It's all kind of ironic when you think about it
The Register, 25 February 2010
If you’re planning to censor free speech on the internet, what better approach to take than to, er, censor debate about how you’re planning to censor free speech on the internet? Brilliant.
That, according to one sharp-eyed Register reader, is the game being played by Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, whose ministerial website is currently set up so as not to show searches on embarrassing terms such as "ISP filtering".
The Minister’s official site is no exception, and visitors wishing to know what other visitors are searching on just have to take a look at the search cloud at bottom right of the landing page. Well that’s all they need to do unless they wish to find out about "ISP Filtering", an issue that has been the cause of some controversy in Australia over the past couple of years.
Nip below the page surface and you will find a clever bit of code that sets a counter to record the frequency of any given term, ranks the most frequently occurring terms – and then sets the size of that term within the cloud according to its rank (highest ranked is largest, lower ranked are smaller).
So far so good, unless the search term happens to be "ISP Filtering". Because the other clever thing that the code does is to exclude that particular term from the search cloud. Sorted. Or not.
Submitted by Sullivan on Mon, 2010-03-01 16:46
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