Shhh... ACMA preps URL 'block' page

Filter Conroy - he has Bad Sectors

The fact is Australians dont want a filter, and these politicians are not representing the people they are meant to serve. Conroy is a liability, and why this constant push for a filter that no one wants. Is he on the take with the ACL? The undeniable fact is web surfing responsibilities are for the parent to enact, and it's not for the Commonwealth Government to be a hand holder to parents due to the parents inability to control their childrens web surfing habits. What happened to common sense?

Everyone knows this is a sly attempt to block controversial websites which can be included in the filter anytime, to hide Information our so-called servants don't want you to see or hear. The people are sick and tired of being dictated to by so called servants of the people and Conroy's attempts to keep pushing for what he wants will end with his demise. We don't want and will not accept any web filter and I will use any technological measures at my disposal to bypass it.

Conroy is playing with fire and he himself should be filtered from the media. The less exposure he is given, the better.

Brainless!

Would it not be better to notify the so-called "readily identifiable and contactable website owners" that their site - (or page within their site) - is under review, and then let them take whatever remedial action might be necessary - (say, a grace period of 30 or 60 days) - BEFORE the henchmen at ACMA blindly start blocking pages? This is why Conroy and his cronies are seen to be so out of touch with reality - because they are proposing to impose ridiculous conditions on anything and everything that might be on the web. All this despite the overwhelming opposition to his plan anyway! A true cretin amongst cretins!

Refused Classification

Please bear in mind that the Refused Classification category is ALREADY "otherwise legal content." Except in WA (which has some whacky and unique state laws), RC is not illegal to own, view/read, or buy. It's only illegal to sell or to exhibit in public.l.

The purpose of the RC category is to provide a vector for noisy moralizers to restrict things they don't like. Refused Classification means, "Legal but we really want you to think it's illegal."

No other country has a category even remotely like Australia's Refused Classification -- In other places they use classifiers to categorize legal content, and police to track down legal content. For some reason that nobody seems to be asking serious questions about, Australia has a third category of "legal but demonized" content, and the whole thing is a sop to the religious right.

- mark

Useful

That's a great idea, a standardised block page will make it so much easier to reverse-engineer the contents of the blacklist. Instead of taking a week or more for a home user to derive the contents of the list via what's known as an "Oracle attack" the block page will help reduce this time to mere days.

As anonymous comments, if the list of banned films and books is published, and the intent of the filter plan is to bring the internet into line with other media (the internet is a carriage service not a medium, but let's ignore that for a moment), why treat the internet differently and keep the list secret?

The answer, of course is one that exposes the idiocy of the whole filter plan - the filter will not work! If it worked, the secrecy would not be necessary. So if the government contends that it will work, then what is their (secret) reason for the list remaining secret? If it does not work, why bother with the whole scheme, which is roundly condemned by almost anyone who understands it?

As above - a few answers wanted, but best of luck getting them out of the government - they have been refusing to answer my questions for over a year!

are we becoming communist?

or they making us?
i would never imaging that this could come to the mix of religion and communism?
or should we offer them a one way ticket to some of the former USSR republics (preferably 2K north-east of Ural's).
if they consider themselves 'educated', why not educate others?
sorry, forgot that it's easy to handle otherwise.

Blacklist

How is keeping the blacklist secret going to help anything? If the blacklist is a secret, people will organise a community-level blacklist tracker. Think wikipedia, but with blacklisted websites, or a list stored on a server somewhere. And it wouldn't take much to write a basic script to track websites (you aren't looking for much, just the resolved DNS AFAIK) and then return which websites point where. Also, what is the point of keeping the blacklist secret? The whole "telling people will make them look" comment is stupid. If they filter worked properly, THEY COULDN'T look if they tried. As it stands, the filter will just be another encumberance to freedom of information.

Why the heck are we re-inventing the wheel?
What difference is this filter from something you can opt-in to over at OpenDNS? Apart from it being more forceful and possibly reporting you.

This is an absolute waste of time and effort. There's way too many legitimate reasons to get out of any trouble, ex. bad security, daily exploits, unsecured Wi-FI, etc.

And really a blacklist? this is such an impossibly slow way to filter the internet, heuristics + whitelist is one modern way that is still inefficient because it is still impossible to filter such a large volume of dynamic content, and it'll block legitimate sites every now and then too.

Assuming there will be a string of text on the block page that never changes, e.g. "This is the ACMA block page", couldn't we just type that into a search engine to get a complete list of all blocked pages it has tried to index?

Actually, our constitution does not prevent this legislation from taking effect. The best we can do is to stop legislation being passed, and the fight will continue for a long time to come.