Slashdot Mirror
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 :(
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...
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?
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!
Actually it could be a sign that perhaps the Department is preparing to quietly let this matter slip into the background ... i.e. give up on it. Rationally, this filter was never going to get off the ground. The Government's own report says it is a waste of money and won't work. It doesn't do anything other than block a handful of URLs, which is pretty pointless considering most of the traffic they are interested in stopping would be via P2P, usenet, IRC and other such channels, which are not filtered at all. It's not a major priority except for certain fringe elements ... and Labor doesn't have the numbers in the Senate to get this proposed legislation through.
For all the sensationalist reporting on the proposed filter on Slashdot, anyone that knows how the Australia Federal Government works internally knows this filter is pretty unlikely to ever come into fruition (in its current form, at least). Governments definitely don't like wasting money on things that are going to make them less popular. Especially considering it's an election year.
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.
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!