AN AUSTRALIAN POLITICIAN has been caught out by eagle-eyed web users who noticed that he had altered his web site, apparently hiding details of a less than popular subject.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is the man responsible for pushing the Australian government's web filtering plans, not that you would know that from a casual visit to his personal homepage.

At issue is Conroy's tag cloud, which it turns out, is not all that it seems to be. A user of the Whirlpool web site, an Australian Internet and technology discussion forum, discovered that the minister has removed terms from the cloud, and posted the following message.

"Looking at the source code of the site, there is the entire list of words that the script uses to determine the cloud words and how prevelant they are," posted Rupple, a forum regular. "Basically breaks it down to an array, counts and then sets the size based on how frequent it is etc...In the script that generates the cloud, there is a line that says basically if thesearch term is 'ISP Filtering' to skip and go onto the next. In the time I was on the site, there were about 16 instances of 'ISP Filtering' in the cloud, though ISP Filtering did not show in the cloud."

Others commented that the fact that this was possible to discover displayed some pretty poor web coding. Not least of all because this sort of information was not being hosted on the server side. "Whoever developed the site is pretty incompetent putting the cloud population code client side" wrote one. "You'd think [they] would have hired a semi-decent developer based on the obvious professionalism displayed by other members of their department."

Unless of course the developer in question had his own motives. µ