Australian Filtering Boss: Turning Off Blog And Comments

from the but-listening...-we-swear... dept

Wed, Dec 24th 2008 10:18am — Mike Masnick

With the story earlier this week about Australia's Broadband Minister, Stephen Conroy, considering adding BitTorrent filtering to the country's ISP filtering/censorship program, it was notable that Conroy said he was paying close attention to the commentary about the program online -- including various blogs and social network systems like Twitter. That was actually a small glimmer of hope mixed in with the ridiculous policy -- but it appears that Conroy has decided he'd really rather not listen to the conversation on his own blog. While that post about BitTorrent filtering got a lot of attention, it also got a ton of comments, and now Conroy and his team are turning off their blog and closing down the comments. Way to communicate with the people...

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Filed Under: australia, bittorrent, blogs, censorship, comments, filters, stephen conroy

7 Comments

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Anonymous Poster, 24 Dec 2008 @ 11:04am

Awwwwwwwwwww, somebody got called out on their bullshit plan and now they can't take the heat.
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Yakko Warner, 24 Dec 2008 @ 11:12am

Must be hard to breathe
Talk about sticking your head in the sand. Wow.
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KitKat, 24 Dec 2008 @ 2:52pm

Conroy is an idiot
filtering an open platform to create a self imposed soviet style opinion suppression system to make bad comments about their own stupid idiotic plans go away so they dont look like the idiots they are.

Everyone is going to hate that stupid Stephen Conroy. Guess what the CON stands for???

Idiot governments usually find themselves out of office at the earliest opportunity.
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David, 25 Dec 2008 @ 2:05am

Madness
Just what on earth are the Aussie politicians thinking of? They'll have no internet at all at this rate! Typical non-techie ruling, thinking they know best. Nanny state at its worst.
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Killer_Tofu (profile), 26 Dec 2008 @ 9:08am

Err
I almost made a joke about this happening in the last post about his initial decision.
Wow.
I suppose from an idiot pollutician I should've known it would have ended up not being a joke.
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stretch, 28 Dec 2008 @ 11:57pm

Sigh
I hope Conroy likes the internet at dial-up speed, 'cause that's what he'll get if doesn't wake up.
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Joe, 26 Feb 2009 @ 3:55pm

Blocking an Ozy business near you?
We had some weirdness on our office today that I suspect is connected to this daft scheme. We have our business web site and email on a US host (www.jodohost.com). For some hours (late on the afternoon of Feb 26 through to 10am on Feb 27), this host and all its customers were completely offline to Austral. Tracerouts via third-party US sites indicated that the host was up, and calls with the hosting company's supprot team confirmed that no traffic problems were occuring and all servers were honky dory.
TraceRouts from Australia indicated that our ISP was getting its connections via Telstra... but that the final leg to the hosting company was being firewalled. I've not been able to get an answer from anyone about this weirdness, but its a lot like the troubles Thai people have with their government's net monitoring scheme: overload leading to incorrectly rejected traffic and email & business griding to a hault. Of course, it could also be fun and games with DNS hackers... thats the problem with this sort of non-transparent scheme. There is no way to know what is happening, so you get all paranoid... but am I paranoid enough?
Anyway - I voted for labor: I will not do it again unless Rudd kills this plan off.
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