Law and Politics

Good news on the electoral system front!

GetUp! wins High Court challenge to electoral roll cut-off

The quick summary. It used to be that when an election was called you had seven days to get yourself on the electoral roll. Back in 2006 the Howard government changed the law so that you only had until 8:00pm of the day the election was called to get on the roll – a move many (including myself) saw as a way of disenfranchising voters who’d turned 18 since the last election and not got around to enrolling (young people being well known for voting against conservatives like Howard).

Now a High Court challenge has overturned the change and restored the seven day rule. Huzzah!

Also, the opposition has come out and announced they will not support the government’s mandatory internet filter. This pretty much kills it dead, regardless of who wins the upcoming election. Again, Huzzah!

Good times…

Here’s something interesting that’s come my way. Senator for Censorship Stephen Conroy has a blog, located at http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/. As is fashionable in these upstart, youngster blogs it has a tag cloud – over on the right – which displays the most common words and phrases used in said blog. All well and good.

Except you have a look at the source code. Here can be found a chunk of Javascript that generates the tag cloud, and which has a very interesting addition.

First up is a long string of phrases that can appear in the cloud. I won’t copy this in because it’s huge, but in the middle is the phrase “ISP Filtering” – the Government’s euphemism for their ridiculous net filter proposal. Further down is the code that adds up the totals for each keyword and prints out the 15 highest ranked…

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<split.length; j++)=”” {=””>
if (unique[i]==split[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(‘<a class=”‘+size+'” href=”%5C%22http://www.minister.dbcde.gov.au/search?q=%27+unique[i]+%27%22″>’+unique[i]+'</a> ‘);
}
document.write(‘</split.length;></p>’);
document.write(‘</div>’);
}

There, do you see that bit in red? That’s a neat little patch that prevents the phrase “ISP Filtering” from ever coming up in the cloud.

Fascinating no? The Government is filtering their own sites to prevent mention of their own web filter. Great work everybody!

Tag: Law and Politics

Victory!

We have to be Sssssssneaky!