One of the big IT news of the past few days was the apparent revelation of the Government ACMA blacklist by WikiLeaks. The ACMA and Senator Stephen Conroy promptly came out yesterday afternoon and denied that the leaked list was in fact the ACMA blacklist.

Now the funny thing is, is that since the blacklist is strictly confidential, the only way they can categorically prove that the leaked list isn't in fact the blacklist is to publicly publish the real blacklist itself! Otherwise we're going to have to take them on their word.

The Senator and the ACMA have reminded us that posting links to sites on the blacklist is illegal, and can attract fines of up to $11,000 per day. But again that poses the question: if the list of 'illegal' links is strictly confidential, how does one know that the link they are posting is actually on the list??

Such is the stupidity of secretive censorship. This opinion piece on the topic from the ABC is quite good. With reports of surveys showing this planned internet censorship being opposed by over 90% of respondents, you have to wonder how long they will keep trying to push this quite unpopular agenda.

I've previously voiced my opinion on the issue, and I'm hoping that after this latest debacle that this absolutely moronic internet censorship scheme is put where it belongs, and the millions of our tax money is put to better use than this pointless exercise. Heck, even the New Zealand Communications Minister can see the light.

The other big IT news of today was that Internet Explorer 8 has been fully released. I've played with it a bit today, and it seems a solid step forward for IE without having anything too ground-breaking in it. So the poor web-developers out there will have to deal with three different forms of significantly used Internet Explorer: those still using IE6 for whatever reason (according to my site's stats, last month it was roughly 25 percent of all visitors), and also IE7 (~40%) and IE8.