Forest Gumpp,

There's nothing automatic about it, and the only thing that the ACMA can do is to issue a link-deletion notice, that requires the individual link to be removed.

If people started posting these links on mass, and then complaining to the ACMA about their own postings, the real effect would be that the ACMA would be overwhelmed by the volume of notices they had to issue.

RStuart, I cannot extend the thread you referred to, because it has been archived. So I've started a new Forum thread, which you'll presumably see provided it gets approved.

Forrest Grumpp: "Am I reading this situation correctly?"

Nah, not really. If I posted something with an offending link all OLO would have to do is remove that post. Or just edit the post to remove the link. Or move their site to a host outside of Australia. The domain name would not change, so no one would be the wiser.

Besides, it isn't OLO at financial risk. It is the hosting service. OLO just gets a link deletion notice. If they don't comply it is their hosting service that gets fined $11,000 per day until they take the site down.

Sylvia Else: "I seriously doubt that the original content fits the definition of potential prohibited content."

I agree. But to repeat what I said when you brought this up last time, I don't think it is relevant. No judge is going to get the opportunity to decide whether it is or isn't. At $11k/day you just remove the link. Any other course of action is just silly, given you can post the link in a zillion ways on the internet that don't come under the ACMA's jurisdiction. In reality, all the only thing they are achieving here is the killing off the Australian hosting industry. Well that and making themselves, and possibly the entire country, look like morons.

As for the other thread being locked: yeah I saw that a month or two ago when I tried to post the observation I made above. Which is why I posted it here when I saw you were looking.

And now, in a utterly predicable turn of events, the entire ACMA blacklist has been leaked. It will appear on Wikileaks in due course.

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/03/19/1237054961100.html

So if any of you interested in child porn can go and look up the complete list. A more interesting exercise would be to count how many of the 2000 odd links seem to be "harmful". Be careful though. Senator Conroy has said anybody publishing the list risks "serious criminal prosecution".

Sylvia, in regards to your not "not within the law" comment above, I notice the newspaper article says a tour operators web site ended up on the list. An apparently harmless one. There is no way for the tour operator to know they were put on the list, and these is no mechanism available to them to get themselves off it even if they did know. Which all begs the question what has the law go to do with any of this, given there can be no meaningful judicial oversight. Law without oversight isn't rule by law, it's rule by decree.

I have no problem with banning child porn links or those sites that advocate sexual violence toward women/children/men. I think we have to be careful though on how far we go.

As I have said on similar threads I would like, as a parent, to have an option to choose unfiltered or filtered internet access via my ISP if it is at all technically possible.

What some might consider banning others may think go too far. Personally the anti-abortion link should not be banned in favour of free speech and the right to put an alternative view.

What about hate sites that incite violence towards particular groups of people or that promote killing in the name of religion?

I tend to think this is inciting murder which is illegal but on the other hand we have to trust the commonsense of most people. What do others think?

Forrest Gumpp

No, there's nothing automatic about it. Posting a link to a prohibited site here would not result in the either the link or the thread being deleted or blocked by any automatic mechanism. What could happen is that the content service that runs the hardware that supports OLO (which may be OLO themselves, but probably isn't) would receive a link-deletion notice, and would then be required to remove the link - but only the link.

If Conroy were to get his way, then there would little need for link deletion notices, because any links to prohibited content wouldn't work anyway, except for the (largish?) minority who know how to get round mandatory filtering.

Sylvia.

pelican: "As I have said on similar threads I would like, as a parent, to have an option to choose unfiltered or filtered internet access via my ISP if it is at all technically possible."

And as has been pointed out in those same threads, you have been able to do precisely that for years now. For Pete's sake, if you really want a filtered feed don't just whinge about it, go and sign up for one. You can do so here: http://www.webshield.net.au/

pelican: "What some might consider banning others may think go too far."

We have a censorship scheme for movies, books and whatnot that most Australians seem to be happy enough with. The mandatory filtering proposal attempts imposed those standards on the internet in a straightforward way. So the problem isn't really with what is and isn't censored.

The real problems:

(a) The filer is easy to circumvent. So the list must be kept secret.

(b) They legislated to make it secret. Legislating to stop fire bugs has about as much chance of success. Did you know the server in Sweden the ACMA blacklist was leaked to was completely overloaded the past couple of days? Every paedophile on the planet must have a copy of it now, and a good number of Australian school boys as well.

(c) It's too expensive to rate web pages in the same way we rate movies. So one bureaucrat in Canberra makes a ruling. Because of the leak, we now know some of the sites he blacklisted:

- Betfair (legal UK betting service),
- Abby Winters (pro choice),
- Peaceful Pill (pro euthanasia),
- Queensland Dentist's website (?),
- abortiontv (anti abortion).

Odd choices, eh? Its amazing what people in power will do if the think they aren't being watched. Don't believe that? Well, the day after the list was leaked several hundred web sites disappeared from it overnight - at least 20% of its total.

Sometimes it takes a little civil disobedience to remind our pollies they were elected to implement our ideals - not theirs.