Yesterday’s cracking of the classification board by XYLITOL is more than a humorous prank born out of a population’s frustration with a belligerent government.
Pros
- The message was spread to a significant number of people with links to other anti-filter material. This campaign is about exposure and making sure that the general public is aware of this attack on their rights as citizens.
- The attack highlights that the government is still behind the ball on security issues and probably always will be. If their policies rely on secrecy, they’re bad policies.
- We all got to have a laugh.
Cons
- The increase in ‘civil disobedience’ from fringe members of the campaign makes it harder to see us as the good guys (admittedly it’ll be a long time before our side of the campaign resembles the super-conservative and fundamentalist aspects of the pro-filter campaigners).
- They cracked the wrong site. That’s right, they hacked the wrong organisation. The classification board is relatively innocent in all this. They are an open and transparent organisation that merely labels content based on its maturity level. It’s the DBCDE that are threatening to say whether or not we can view that content (in a practical sense) and the ACMA is the group keeping the blacklist from citizen’s eyes.
- We really need to be encouraging the kind of openness and transparency that the classification board, as distinct from ACMA, shows in its dealings.
I know that the filename of the screenshot I took was purile and a web-forum throwback, but the comments in that article are still valid. This situation also goes to show that a filter is not going to have a significant impact on the ills of the internet compared to the effect of increased police resources.
*Update* I’ve changed the term ‘hacker’ to be ‘cracker’ as this is a more accurate term in this case. A hacker is someone who can create innovative solutions to problems using creativity. A cracker is somebody who deliberately intrudes, harms or defaces in an electronic environment.
