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Australian Censor Master Censors His Own Tagcloud To Hide Anger Over Censorship

from the nicely-done dept

Thu, Feb 25th 2010 2:50pm — Mike Masnick

Stephen Conroy, the Australian Communications Minister who is the point man on pushing through Australia's latest plan to censor the internet, has apparently been caught doing a bit more local censoring. Yeebok points us to the news that Conroy's own website has a tagcloud, highlighting what people are searching for, but the script that generates the tagcloud automatically blocks the phrase "ISP filtering" from appearing in the cloud. What's most amazing, of course, is that Conroy's tech staff is apparently so clueless that they included this in the javascript which anyone could read, rather than, at the very least, hiding it serverside. Amazing. He's apparently so unable to backup his own position that he has to hide behind a weak technology hack to pretend that people aren't concerned about his plan to censor the internet. Perhaps instead of "ISP filtering" people should start searching for "censorship" on his site to see what happens...

Filed Under: australia, censorship, filters, stephen conroy, tagclound

11 Comments

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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 25 Feb 2010 @ 3:27pm

Where?
What's the URL?
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Jon, 25 Feb 2010 @ 3:37pm

URL
http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/
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Nick Dynice (profile), 25 Feb 2010 @ 4:54pm

Here is the bit of code:

var size = getTagClass(z);
//Customise the tag-cloud to display what shows up
if (unique[i] == "ISP Filtering")
{
continue;
}
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LM, 25 Feb 2010 @ 5:26pm

I doubt it very much if the Minister is personally responsible for this, it sounds like the actions of an over zealous staffer.
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 25 Feb 2010 @ 6:01pm

Re:
I tend to agree. Likely "ISP Filtering" was huge in the cloud and that annoyed people.
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 25 Feb 2010 @ 6:07pm

Re:
"Here is the bit of code:"

Simple enough, but what's going on with "var a?" Stacking the deck? (my javascript is way rusty.)
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Derek, 25 Feb 2010 @ 6:29pm

Stupid web developer
Had a look at the page. Whoever did it wasn't the smartest cookie. Which is good for us because we are now seeing what should have been handled by the server and invisible. Basically that large 'a' variable is some dump of tags from posts without any processing. The script then counts the tag and produces the cloud. Really wasteful because all the processing is being done on the web browser and it's more data to download. An experienced developer would have done in at the server end and just dumped down the tags and relative importance. No script involved.
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angry dude, 25 Feb 2010 @ 7:24pm

Already made up his mind
"The live pilot will provide evidence on the real-world impacts of ISP content filtering, including for providers and internet users. It will provide evidence to assist the Government in the implementation of its policy."

The second sentence says it all really. CON-roy has already decided what the outcome will be before the pilot is concluded.
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Anonymous Coward, 25 Feb 2010 @ 8:42pm

Sounds like .dogfooding
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Anonymous Coward, 25 Feb 2010 @ 8:43pm

Re: Already made up his mind
Hmm, I wonder why AD is in a topic on something other than patents...

...unless he holds the patent for "terrible implementation of phrase blocking in a tag cloud."
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Anonymous Coward, 25 Feb 2010 @ 9:23pm

They want to test this in other countries before they test it in the U.S. The end result will be the hindrance of our freedom of speech if we do nothing to resist.
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