ITnews.com.au has posted an article claiming that the Intergard Internet filter has been cracked and the blacklist extracted. I know that a lot of people in the #Nocleanfeed movement cherish this kind of article and hold it up as proof of Conroy’s idiocy, but in this case it’s probably done us more harm than good.

First of all, the article cites no sources, names no names and provides no proof that this actually occured. I could ring them up now and tell them I’ve cracked Conroy’s personal computer and they’d probably publish it given the traffic we generate with news like this. 

Next, there hasn’t been a reciprical posting on any of the mainstream news channels. This tells me that it didn’t pass the most rudimentary of bullshit filters at the Courier Mail. 

I spoke to John Hedges, Technical Director at Race River and, despite ITnews saying they couldn’t get a comment out of him, found that he hadn’t even seen the article, making me wonder how hard the site tried to contact him if at all.

“We are investigating the claims and if there is a security problem with Integard it will be rectified as soon as possible.”

So, why do we NOT want this article to be true? Because the more damage we do to PC based filtering vendors like Race River, the more ammunition Conroy and his cronies have to claim we need ISP based filtering. While there are a whole bunch of forum kiddies out there just hoping for more government ’stuff’ to trash, some of us need to be thinking about how we’re going to get this stopped.

And no, marching on Canberra with 150 /b/tards and kindie-goths with parasols isn’t going to do anything. 

We’ve already seen nearly 3 copies of the blacklist as it is and Conroy has poured water on it to little effect. Throwing articles like this on the fire without any evidence or citation is only going to cause noxious fumes and headaches.