Second black list made available

Loose thoughts by Bjorn Landfeldt

Wikileaks made a second list available on the 20th of March. The second list is a cleaned up version of the first list that now contains some 1170 entries.

Since the government threatened to prosecute any Australian involved in leaking the list, Wikileaks responded by threatening the Australian government with legal action since the action is firmly protected by Swedish law and Wikileaks operates within that jurisdiction. Interesting, is there an international diplomatic conflict about to happen as well over this? Perhaps I (as a Swede and Aussie) will have to chose sides, and which army to join after all :).

It is extremely stupid to distribute a list in cleartext in the first place. I have no idea who at ACMA decided to hand out clear text ASCII files with all the banned sites but it was not a struck of genius to do so. Why did ACMA not simply hash the sites and distributed a file with hashed values? Any filter implementation can still hash each destination URL and compare with the list without the destination address ever being exposed. It is true that there would still be people within the ACMA who would have acces to the original clear text list but the risk of spreading of the list would be much lower.

Wikileaks apparently also published a simple way of extracting the list from a down loadable software package from the netalert scheme era. Apparently, it is possible to extract a file with the conspicuous name "Websites_ACMA.txt". Well designed security software!! I wonder if the developers had dumbed down 3-year Australian university degrees......