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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.
We keep on asking for Conroy to shut up but this is not what we meant :(
In french, ACL means Affichage à Cristaux Liquide (Liquid Crystal Display).
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.
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!
I am so embarrassed to be an Australian right now...
Those corrupted by power never want to lose their power. If this means disregarding morals, ethics, and standards of any kinds, so be it. It is a plight of the human condition that we are so easily corrupted, and a shame that we haven't seemed to outgrow it, and frankly, I don't believe this race ever will.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
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!
Wise beard man. His words are wise, his face is beard.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
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?
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
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...
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.
The summary of this article is a ball-faced lie. The JavaScript in question removes the term "ISP filter" from the tag cloud on the home page of the site, nothing more.
There are still plenty of pages on the site that mention "ISP Filtering" such as the following:
Media Release - Measures to improve safety of the internet for families
Measures to improve safety of the internet for families
Media Release - Optus to participate in ISP filtering pilot
Media Release - Pilot to assess technical feasibility of ISP filtering
PS: I still think Conroy is an ass-hat. It's a very small minority of Australian citizens who want internet censorship - Kevin Rudd and his government need to remember that they were voted in by the majority. Say "NO" to Kevin in 11!
Hear! Hear!
When I read the headline, I thought the summary would be about how the internet censorship minister accidentally blocked himself from seeing things he wanted to see. Yes, that would be sweet justice and deserving of the "humor" tag. But, the article speaks of something far more nefarious. It should probably be tagged "scary", not "humor". Except that it's kinda funny in a we're fucked kind of way.
the isp's will be paying for it, so driving up the costs is only going to drive of the cost of your internet connect to cover it.
"I'm getting tired of endlessly debating the filter"
Indeed, it's been going on since the 90's, still no filter and IMHO there never will be. OTOH if I hear you laughing in the streets I will grab my picthfork and join you.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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
My/Our UID is actually 0
No Anonymous Coward is 666.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
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.
"once the general populace work out what they've signed up for." Unfortunately, the sheeple won't notice or care.
A big fat "I told you so" from the entire IT industry would be in order.
LOL THOAS DUMB NERDS, I BET THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE ANY KIDS, LOL! GIT SUM PUSSY!
(Note: Though I agree with you, this is the likely response. I'm convinced the only thing a human being truly understands, in this type of situation, is violence.)
not much, just being forced to manually insert line breaks into my comment
I find it interesting that you seem to think that the reason people disagree with you stems from a lack of understanding. Have you stopped to think that perhaps a lot of people have stopped to consider the implications, particularly on an issue that is important to them?
Yeah, that seems extremely unlikely.
... and then they built the supercollider.
ACL also refers to:
Access Control List,
Anterior Cruciate Ligament,
Agent Communication Language,
American Classical League,
Audit Command Language,
Access Control Level,
Automotive Components Limited,
Ace, Ltd.,
Association for Community Living,
Allowable Cabin Load,
Allowable Cargo Load,
Australian Current Law,
Active Current Loop,
Authentic Christian Living,
CSX Transportation Incorporated,
Average Call Length,
Anterior Clavicular Line,
Aircraft Cabin Load,
Keyboard Accelerator,
A Changed Life,
Aliasing Controlling Language,
All Community Luck,
Agent Communication Library,
Another Classless Laker,
Angels Crucial Leg,
Academy for Church Leadership,
Austin City Limits,
Auto-Correct List
etc.
There has to be a joke in there somewhere.
he has been marked...
Wow I'd like to see where you are getting your stats from but the majority of child abuse is from family and friends (82% according to a quick wiki search)
Maybe show some references and I'll take you seriously but at the moment you are coming across as nothing more than a bigot.
Kactus
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!
Keyboard Accelerator,
?
The biggest joke here that he's trying to censor himself using client-side scripts.
But it does show how the "content-control" people think. They're the ones who try to block right-clicking and text selection. In their ideal world, the "content provider" controls the information right up to the moment it enters the "consumer's" eyeballs, and beyond. The digital age and lossless reproduction of information is their greatest nightmare.
Tell them their games, web cam and download may be slower and they will have to may more per month to connect.
Tell them the Conroy is going to take their youtube away.
Make it personal to them. Tell them the truth about the reality of packet inspection at your average Australian isp.
Narus they are not.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Did the mega churches close after the straight, gay and cash dealings where exposed? :)
Then only thing you can know is truth will always come out and political deals by big parties with faith based groups will blow back too
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
sic!
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.
I am not willing to let this one fly on by without a show of proof.
Most child abuse occurs within the family. Risk factors include parental depression or other mental health issues, a parental history of childhood abuse, and domestic violence. Child neglect and mistreatment is also more common in families living in poverty and among parents who are teenagers or are drug or alcohol abusers. Although it is certainly true that child abuse occurs outside the home, most often children are abused by a caregiver or someone they know, not a stranger. What do I need to know about child abuse?
Who has won our very most complaints?
Now is it Amy Johnson, or little Mickey Mouse?
No! it's just a country lad who's bringing down the house.
And he's Our Steve Conroy- And I ask you is he any good?
Our Steve Conroy- Making laws like no other should.
For when he goes in to bat
He knocks ev'ry geek flat,
For there isn't any thing he cannot do,
Our Steve Conroy - Ev'ry Aussie "says get f**ked" to you.
Once again we see child porn trotted out as a straw man in an argument which is really about getting the ability to arbitrarily censor any material which offends the moral majority or threatens the political power of those currently holding it. Child porn should be as familiar a straw man as terrorism, and it affects about as many people as terrorism.
If 82% of all children are molested by friends and family then you can rule out the internet and all it's filth in at least 82% of all cases.
"Oh won't somebody think of the children!" I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm going to state that in general it's not "the children" who are downloading and enjoying child porn. Children are being exploited by it, but they're dreaming if they think any filter is going to prevent those images swapping hands. There's altogether too many tech savvy kiddie fiddlers using encrypted systems, hidden partitions, private browsing settings...and...get this...the fracking mail system to simply post a DVD filled with porn straight to their well known "web of trust" kiddie fiddler mates. This filter won't even touch the ones they claim to be stopping - they're already too sophisticated.
What it will do is stop consenting adults from visiting niche / edge sites to view their particular form of pron, say BDSM for instance. You'll wake up one morning and find you can't look at pictures of women hog tied and spanked pink - because someone out there objects, even though all parties involved were of legal age, consenting adults.
We have to oppose the filter, because it's like the GST. It took a lot of work on their part to get it in place and set it at 10% (which they said they wouldn't increase) but once it was legislated it became easy for them to ramp it up from there.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
huh ? so you gone nuts over javascript. is it ?
Read radical news here
Actually, the vast majority of abuse against children is committed by close family members (fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles etc). This is true of Australia as it is of every country. Now, it is true that the majority of high profile media reported cases are probably those perpetrated by the catholic church, however abuse has been rampant in every institution relating to children where oversite is absent. Recently, Rudd appologised to the men and women who had been abused in the various institutions as children. Some of these institutions were state run, and some church run. I do not support the internet filter, and I certainly do not defend the church organizations who's lack of oversite and attempts to cover up abusers lead to so much abuse. Having said that, your statement is in error in regard to the most common abuse vector.
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,...
Citation needed.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Anonymous Coward is 666.
See, AC has a 3-digit UID. Which is why we must always listen to them.
proud caffeine whore
I'd like a citation for that. Child abuse is quite common and most of it is perpetrated by relatives or people who know the child well - step father, boyfriend of the teenage mother, uncle, next door neighbour and often camp counselor or teacher. In some cases the mother is responsible. I'm not aware of any statistics which say that the mostly homosexual child abuse perpetrated by priests makes up the majority of cases. It's nice not to like the clergy but it's better not to demonise them without proof.
Sinead O'Connor could have carried her point across better. For people like me, I'm of Polish descent by the way, the Pope was the source of inspiration and the only person we could trust while we were under the yoke of the Soviet Union (having been sold out by the West to Stalin). The Pope definitely did not support child abuse and his message was a positive one and quite ecumenical - whether you were Buddhist or Catholic he had positive things to say to you. On the other hand Sinead O'Connor decided to take the sensationalist approach instead of stating her case in a civilised way. In fact the Pope was not the enemy - he may have not realised the amount of child abuse going on but being of the older generation he probably couldn't believe that such things were happening - not to also say that the media did not blow them out of proportion to sale more papers or push the agendas of those who were anti the RCC. Personally, I'll take the Pope's message any time over the sorrowful moaning of O'Connor because it was he and not her who stood by us and gave us hope at a time where everyone else turned their back on us.
Yeah, I've heard that complaint too.
What that argument ignores is that she's a singer. That's what she does, that's the only reason she even had a platform to tell anyone anything in the first place. Do you think SNL would have given her national air time to do anything BUT perform? Of course not. Look at Bono - he's got all kinds of causes that he raises money for by "going through channels" - do you know even one of them?
And as for your giving the pope a pass, bullshit. The policy of the church was that molested kids faced excommunication unless they kept their mouths shut. It doesn't matter HOW many kids were molested by priests - the fact that church policy straight out of the vatican was so massively wrong-headed is what made an enemy out of him and organization that he lead.
Personally, I'll take the Pope's message any time over the sorrowful moaning of O'Connor because it was he and not her who stood by us and gave us hope at a time where everyone else turned their back on us.
Funny, I'm pretty sure that the tens of thousands of people who were abused as children by the clergy would disagree with you.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.