Today’s irony award goes to the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, which last week blocked access to Open Australia, a website (modelled on They Work For You) which helps people track what their MPs say in Parliament. In fairness, the blockage occurred because a third party border proxy classified the content as a ‘blog’:
In an emailed response from Customs to [the website operator], it said that the site had been classified by its third-party internet filtering software as a blog.
“The website http://www.openaustralia.org and it’s [sic] charity foundation http://blog.openaustralia.org/foundation/ are classified by the filtering software … as ‘blogs’,” the department said.
It could not allow “general access” to websites classified as blogs “due to the threat websites within this category can pose to the security of the Australian Customs and Border Protection network”, the email said. …
Customs said that it was “important to note that the filter list is provided by a third-party” and that it “simply consumes this list”. “We do not make decisions on what category a website should be placed in,” it said.
Of course, exactly what threat such blogs pose to network security remains unclear. I wonder what the filter list provider’s responsibility for the blockage is — presumably, its terms of service disclaim all liability for false-positives.
