you were to suggest we fix the problem by preventing the church from accessing children you would be crucified. Meanwhile the politicians get to ruin the internet for everyone and pretend they are not making the problem worse by burying the real causes.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The biggest problem I have with this whole debate is that, while there are plenty of people that are flat against the blacklist (for plenty of good reasons), nobody is offering any decent alternatives or trying to find a middle ground.
From what I understand, the main role of this filter is help parents police their kid's activities on the internet, which in principle, I'm all for. There's the secondary goal of preventing kiddie porn and other unsavory content from appearing too, but blocking it won't make it go away.
So why not an alternative? They could set up an opt-in system that allows parent's to decide what their kids see (and achieve their primary objective) and let the police go after the child pornographers (which they do already).
As an example: a custom, government subsidised router with a white list (Conroy can handle that) of a few thousand domains/url's should be enough for most parents. Any additional sites that the parent's want to allow can be added via a password controlled page on the router. One could also offer parents the ability to review pages that have been added recently in case they're dumb enough to let their kids figure out their password. I'm not the worlds best developer but I'm pretty sure that even I could implement something like that.
That way everyone wins:
I'm know that they want to block ALL denied-classification content, but if you've spent a bit of time on the internet, you'd know that it's just not feasible. Why don't they make that a separate policy and at least get some benefit out of this.
this post is now diamonds!