From itnews.com.au:

The System Administrators Guild (SAGE) of Australia said the publication of the Federal Government’s “black list” of pornographic and violent websites has fatally damaged its proposed compulsory Internet filtering regime.

The black list’s appearance on wikileaks.org demonstrated the futility of the Government’s proposed censorship regime and the need for fresh thinking, the not-for-profit organisation said.

Donna Ashelford, president of SAGE-AU, said publication of the list has, in effect, given every 15-year-old in Australia a guide to porn online.

Given every 15 year old in Australia a guide to porn online? Haha.

From news.com.au:

POLICE have raided a Wikileaks associate’s homes in Dresden and Jena after the website published a list of banned websites.

Theodor Reppe owns the German domain registration for “wikileaks.de”, one of the many URLs used by the whistleblowing website.

This morning, Wikileaks published a Twitter update:

“Police raid home of Wikileaks.de domain owner over censorship lists – stay tuned.”

Wikileaks, which offers an anonymous service, has previously published alleged web censorship lists from Thailand, Denmark, and Australia.

How the tides have turned. First wikileaks published a list of web URLs which they claimed was the ACMA’s official blacklist and Stephen Conroy denied this was the case. Then another updated was published, and another.. and now we have Stephen Conroy saying the leaked list ’seems like ACMA’s blacklist’.

Personally I don’t have an issue with any site on that list until they start blocking sites that I visit and are completely law abiding (superherohype.com, for example). Although in saying that, what government would use the filters to block anything which is anti-<insert-country>-government, or offends some people (online poker sites, please). It will be an interesting few months, thats for sure.

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After all the complaining by the public and after all of the technical opposition to the filter, the australian government has gone live with the pilot of the “clean feed”. The initial round of ISP’s involved in the trial are:

It seems 3 of the biggest ISPs were shunned (Telstra, Optus & iiNet) for what we can assume is more users = more issues = more failure. Apart from Primus nobody in Australia will really know of the ISPs mentioned. Webshield actually sell a clean feed onto their customers as a business model so it’s no wonder they want in on this. Funnily enough I used to work for an ISP who resold Highway 1 ADSL connections, luckily for me I don’t now.

The testing will take place for six weeks once the equipment has been installed at the ISPs, and will examine impacts on performance, user experience and also the ease of circumvention. Customers will get to choose if they want to participate in the trial.

The pilot will involve two filtering techniques — a simple filter of the ACMA blacklist, and a more invasive content filtering solution.