Sign in / up

back to article Oz comms minister cops Internet Villain jibe

Australian communications minister Stephen Conroy's attempts to clean up the web Down Under have been officially recognised by British ISPs - with a nomination for their Internet Villain of the Year Award. Conroy is cited in ISPA's annual boo-hiss list for "continuing to promote network-level blocking despite significant …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Ian Ferguson
    Happy

    Lord Carter

    "For his attempt to bring a holistic view to government policy across the communications spectrum."

    Translated to human as:

    "He's on twitter."

    0 0
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Stephen Conroy: "CP is A-OK"

    Not his words, but his actions. On the one hand he is saying there are child porn sites on the net, that AUSTRALIA is protected from, yet somehow, instead of asking for the site to be removed, it is blocked.... but only for Australia.

    So, by his actions, CP is ok, just not for Australia, right???

    There's American sites on the block list, and EU sites, a telephone call to the ISP would have those sites removed, so why does he block it in Australia instead of asking the ISP to take it down?

    The world has the same age limits on porn: 18 years. Regardless of age of consent. So it's not a mismatch in age definitions.

    That's the trouble with secret censorship, it starts out with someone 'protecting children' and ends up censoring Wikileaks for making you look bad (and no doubt UK.gov would censor the press stories on the leaked expenses lists on grounds of national security if they had their block infrastructure in place, remember Spy catcher? It's the nature of governments to censor things that make it look bad on any spurious reasoning they can).

    If Australia is already blocking anti-abortion and Wikileaks, image after 10 years of secret censorship how that list would have expanded. Who knows Wikipedia might even be banned, as ridiculous as that sounds....

    0 0
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    They should all be given villain awards.

    And the prize should be execution, or at the very least banning them from any kind of politics.

    0 0
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Australia isn't blocking...yet

    I have a list of sites that would be blocked by this filter - including the abortion.tv site, some pages on encyclopaediadramatica.com, some gambling and poker sites - and I check them on a regular basis. So far, I haven't been blocked from accessing any of them. The day I am, I'll be setting Tor and GPass to run on startup instead of just launching them manually whenever I'm feeling a bit paranoid! The annoying aspect of having to use these applications is the horrendous internet slowdown they entail... but if I had no choice I'd rather have a slow free (as in free speech free) internet than a nanny-sanitised one. And I will NOT abide by any law restricting what I can and cannot read, see or listen to.

    0 0
  5. Peter Hood

    Missing name

    Stephen Timms is absent from this list. How disappointing.

    0 0
This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like