ProxyMate.net

Dead, buried and garroted

I declare the filter dead.

What they said…

Some said this business model was too expensive to attract a consumer base.

Some said it was tripe (which it always was intended to be – readily available technology).

Some said it would amount to nothing – and it very well may not.

But let’s put this in perspective.

Rudd is gone, and Gillard has called an election.

The government is secretly trying to monitor your usage, but the filter is on the backburner until after the election.

So maybe not doing a hell of a lot of shit does help. I promise I’ll get that AMI up as soon as I don’t sleep through a weekend. The model is perfect.

Poor ol’ Conroy.

In the meantime I would recommend that you read some publicly available no-nonsense clearly-legible no-nonsense policy.

It’s coming round

http://aec.gov.au/

Register.

Or you could just fuck off. I do mean that. If you’re over 17 and don’t register then… fuck off.

I could explain your obligations to you slightly more politely, but no, if I have to listen to you whinge and complain – whether it be about your mother, computer or uber-president – i want to be assured that you made an effort to misguide your votes out of ignorance.

I’m pretty damn serious about this. All trolls will be asked to state their voting credentials. If they fail they will get flamed.

Note how I still haven’t stated a political affiliation. Aren’t I good.

Fine. I’ll do it myself.

That’s the mantra of the I.T. support slave. Basically, it translates as “you are too lazy too type this into google”.

Rudd, afraid of getting another 4.1 for his next high-dive backflip, is never going to allow Conroy to back down before the next election.

Nevertheless he lets the docked staff loose on the morning shows. And someone needs to draft the legislation.

Conroy makes accusations: your passwords, banking details and personal data may have and are still liable to be sucked up by the Google-monster.

Pied Piper deserves a decent score imho.

Right. That’s the allegation. Where is the evidence or the proofing mechanism?

I’m looking for it. I should be in bed. I have a nasty cold. I’m looking for it. Help me out. Post the relevant links.

Let’s start with this $2 de-mystifyer:

Banking transactions conducted over the internet use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption between web browsers and banking servers

I am radically searching through media to establish that any of the things along the lines that Conroy has insinuated over the last few weeks, but specifically alleged this morning, carry any weight at all.

Show me the mother$%^&ing links. There are none. At least none gaining page rank. Let’s follow this up with a trail of Conroy’s subsantiated bullshit, this man is flogging a dead horse.

It’s war!

It would be too easy to describe this as a David vs. Goliath scenario except that it raises questions about who is the bigger brother…

Stephen Conroy has used a senate hearing to blast Google (and Facebook) over privacy issues – with a particular focus on Google’s recent collection of information relating to WiFi devices in the course of its Street View campaign.

Of course, there’s nothing new about web sites that list WiFi access points on maps – back in the day when Bigpond were sending out unsecured Motorola WiFi routers to their best cable customers, these sites were in fact quite useful if you needed to quickly borrow a little bandwidth. Naturally the software has been around for quite a while too, even if Stephen would like you to believe that Google wrote a piece of uniquely malevolent code.

Admittedly Google’s “accidental” excuse doesn’t quite stack up (wait a minute… does that not pertain to an entirely different country?). Nevertheless Conroy capitalised on the opportunity to avoid discussing the real issues by getting back at Google for their criticism over his proposed filter. And we would imagine that he was still a bit miffed about the lack of cooperation he got over the issue of Youtube filtering as well.

Google’s response?

“We were surprised to hear more discussion about Google and Facebook than about the actual proposed filter”

We’ll post the full record from the Hansard when it becomes available.

Neglecting one’s responsibilities…

Fortunately others have been taking care of them.

ABC’s Four Corners recently covered the issue and pretty much agreed with everything we have to say and stand for.

Conroy has postponed the legislation required to actually implement the filter because of the current political climate. That buys us a few more months.

Google introduced encrypted search last week.

And, typically of this government, the debate is still not open.

Just as few of their other policies seem to be carefully considered (and I’m still not voting for either major party, never have, so don’t be so deluded as to interpret that as an endorsement of Abbott).

Meanwhile our adwords campaign is achieving 80,000 exposures per month, costing nothing ($20 so far, just realised we ran out), and hopefully reinforcing the message that filtering is a poor policy model for the issues it’s intended to address.

In today’s news…

Hacking masterclasses build a business model:

IDG: Internet filtering hacking classes take-off

… not just for seniors seeking advice on euthanasia anymore. There’s a revenue model – people are willing to pay to get trained to circumvent the Clean Feed.

Also, the Murdoch media, not willing to do any actual journalism, recycle a story from three years ago without actually adding anything to the debate:

News Media: No penalty for bypassing Conroy’s internet filter

In their defence, it was nice of them to highlight some of the legal non-issues.

But it seems even News can’t turn this story into a scandal. So perhaps ironically, they turn it into reverse scare tactics: “some criminally-inclined teenager is going to hack your safety net” (subtext?). Normally News just stick to the forward scare tactics.

[edit] Quite a good article that explains the whole thing in a very straightforward manner; not sure how we missed it:

SMH: Net nannies take on the freedom fighters

Adwords activism

One thing we noticed was a lot of blank space where the ads normally go on Google when you search on Conroy-related terms such as “stephen conroy filter“.

You can fill this space for a dime until someone else comes along and offers to pay more for it. For non-marketable search terms, this provides a real opportunity to people who have a message to sell.

So as long as you stick to the terms of service, and don’t defame anyone, you can paste pretty much any message you want there, for anyone who’s interested in Stephen Conroy to see.

The deal is basically that it will only cost you money if people click on your ad. So linking it to a really unattractive URL would probably help!

It seems we aren’t the only people who’ve thought of targeting Conroy’s search terms (although I think they are actually trying to attract traffic), so it will be interesting to see how this pans out, and whether Conroy eventually decides to spend some of his own money bidding against us (because I’m pretty sure he’s not allowed to spend yours this way).

Of course there are other tactics one could engage in, but I won’t go into them now… Whatever you do – please don’t click on those links!

Actually, if I see an ad on Google that I think is for a good cause – or even in a commercial context, if I’m not interested in buying anything from them but just want to look at what they do – I type the URL in manually. This way they don’t get charged. Seems fair. If I want to buy from them, on the other hand, I click.

Updates on ineffective governance

The 7.30 Report has neatly summarised everything we were thinking of posting this week… but were too lazy to:

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2010/s2873045.htm

Even the U.S. Ambassador pitched in this week, along with a bunch of seniors up the North coast who now know how to bypass Conroy just as well as teenagers thanks to a recent workshop.

Oh. And Google. But ever so quietly.

Meanwhile, despite attempts to influence his search outcomes, the word “filter” still features prominently in search results for “Stephen Conroy”. Check the news results. Seems only a flood of NBN-related press releases can protect his rankings now.

Perhaps time to bid on those search terms with AdWords…? Should have cashed in that free credit they were offering! Look at all that empty advertising space on the right-hand side…

Have started work on a Tips page tonight, because ultimately that’s how we can put an end to it.