Minchin strengthens attack on Conroy as Labor ignores cracks in Great Firewall
Senator Nick Minchin is taking initiative in his fight against Labor’s mandatory ISP filtering policy and unlike his opposition in the Senate, his message is getting stronger. Minchin’s latest press release draws attention to China’s move to bulk-up it’s censorship system by resorting to PC installed filters and he asks whether Labor will continue to...
Cyber-safety and filtering remains well funded in 2009-10 Budget
Funding for the DBCDE’s cyber-safety plan (PDF, page 42) which includes mandatory ISP filtering remains relatively untouched in the latest Federal Budget. Flick to page 22 of the 2009-10 DBCDE PBS 02 Section 1 (PDF, 139.7 kb) and you’ll see filtering remains part of the Government’s plan. Under initiatives continuing from previous years: $125.8 million...
Five things I learned from the Insight episode on filtering
1) Conroy isn’t backpedaling, he’s reengineering rhetoric: He now claims his plan is to block only material which would be classified as Refused Classification (RC). Well ‘almost exclusively’ Refused Classification — In typical Conroy fashion he has left himself a backdoor with enough room to park a Hummer-sized load of as much ‘unwanted’ content as...
ACMA declares anti-abortion site ‘prohibited content’
Update – Friday 13 March, 2009: ACMA forces Whirlpool to remove link to banned anti-abortion web page. In response to a complaint about an anti-abortion web page showing photographs of what appears to be aborted fetuses, ACMA has declared the page ‘prohibited or potential prohibited content’. The Whirlpool member who made the complaint, presumably to...
Spiked Online ramps up UK coverage of Aussie filter
Spiked Online, a UK publication with the modest ambition of making history as well as reporting it, has published three articles on Australia’s net censorship plan. Guy Rundle gives a detailed run down of the proposal and its conservative connections in his article, Tear down Australia’s Great Firewall Reef (c’mon Guy, it’s Great Barrier Web). ...
Tuesday filtering wrap up: Conroy’s blog, AISA, Greens and the trial of doom
Another busy day of filtering news with the Greens calling on the Government to abandon their live ISP trial as ‘as it’s flawed and doomed to failure‘. Senator Ludlam said: “This trial is simply all show. It won’t give any meaningful indication of how mandatory internet filtering would work in practice. One of the few...
GetUp! raises 25K for Save the Net campaign in hours
GetUp! has raised a whopping $25,000 in donations in less than half a day for it’s anti Internet censorship campaign, Save the Net (you can donate securely at the GetUp! website). At time of writing, the exact figure is $25,618 and just like their petition, the number rises every minute. GetUp! will use the funds...
Question time turns into Conroy comedy club: Question dodging at its worst
If it wasn’t such a serious issue (and one that has been around for well over a year in Labor land), Senator Conroy’s game of dodge-the-question in parliament today would be comedy gold. Conroy not only fails to answer a single question put forth by Senator Cory Bernardi (good questions, at that, for a guy who...
With adults controlled like this, protecting children can wait
Guest post by Jon Seymour Clive Hamilton does not believe, like the Kantians, that exercising rationality is a virtue. It shows. Hamilton does concede that rationality is useful to the extent that it allows one to avoid being manipulated by others against one’s better interests. The unstated corollary of this is that if one wishes...
DBCDE answers ISP questions about live filtering trial
The DBCDE has published answers to 23 questions submitted by ISP’s about their live filtering pilot. Considering the size of the task proposed and the impact it would have on ISPs, DBCDE’s response is rather barebones. Here’s a selection: 1. If this Pilot is run as a voluntary opt in service for the Pilot, how...
Libs shoot down filtering plan: ‘Misguided and deeply unpopular’
The Greens announced their opposition to filtering (or close to it) this morning and now the Liberals Shadow Comms Minister Nick Minchin has issued a press release labeling the Government’s plan as misguided and deeply unpopular. It reads: Senator Minchin said nobody of decency disagreed about the importance of working to ensure the online world...
Sunday wrap up: Image filter mistakes Conroy for porn
LogiPik, a PHP image filter for websites which supposedly uses a number of advanced detection layers to accurately classify a pictures level of appropriateness, thinks this picture of Stephen Conroy is porn. Actually, of the five photographs of Conroy I tried, three were considered porn and the one to the right ‘erotic’. Cheers to Eddie...
