“Websites_ACMA.txt”.

FAIL

The UK Press Gazette reports that the European Court has nixed an attempt to put a time limit on internet libel-so a person could sue years after something is published on the web-and in the UK where libel actions are more profitable.

Some people should think before they lash out at those who don’t agre with them.

http://wikileaks.org/leak/acma-secret-blacklist-18-mar-2009.txt

approx 1900 downloads with 34 seeds and 97 leeches as of now.

There are organizations that securely send files to thousands of remote sites on a daily basis. The problem there is not the list, it is not inherently insecure due to it’s contents, the issue is the procedure and lack of a fundamental secure transfer and storage process.

I think you may want to reconsider whether governments should maintain lists of objectionable material for the purpose of identifying, filtering and controlling access to those sites Mark… How else could they pragmatically do that? Who else could? Would you leave that to a filtering vendor??

As for the dentist, he has at least gained in visibility and media exposure… Has it been confirmed if his site was on the ACMA list or was it a filtering vendor add-on? There is a difference…

some 1800 downloads…

The Minister’s response to empirical evidence that the ACMA blacklist contains gazillions of perfectly legal websites is to say “it was never the Government’s intention to block all of the ACMA’s blacklist with the mandatory filter.”

(interesting use of language: It seems like only yesterday that he said, “there has never been any suggestion that the Australian Government would seek to block political content” — I think that was on the same day that we found out ACMA had blacklisted part of an anti-abortion site. But I degress…)

So lets take the Minister at his new word: Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia. Lets assume that the Government has no intention to block all of ACMA’s blacklist with mandatory censorware, and that the only content they wish to block is the stuff that’s so illegal and offensive that it makes your eyes bleed and causes curdling of the milk in your coffee.

So that means ACMA will need to maintain a SECOND blacklist: There’s the original one they maintain now, the one with the dentists, tour opperators, Betfair and the tuck shop association; and another one which is the Worst Of The Worst.

How long do you think it’ll be ‘til that one leaks?

Surely the Govt has their eyes open to the risk now, given all the water under the bridge over the last few days. They can’t seriously expect anyone to believe that a _new_ blacklist will be any more secure than the old, especially when it needs to be distributed to 700 ISPs instead of a dozen censorware vendors.

My question is simple: Why is the Government in the business of maintaining pornography databases in the first place? Plenty of other Governments don’t, so why does ours? Does the ALP still expect anyone to believe that they’re serving some kind of public interest by maintaining this charade?

- mark