ProxyMate.net

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.

Impending doom…

SMH: Conroy’s internet censorship agenda slammed by tech giants

F.A.Q. in progress…

Check out the new FAQ page.

Actually – start here.

The navigation is actually top-right. I will fix it when I feel like punishing myself with CSS.

Online…

A bare bones proxy is available at on.conroids.com (port 80).

Have fun, I will be shutting it down soon.

Don’t be evil.