We will succeed.

If it helps put your mind at ease a little – almost all of the comments on the ABC story about this were anti-filter and hesitantly supportative of Anonymous.

Attacks like this show that people don’t want it very strongly – and if no grander organisation is going to take it into their hands to make a big mess of the filter, the Anonymous masses of the internet will do it their own way. Opposition to the filter has been fairly half-arsed since the protests in … when was that? January?

Those protests which, I might point out, largely originated from /b/.

It’s about time the internet community started making itself heard about this again – DDoS is just one nice and vocal way of doing that.

A bunch of 4Chan kiddies with the low orbit ion cannon is hardly terrifying stuff. It is to hacking what holding hands is to an orgy.

The Internet is different given that static images that would be legal in a publication are classed as “film” due to the definition of a “computer generated image” in legislation and are treated (as far as legality is concerned) with video tape and DVD. This was the case for the prohibited (but R rated) aborted fetus image.

I can’t say that Jim Wallace appears to have got his head around the practicalties of the Conroy proposals defining it only as a “blunt instrument” but believing that a “blunt instrument” is better than nothing.

At the FORT forum it was pointed out that googling the term “sexual fetish” would return several million results (I just got over 8 million ) and it should be pointed out that some fetish material is legal and some illegal. The term is a generality. Typing other terms will result in thousands of results – some with explicit advertising – and in the countries from which the material originates it is often perfectly legal and is also usually legal to purchase possess and view in the State of New South Wales.

In his “We can’t wait for whales to use the internet” press release he spells Patten Patton indicating to me that his mindset is firmly in the military where he served as a distinguished brigadeer. Patton was a military commander.

It doesn’t appear to have been noted anywhere (and I wasn’t allowed to video or record the proceedings) but when asked if the current classification system was suitable for a dynamic environment such as the Internet Jim Wallace appeared to agree that it wasn’t.

A review of the Australian classification system is long overdue.

If someone can hack these websites, someone can hack the filters. Imagine hackers having access to an entire country’s internet usage logs and being able to redirect and hijack any site accessed.

One of the great things about the internet is that its decentralised nature makes it more resilient to attacks. Forcing everyone through a filter creates a central point of failure and additional security concerns.

The PM and ACMA sites being hacked didn’t affect anything else. But what if the filter was hacked?

We do not need guerilla attacks, we need it to be all out in the open and discussed freely and without aggression or ignorance.

I know a lot of people who understand nothing of the proposal of a national internet filter, yet when they see reports of this kind of guerilla activity, their default decision on the matter is for the internet filter. After all, they ask “Don’t filters keep hackers like these out? I don’t want hackers.”

One thing we need to remember is that most of us who are fighting the good fight have a much stronger grasp of how the internet works, how a filter will affect it and what it will and won’t do. We need to be talking to those people who are not high end users and who do not understand all of the details, and convincing them of what we already know.

Yes, attacks such as we have seen from this Anonymous group get people talking about the cause, but not in a positive and supportive manner for our cause that we want and need them to be.