The web site for Senator Conroy, the Australian Minister for Censorship, has infringed on copyright and failed to remove the code when requested by the author. As reported by ITWire the DBCDE web site uses a Javascript to generate a “tag cloud. The Javascript was written by Aleks Bochniak who requested on 1 March 2010 that the script be removed. He requested the removal of the code because “I do not want in any way to be associated with yourself, your office or your policies”. The copyright information has been deliberately removed from the script so I’m asking DBCDE to prosecute the DBCDE and Senator Conroy, whose photo appears large and proud on the site, for copyright infringements and issue an immediate take down notice for DBCDE web site.
ITWire also reported that Senator Conroy is already censoring his own web site by removing the the term “ISP Filtering” from the tag cloud. The code below is from the ministers website – http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/:
for(var i=0; i<=15/*<-Important! increase this value by 1 everytime a keyword is excluded below*/; i++)
{
var z=0;
for(var j=0; j
z=z+1;
}
counts[i] = z;
}
var size = getTagClass(z);
//Customise the tag-cloud to display what shows up
if (unique[i] == "ISP Filtering")
{
continue;
}
document.write(''+unique[i]+' ');
}
This is type of action that Senator Conroy would like to impose on all Internet access in Australia, filtering any content that is embarrassing the Labor Party or government. Make no mistake, the filtering that Senator Conroy wants to impose has nothing to do with paedophiles and child pornography, these are already illegal and offenders can already be prosecuted under Australian and international laws. This offensive material is not distributed by web sites, it is distributed by email, peer-to-peer sharing, personal FTP servers and encrypted file transfers. The ISP filtering Senator Conroy wants to impose will do nothing to stop these methods.
