Aussie censors implement six degrees of separation policy - Links to links now banned | Hacker News Reader

Aussie censors implement six degrees of separation policy - Links to links now banned

theregister.co.uk

54 pointsvaksel20 comments

This looks like an easy one to protest. Just get a huge bunch of people to post the link: on personal websites, message boards, whatever.

A series of redirecting pages would be fun. Get a few hundred people to form a link chain..

Sadly, the Aussie govt even issued a "link removal" notice to EFA, who complied by removing their link to a link to an offending site. They may not have deep enough pockets to battle the govt in court.

If a lion is to beat a crocodile, it must stay out of the water.

In this case they did the right thing. You comply with the governments legal request, then dig through their trash and find ugly stuff you can throw at them.

Then with that info, you go to a friendly journalist and cry censorship and talk about how evil the politicians are. Then you put the content back up again and wait for the next sucker - they will stop trying pretty quickly.

It continues to annoy me how many people who try to play it clean with the politicians. The reason you have to shower is that the real world is dirty; pretending otherwise will mean you end up being the one who stinks.

what kinda koolaid is the aussie government drinking? you would think that in 2009 people would know how the interweb works. tubes, ya know?

how can anyone exert control over what someone else links to? government forcing you to accept responsibility for what others link to basically chills linking at all. what if you link to a blog which has public commenting and someone then comments with a link to 'censored' materials. where is the list of censored materials? who knows what is censored? how do i know that something is censored and that i should not link to it?

this quote was taken from an article linked off the op, ( http://www.itnews.com.au/News/98679,conroy-requests-faith-in... ):

"Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has urged detractors of the Government's proposed Internet Filtering scheme to have faith in their elected parliamentarians to pass the right legislation."

here is a news flash: stop censoring! then i wont have to worry about elected parliamentarians passing the right legislation. this is like right out of a tolstoy novel or something.

what kinda koolaid is the aussie government drinking?

Let me try and explain what koolaid they're drinking: I believe the real reason the Australian Government is pushing this plan so hard in spite of massive opposition from industry and the general public is they need support from a couple of minor party/independent senators in order to pass basically any controversial legislation. These senators represent social conservative special interest groups who have strong objections to things like gambling and adult (legal) pornography. In this case, we're talking about the online versions of these things.

It has little do to with protecting the children (that's just the cover) or anything else other than good old political manoeuvring. The whole situation is probably not helped by the fact that the current left-wing Australian Government is by and large, about as conservative as you can get and still be called left-wing. But I think it's mainly that they need support from outside their own party if they really want to get anything done.

they need support from outside their own party if they really want to get anything done.

I thought Rudd had already broken the record for most time spent overseas for any PM in Australia's history.... Seems like he's getting plenty done[1].

Oh wait, you mean getting stuff done in the country? Nevermind.

[1] - for those who don't know, our current PM was elected after it was brought to light he used a tax payer funded overseas trip to visit a strip club in New York. Since becoming PM, he has spent more time overseas than any other Australian PM in history...

By this definition don't they have to block Google?

Yes they would if the title of the article was accurate. But it isn't. The title is a poor piece of sensationalistic journalism. They are only issuing 'take down' notices for direct links. This is stupid enough in itself and should be ridiculed. But adding false information to the mix is counter productive.

The ironic thing in this whole internet censorship debacle here in Australia is that this bullshit is being led by the left wing side* of our political system which one would typically associate with progressive ideals and liberal thinking.

The same party also whole heartedly opposed any plans for Internet censorship in 2003 at the ISP level, which they are now trying to implement themselves.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/web-censorship... (last 2 paragraphs)

Go figure.

*(I can't say the liberal side, because the Liberal Party here in Australia are the conservatives/right wingers, whereas the Labor Party are the liberal/left wingers and I wouldn't want to confuse the two)

I think authoritarian vs. non authoritarian is more useful than left-right. For instance in the US both of the big parties are authoritarian and are pushing big government. To me they are very similar.

That it is leftist doing censor ship is not surprising at all, just look at the history.

In the US both the term "liberal" has been hijacked by socialists. In the US the term libertarian is used for what in the rest of the world is still called "liberal".

To be fair, the original usage of the term "libertarian" in a political context was to refer to socialist-anarchists.

As far as I know, this isn't the only instance of a law banning certain hyperlinks. If I remember correctly, in Germany it is currently illegal to link to software which can be used to remove copy protection. (for example, DVD-ripping software that breaks the CSS encryption)

I believe this is inaccurate. After reading through the entire article and the page on EFF there is no indication of a take down notice for anything but a direct link to the 'offending material'. If I've missed something please let me know.

Wow this is embarrassing. I thought Australians were progressive.

We are... as an Aussie living overseas I am still amazed by these laws, and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a lot of protests/action against them. Maybe protests have been banned as well?

I think most people don't realise what's at stake. Many just don't care, many others hear the talk about protecting the children, and swallow it, hook line and sinker.

I think in places like this forum, where most people are pretty web/tech savvy, it's easy to forget that we are still the minority.

When this latest round of censorship stuff reared its ugly head, there was some talk from parts of the pro-censorship side that the country should instate a policy of relegating certain web content to different ports. So rather than the standard port for HTTP being port 80, instead certain web content could only be served on a particular port and of course this would make it easy to block said content by blocking its associated port.

Yes, you read that right. So like you'd have a porn port (lets say port 69) and a gambling port and eventually I guess you'd have a political decent port before too long.

This is the level of understanding we're dealing with. Born in an earlier time, I'm sure these people would be spending their days burning witches after making sure they were witches by determining that they weighed the same as a duck.

Doesn't Australia even ban regular porn?

Pretty much every major ISP in the country has told the government that they have their heads up their proverbial asses if they think this is going to work.

There is plenty of talk on whirlpool about this and throughout various local news sites.

Unfortunately, as someone mentioned above - this is a political move to pander to some more conservative independent seats, so that the current government can get more of their own agenda's pushed through.

They are. Progressives are not necessarily opposed to censorship. You can see this in the lack of free speech protections in many Western countries (Holocaust denial, "hate speech", etc.). I don't want to assume too much about you, but many Americans are not aware of this because of stronger popular support for freedom of speech in the US.

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