Things not to post on Planet LA

Publication of the ACMA blacklist could possibly be a crime.

We encourage our members to speak up and have the debate on censorship. We believe the governments policy to break the internet is broken.

We have to act responsibly however, and based on our legal advice we cannot syndicate the feeds of people engaged in such activies.

Please mail planet@linux.org.au to get your feed removed if that is how you want to use your blog.

Thank you,

Stewart Smith
President, Linux Australia

5 thoughts on “Things not to post on Planet LA

  1. Stewart,

    What would be better, is that there was a way that the Planet software code not syndicate posts that contain a particular phrase.
    For example maybe a HTML comment/HTML header that contains NoSyndicate?

    Seems crazy to throw the baby with the bath-water.

    In my defence, I didn’t post the blacklist – I posted some random characters. :-)

    One could also state that the so called ‘blacklist’ can’t be ‘illegal’ as it is not law as yet.

    It’s tragic in this country that we talk about ‘freedoms’ yet decide to bow to those that would restrict our freedoms. How crazy that an international organisation has been more outspoken on the topic than the citizens it will be enforced on.

    A sad state of affairs…

  2. I don’t see what the big deal is. Although I do like the suggestion from Matt on handling such posts. It would be nice for the planet to be a little intelligent and allow authors to mark certain posts as NoSyndicate.

  3. Matt – it’s been law for a long time now, the blacklist was introduced by the previous government, you’re thinking about the mandatory filtering.

    Also it appears that (allegedly) the Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Act 2007 says that sites that link to content refused classification are themselves classified as “refused classification” – a toxic clause that renders most of the Internet “RC”.

  4. Just to be clear, as we’re talking about my blog, I’m perfectly happy with the decision to remove my blog due to my poisting of a screenshot of the (alleged) blacklist. I hadn’t thought of the Planets at the time of posting, and when they emailed me to say they’d removed, I realised I was exposing a third-party to legal action, which was never my intention.

    I think it’s a reasonable precaution.

  5. I’ve since amended the post in question (http://matt.bottrell.com.au/archives/329-NPZN-Oynpxyvfg.html) , yet I’ve Emailed you and the planet@linux.org.au Email address.

    I’m still yet to receive any communication whatsoever. :(

    Has the decision been made that I am ‘forever banned’ from the planet per say? Will my blog be syndicated again?

    Some communication one way or other would be appreciated.

    I guess some guidelines for syndication for all is probably warranted. (Possibly a FAQ) This will avoid such sticky legal issues in the future.

    I’m happy to provide a patch to the planet software so that filtering out certain posts that contain special markup is introduced (if wanted).
    (I’m thinking a HTML comment within the body of the post may be the easiest and most universal — as tags differ in various blogging software.

    I’ll write again to you Stewart (via both Email addresses).

    Regards,

    Matt Bottrell.

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