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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)."
Their media releases trip our spam filters. I can't remember the exact rules, but they were the dodgy mail server kind.
In french, ACL means Affichage à Cristaux Liquide (Liquid Crystal Display).
They can't be trusted to not use it for political ends. You wont ever hear the words "We've legislated against the filter being used to block political material."
We're already got the ACL (Australian Christian Lobby) attempting to file its members into the classification board by applying for positions to put their own slant on approvals or most likely disapprovals.
Every little interest group that wants the particular vice that they're against is already lining up to whisper in the Senator's ear. He's ethically corrupt and making dubious shady decisions. $250 Million for the free to air channels around Australia with no strings attached. I wonder why there is little to no coverage in the main stream press now days?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Somebody rings you up or corners you in the street and asks you if you support internet filtering and you say yes so you don't look like a creep but when you get into the polling booth it might be an entirely different situation.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
When I get involved in these arguments, I like to point out that in fact the vast majority of child abuse in this country has been carried out by members of the clergy, particularly the Catholic church, and that statistically the most effective way of reducing child abuse in this country would be to close all church-run orphanages and missions.
This would eliminate something like 99% of all child abuse, and wouldn't affect the everyday lives of anyone else. While implementing the Conroy Filter will create a burden on the rest of the country but will not stop a single child being abused.
Needless to say, this doesn't go over particularly well
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Dunno if it made the news down there, but well over a decade ago Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the pope on live television in the USA and said "Fight the real enemy" as she did it. She was hugely censured for it and although it did not kill her career as a musician it probably forever kept her off the pop charts here.
The thing about her protest that most people didn't even realize, was that she had just finished singing a version of the classic reggae song "War" in which the lyrics were repurposed to be about stopping child abuse. Her message was drowned out by all the media outrage - for a few weeks we learned that everybody in America was catholic, but nothing else really came out of the incident.
A decade later and the news media finally pick up on the abuses perpetrated by the catholic church - even the 'discovery' of an official super-duper-secret document detailing how to deny any molestation accusations and denigrate the accusers written by the guy who is now pope from back in the 70s - but not one of those people who took O'Connor to task for telling people the truth back then has come forward to apologize and say, "Sorry, guess you were right and we should have listened to you."
So yeah, it doesn't go over very well when you tell them and they sure aren't willing to give you credit when they can no longer avoid the facts either.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
You don't have to worry. Tony Abbott is just the liberal opposition mouthpiece until the labour party sends the country broke after the next election. After which the personable, intelligent and well spoken Joe Hockey will take over leadership and with his down-to-earth style and an armload of "labour can't manage money" will convince the beer drinking, bbq loving majority that he's the right man for the job.
Then he'll make some nasty international agreements and raise the GST rate to pay off the 300 billion Australia will have in debt, and everyone will hate him for not owning up to it before the election. He'll spend the next 2 years defending himself against a load of labour hot air and survive a serious leadership challenge from the overly ambitious bloodthirsty party members (due to his approval rating dropping so much for doing his job rather well) and go on to become our 'golden boy' for the following election.
I'd imagine at this point in time, labour might run a female candidate for PM and will have such union support that they may even get back federal power after all the state leaders have been kicked out for being idiots and everyone has managed to forget how much they hated the previous state premiers.
But it could be worse, this is just a best case scenario.
Hey, at least you got a good straight answer out of him. A politician that will answer a question, even at the expense of disappointing his audience, has my respect.
Not my vote, of course, since he disappointed me too. Actually, you need to have some expectations to be disappointed, so I guess he didn't even do that.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Don't worry ... we are still like that. Don't confuse a few fringe Senators' ideas with the status quo. Slashdot really gives you a warWe won't bite :P
Our wildlife might though :P
Better to regret something you have done, then something you haven't.