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Hong Kong Using Children to Hunt for Piracy
westcoaster004 writes to tell us that according to The New York Times the Hong Kong government will be using some 200,000 youths to scour the internet for piracy. Members of the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and nine other youth organizations will be drawn from with the first 1,600 being "sworn in" this Wednesday. From the article: "Tam Yiu-keung, the Hong Kong Excise and Customs Department's senior superintendent of customs for intellectual property investigations, said the program should not raise any concerns about privacy or the role of children in law enforcement. The youths will be visiting Internet discussion sites that are open to all, so the government program is no different than asking young people to tell the police if they see a crime while walking down the street, he said."
Why do they think its so difficult. Go to google.com and search for Warez.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
to see porn and all its flavors, casiono/poker scams, spyware, popups, circle jerks, top20 gateways and all the other scum that floats on the bottom of the warez scene
The first problem with this that comes to mind is that there are a lot of piracy websites that have images unappropriate for kids.
Yes, yes, I know that any kid can go online and find whatever they want to look at. I'm getting at that maybe this isn't a task for children (in the government-run sense).
In my day, we used Pirates to hunt for children.
Yarrr!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Sending oodles of kids out looking for music-sharing sites is kind of like sending angry, unattractive, middle-aged cops to "stop" prostitution. I imagine these kids sticking USB thumbdrives in their cop computers and bookmarking wildly for the evening's Internet Cafe feeding frenzy.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Anti-Piracy Merit Badges!
To earn one you must:
Breaking news: Chairman Moa is doing 3,500 RPM in his grave.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Hong Kong: Aha! You people are pirating software and video games!
Pirates: Aha! You are using child labor!
Joe Everyday: Oh no, who should I hate more?
RIAA/MPAA: The pirates, they're the worst kind of criminal!
American Government: Think of the children!
Joe Everyday: [glares] Not helping!
And then Canada just kind of laughs and goes back to whatever its doing.
First of all; Warez sites have porn. Not just a boob here and there either. Real live penetration. Often times, you have the weirdest fetish shit to deal with too.
So let's dump that on 200k kids. Lovely.
Second, kids are idiots. Truly, they are. I remember when I was a kid, I was an idiot. So now we are turning out 200k kids in to an enviroment ripe for molestation. And porn, lest we forget.
This is a bad bad idea, no mater how you slice it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Ok, so we're going to:
1) Force children, who no doubt understand teh intarwebs better than those in charge of this, to swear that they will search out piracy
2) Encourage said children and young adults to spend time searching for movies and warez
3) Wait for the reports to roll in.
Whoever thought this up is brilliant. This plan has no flaws. Why didn't my government think of this?
So 1% of the kids will be all into it and be good citizens... and 99% of the kids will laugh at and mock that 1%.
Great way to make piracy seem even more cool, and to make reporting piracy something that only losers do.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
The massive attempts (and manpower) China require to keep their Great Firewall of China up to date. Who knows if these "Youth Ambassadors" won't just have their task expanded to include reporting on objectionable material? After all currently Hong Kong isn't covered by the GFC.
Video Game cheats, hints a
a surge in enrollments, it would seem that the warez-hunters have found a sanctioned way to collect britney speers albums.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
"With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother -- it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used -- had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police."
Here in America, we have millions of youths scouring the internet for piracy!
However, we do outsource the collecton results in Sweden so I guess we can't take all the credit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Asking children to do something like that is a form of indoctrination, making the implication that "ratting" to the government is grand thing to do."
..." was a little overdone, but I do agree with you in principle.
/. meme.
Not a new idea (Hitler Youth, anyone?), but it seems our capacity for learning from history seems tied only to short-term memory.
I think the "...asked my son to explore dark alleys at 3am, just to figure out if drug deals are going on
Face it, it is hard for the would be dictators/over-control types to acheive their agenda unless.....they "THINK OF THE CHILDREN", to use an old
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
the merit batch comes with an E.U.L.A. that makes it measure as a 3' circle
hard to stich that on your average girl scout/ boy scout uniform
additionally, due to D.M.C.A. rules, each boyscout/ girlscout must get preapproval from 5 separate companies and 6 layers of lawyers before they are able to legally wear the merit badge
and finally, anyone viewing the merit badge on the person of a boyscout/ girlscout must gain preapproval from the same companies/ lawyers or they are in violation of fair use of the merit badge
i mean come on folks, content creators have rights here! think of the starving merit badge stichers!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Redmond WA (Hydraulic Press) - The Business Software Alliance announced today a settlement agreement in their long running trademark dispute with the Boy Scouts of America. According to the terms of the agreement, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) must use its swelling ranks to help the Business Software Alliance (BSA) sniff out piracy on the internet. Another controversial term of the settlement is the mandate that requirements for the Computing merit badge must be completed using only legitimately purchased Microsoft branded software.
The dispute started in 1998, when the Business Software Alliance noticed that the Boy Scouts of America, a quasi-military organization headquartered in Irving, Texas, had the same three letter initials as them. They promptly sued for damages and infringement. While many legal scholars believed that the Scouts would prevail as they have existed for nearly a century, the Business Software Alliance won the case by throwing wave after wave of lawyers at them until the Scouts relented.
"I cannot continue to sit back and allow the Boy Scouts to continue to sap and impurify all of our precious intellectual property," said a Business Software Alliance representative, "God willing, we will prevail, through the purity and essence of our trademarks and copyrights."
Bob Talbee, a scoutmaster in Grand Rapids, Michigan, stated that he would cancel the weekend campout to comply with the order, "Sorry kids, we've got to spend the weekend on the internet looking for something or someone called warez," he announced at a recent Scout meeting. Talbee, a bricklayer by trade, was not sure what a warez is, but thought it sounded thoroughly unwholesome and worthwhile for the scouts to work towards eliminating.
Unknown host pong.
So, basically, what we have here is children fighting pirates on an island? Where have I heard that before?
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Living in a post-communistic country, i remember from my schoolyears how we were 'trained' to look for and report saboteurs, spies and evil western agents. Given the state paranoia, the agents were portrayed as almost mythical creatures, with ninja-like capabilities, evil to the bone. The result was that everyone i know wanted to be western agent, so cool, merciless, almost invulnerable, able to get anywhere ...
.. way to go China! :)
So
Considering the adult (as well as illegal) content openly displayed on such sites, this isn't an unreasonable metaphor.
Since this is Hong Kong, one must wonder if they are looking for pirated materials in order to wipe out their competition, or are they looking for something new to pirate that hasn't as yet received wide exposure.
The idea that the children of Hong Kong are being sent on a crusade to supplement the RIAA is absurd, and should not be taken on face value.
Perhaps the Hong Kong politicians who have received gifts from the pirates along with honorariums (to cover expenses, of course) from the RIAA need to show everyone involved on both sides that they are making 'a sincere effort' to address the 'problem'.
FTA: "The program may work better here than it would elsewhere, local officials suggest. Hong Kong teenagers are surprisingly obedient, possibly because of a Confucian tradition and very strong social pressures to study hard and serve the community."
That's right! Their kids are more brainwashed! Go MPAA/RIAA.
The Rat Fink
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That would mean that 1 in every 5 youths would have to become part of this program. Sounds....unlikely.
Sources:
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
Sorry, but that's really dumb, even for a conspiracy theory. If you were the Chinese government and wanted to hack in to American information infrastructure, you wouldn't hire 200,000 children, you'd hire 200 really bright graduate students, and have them write automated attack programs. Not hundreds of thousands of amateur volunteers who are (a) not going to be very effective, and (b) are going to be impossible to keep quiet about their activities.
There's also the minor detail of China having the USA as their largest customer -- attacking the USA is hardly in their economic interest.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/
which is a damn fine webcomic as well
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
You obviously know nothing about Hong Kong. China does not trust Hong Kong people politically, (having beeen tainted by British colonialism and western concepts of democracy) and they not allowed to join the PLA. For various reasons the Beijing govt keeps a hands-off policy with regard to HK governance (except for ruling out real elections, etc), and I can assure you this idea is entirely home-grown and in line with other of it's nany-state ideas.