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Why Doesn't the IWF Notify Those Whom They Block?
The chief executive of the Internet Watch Foundation, which maintains a list of sites allegedly containing child pornography which are then blocked by most U.K. Internet providers, recently declared that the organization had erred in blocking the Virgin Killer poster art on Wikipedia. But Peter Robbins also called it "one mistake in twelve years" and said that "[t]here are a lot of very credible people on our board, and we want to give assurance that there is independent oversight on what we do." The issue of "oversight" raises a question that I don't think received enough attention during the Wikipedia block controversy: Why doesn't the IWF notify domain owners or hosting companies when it blocks their content?
If an image is a borderline case, such as the album cover that was hosted on Wikipedia, then IWF could notify the hosting company that they had determined that the image could be illegal under U.K. law. If the host — in this case, Wikipedia — disagreed, they could provide arguments to the contrary and possibly change the IWF's mind, which is what in fact happened once Wikipedia users eventually found out about the block anyway. On the other hand, if the image is very obviously illegal, then a notification to the hosting company might persuade them to take the image down. In that case, any argument against notifying hosting companies has to be weighed against the obvious good that would be done by removing the image from that location on the Web.
I sent this question to the IWF, which must get this inquiry a lot, since they replied with a form letter which stated in part:
Contacting international hosts of such content directly may undermine a police investigation, is contrary to our remit and is contrary to INHOPE best practice.
Well, saying that it is contrary to their remit or to INHOPE best practices, obviously just begs the question of why it is contrary to those "best practices"; I replied to ask that question but didn't receive a response, and INHOPE did not respond when I sent them the same question. So consider the only substantive reason given in the IWF's response, which is that notifying the host "may undermine a police investigation." This could hypothetically be true in some cases — if police are preparing to move in on a suspected child pornographer, but he finds out that his ISP has removed content from his account after a notification from the IWF, he might know that he's about to be caught, and delete any incriminating pictures from his hard drive.
But this reason makes no sense in the case of images such as the cover art on Wikipedia, where the content has been generally available in the host country for a long time, and the original content producers are publicly known and wouldn't be able to run for cover even if the local government did declare the image illegal. It also would not apply in a wide range of other situations where the creator of the content is known and admits to creating it. Consider the case of Dr. Marcus Phillips, who was convicted of producing child pornography after he was hired by the parents of two girls, age 10 and 12, to take semi-nude photos of the girls (with the parents present) that could be digitally manipulated and super-imposed to produce "fairy art." Suppose Dr. Phillips had posted his photos in a portfolio online. In cases where the person posting the content admits that they took the photos themselves, and the subjects of the photos are identifiable people with a connection to the photographer, then consider the two possibilities: either (1) The images are such that the police and the courts will ultimately determine that they are child pornography. In this case, you might as well notify the user and their hosting company that the images are being blocked by the IWF, because even if this "tips off" the guilty user, they won't be able to destroy the evidence by erasing their hard drive, because the existence of the image is enough to incriminate them. Or, (2) The police and courts decide that the images do not constitute child pornography, in which case they should not have been blocked at all. In either situation, there's no rationale for the IWF to block the content without notifying the content owners. So why wouldn't the IWF notify the hosts in such cases — when the content creator is generally known, and admits to creating the content, and simply doesn't believe that it constitutes child pornography?
The elephant in the room is the obvious motivation that the IWF has for not notifying people when it blocks their sites: The IWF may be over-blocking such content, and doesn't want irate parties to complain when they find out that the IWF has mis-categorized their content as "child pornography." If several people came forward to say that the IWF had blocked, for example, their photographs of nudist children (which are not illegal), then it might undermine support for the IWF blacklisting system and for their mission in general. So by not telling people that their URLs are blocked, they minimize the number of people who find out and complain.
Perhaps the IWF does not over-block a lot of content, but the point is that we don't know. When Peter Robbins says the Wikipedia over-block amounted to "one mistake in twelve years," and adds, "Nobody in the years that we have been operating had any real reason to complain," there is no way of knowing if those statements are true, because any other mistakes made by the IWF are unlikely to have been brought to light, for two reasons. First, if a site or an image is blocked, most users are not going to realize what happened, since to them it simply appears that the remote server is not responding. Second, even if a user realizes that an image is blocked and the user knows that the image does not constitute child pornography, they may still be embarrassed to come forward and complain that they were visiting, say, a site full of nudist child photos or a porn site featuring adult models pretending to be mid-teen Japanese schoolgirls, and their favorite picture was blocked. The Wikipedia incident was probably a once-in-a-decade perfect storm of factors that led to the IWF having to retract a decision:
- Wikipedia was popular enough that people quickly noticed the blocked content.
- Wikipedia had the halo of legitimacy accorded to a popular research site; nobody had to feel dirty for admitting that they had been browsing it.
- The image in question had been commercially available for a long time, and nobody had been arrested for selling or possessing it.
- The image had a credible claim to artistic merit. Strictly speaking, "artistic merit" is not a defense against child pornography charges, but there is no unambiguous definition that can be used to determine if a given picture constitutes child pornography, and in a borderline case, a judge would probably be influenced by the fact that the photo was used as cover art for a "serious" album, and not seized from a darkroom in some creep's basement.
That last factor brings up a final irony: that the IWF, in labeling the Virgin Killer cover art as "child pornography," may have just been applying an objective standard that many people might not have disagreed with, if it hadn't been for the fact that the image was used as cover art for a rock album. Suppose you read a news article about a man who was arrested for possession of child pornography, and you happened to see a sample of the images (never mind how) that he was arrested for. And suppose the Virgin Killer album cover photo were been mixed in with those images. Would it have jumped out at you as an obvious case of over-reaching by the police? Would you speak out publicly, saying that even the guy should be prosecuted for the other images, he shouldn't be prosecuted for that one? (Again, ignoring the issue of how you happened to be looking at the photos in the first place, and assuming you couldn't get in trouble for that!) I doubt that I would have the nerve. By defending Wikipedia for hosting the same image, I'm guilty of a double standard. But would the IWF have agreed to un-block the image, if it hadn't been the cover art of an album, but instead had just been a grainy photo stuck in a sub-directory of someone's home page that they never intended to be made public? If not, then the IWF is guilty of a double standard too.
So not only do we not know how many mistakes are on the IWF's blacklist, it may be hard even to agree on an objective definition of a "mistake." But at least in cases where the content creator has already identified themselves — such as a public image on Wikipedia, or an image in a photographer's online portfolio — the IWF should notify people when it blocks their content. That would at least bring to light the cases where the content creator disagrees with the IWF's determination that their content constitutes child pornography. In some cases, such as the Wikipedia controversy, people would side with the content providers. In other cases, they wouldn't. But there's no reason to assume, as the IWF does when saying that Wikipedia represented "one mistake in twelve years," that in 100% of such cases, the courts and the police would side with the IWF's judgment.
People invariably get the authority they deserve.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Post the blacklist so we can independently verify that they have not made any mistakes!
The artwork for the Virgin Killer album was said to clearly fall under new UK child pornography laws. Therefore, while a law so restrictive that it makes old album covers illegal might be odious, how is it a mistake for the IWF to go along until such a law is overturned?
Child porn is like terrorism: it's a free pass for the government to do just about anything they want to in the name of protecting us from it.
It could be called the Open Internet Watch Foundation (OIWF) or something like that. The operating policy would involve openness and transparency to permit full review to ensure errors and controversy are properly dealt with, unlike the secretive IWF. This would ensure the higher level of quality of the blocking list. It can also may multiple categories of blocking more readily available.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Generally, secret stuff does not withstand public scrutiny. If it could, then you would be able to hold some one or somebody responsible. But that is against the secret nature.
If it undermines a police investigation, don't you think that as soon as the site is blocked, it might give them a clue the fuzz is on to them?
In my opinion, it should be the police's job alone, and not the IWF and ISPs' job to police these sorts of pages. True, there are some horrendous images of children being abused out there—but if the IWF can't tell the difference between a Wikipedia image of album artwork and child porn, surely there's something wrong?
If the police go after the pornographers, presumably they'll eventually find the servers and confiscate them—therefore, the stuff is taken off the net, and not with the sticking plaster of the IWF block. The contents of the pages also needs to be made public: only the text, however, because one can usually make a good guess at what's in images and video by looking at the text.
If the text says, for example, 'Virgin Killers is an album by [X band]...' you can guess the page is going to be legit. If it says 'cum see the hottest ch1ld pr0n0 & k1ddi3 pix...' well... you can guess what's going to be in there.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Only a paedophile, or closet ally of paedophiles, would subject our laudable Safety and Security measures to the vile corrosion of reasoned criticism! Purity through Faith!
i understand the argument of some people here: the list can have errors, therefore, the list idea is bogus
but this argument is ineffective: the list can be fixed. there can even be punitive damage costs delivered to anyone shown to be put on the list in error, which i would suggest, to make sure governments don't block carelessly. let a law be established where the government can me made to suffer dearly financially for blocking content that is deemed permissible in an open court of law. but what is not going to happen, nor should happen, is that the list itself should go away
i am going to receive flak from slashdot in general, but here goes: there is actually material on the internet that even the most socially liberal, libertarian-minded society would find objectionable, and has every right AND duty to block
that doesn't mean there is tons of content that is currently blocked by one government or another that is blocked wrongly. plenty of blocked material fails any morally or intellectually coherent test for validity of being blocked. but that doesn't mean there is actual genuine content out there that society has a right, and a duty, to block
look: you lose the argument if your argument is nothing should be blocked
but you WIN the argument if you say plenty of stuff is blocked wrongly
change the nature of your argument and your fight. but if you keep up with the fight that nothing should be blocked, you lose and are further marginalized in the argument. and it is an important argument, so that governments don't start blocking content without impunity, and that their block lists are transparent to the public and reviewable and vetoable
THAT is the important the fight. but the fight against the idea of blocking is over. it is happening, and will happen. get used to it. if you can't make peace with this fact, you have left the realm of the coherent argument and society is not listening to you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Internet Watch Foundation's "Crapland" child-friendly Internet theme park has gone bust after only three days.
An information board at the entrance depicts the classical painting Smell The Glove by Scorpionaggio (courtesy National Portrait Gallery) and welcomes the visitor on a "flight of the imagination, travelling down the magical pathways that teenagers have used to get their porn for centuries," and which have been specially opened up for the lucky children invited to come. "Just like Michael Jacksonâ(TM)s Neverland."
Advertisements promised a "Clean Kiddie-Friendly World ... Hollywood Special FXs, Blind Faith plane ride, Nevermind swimming baths, Houses of the Holy rock climbing ... & much more!"
The reality when it opened on Saturday evening was somewhat less impressive. Spurious 404s, lying customer service staff ("for the authentic Internet experience!"), HTML 2.0 and web searches through AltaVista. "It looked like a website from 1995 or a paper chart of what it should look like," said customer Jimmy Wales. "It was like they'd stacked dial-up modems on both sides of a path together, stuck some printouts on a TV and stuck a keyboard in front. We were waiting two hours and they charged us GBP10 for a photo with Mary Whitehouse."
Two curtain-twitchers and a Whitehouse were attacked by irate Internet users. A posting on 4chan showed a busybody having a fag behind the grotto.
Then, on Tuesday evening, Crapland closed. A statement by the management said this was due to "intentional organised crowd manipulation and event sabotage and unscrupulous and inaccurate negative bias media that quoted our words accurately in full." A woman dressed as a particularly hefty Pepperpot stood outside shrieking: "The IWF's dead. Go home."
Cable internet users who unwittingly signed up for the Crapland experience are giving up and getting DSL broadband instead. "It's been a complete Virgin killer."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I'm the volunteer press person for Wikipedia who spoke to the press during the incident.
One thing I didn't find out until Monday night (by which time the news cycle had ended): they blocked the page about the album, on en.wikipedia.org, and they blocked the page describing the image, on en.wikipedia.org ... but they didn't actually block the image itself, on upload.wikimedia.org.
But then, large websites have only been using separate image and text servers since 1995, so we could hardly expect the IWF to be up with such developments.
As well as blocking people from reading *encyclopedia text*, they *failed* to actually do the thing they were claiming to do: blocking the image.
This brings up one point: there is no evidence whatsoever that they actually do the job they claim to. And there is this piece of evidence that they don't actually know how to. Hamfisted *and* incompetent.
Could you follow up with a question as to how they managed to block text and not the actual image? I'd be fascinated to hear their explanation.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
They claim it's the first mistake they've made- this is clearly false, and it isn't hard to find examples where they've been clearly wrong.
It is, however, the first time that they've reversed their decision and admitted that they were wrong.
No, it doesn't "beg the question." It might raise the question, but it definitely doesn't beg the question.
http://begthequestion.info/
Get it right!
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
Many of the commenters here seem to think that this was government censorship, I would just like to clarify that the IWF is funded (and founded) by an independent consortium of ISPs and is not attached to the government in any way.
The ISPs are just as panicky as the government about banning it so the story-hungry newspapers don't start a campaign against them. I think this just goes to show that you it isn't only the government censoring/filtering content, the corporations will do it too (albeit for different reasons).
So consider the only substantive reason given in the IWF's response, which is that notifying the host "may undermine a police investigation." This could hypothetically be true in some cases â" if police are preparing to move in on a suspected child pornographer, but he finds out that his ISP has removed content from his account after a notification from the IWF, he might know that he's about to be caught, and delete any incriminating pictures from his hard drive.
Doesn't this only really make sense if there's some connection between the police investigation and being put on the list?
Imagine if nobody was allowed to tell anybody "hey, I think what you're doing might be illegal". Because of course there's a chance that it really is illegal and that the police are investigating, and if the person told this decided "hey, you're right, I guess I'll stop", well, you've just interfered and prevented the investigation from succeeding.
Maybe they just care more about persecuting people than they do about reducing unlawfulness...
In order for speech to be labeled Free, I don't believe it should be restricted. We of course, don't have any free societies on this planet, AFAIK. This is the tyranny of the majority, as outlawed by the U.S. Constitution, then democratically instituted by the ignorant masses. I realize TFA refers to GB Malarkey, it's the same as here, histrionics &c. used to promote government bloat, if not also the usual Black Helicopter stuff.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Obviously you can't tell anyone once you have found out but there you go.
They aren't asking to see your bookmarks are they? Why do you expect them to show you theirs?
a dutch court of law finds a website to be serving up child pornography and deserves to be shut down. the police have been given full powers to shut down the webserver by any means necessary. the dutch political establishment, the press, and the popular majority are all for shutting down the site
the webserver is located in moldova
the moldovan government responds "we have reviewed your request and will advise you upon receipt of bribe, i mean, proper consideration for our request for tanks. i mean, ALL YOUR GAS PIPELINE ARE BELONG TO US. end transmission"
you can't always shut down the webserver. sometimes, you need to block, and you have every right and duty to block
and it IS censorship, and according to the most libertarian and socially liberal notions, it is your right and duty to censor. and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. in fact, it is wrong, according to libertarian and socially liberal morality, to NOT censor the site
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...why it is contrary to those "best practices"
And exactly what ARE those "best" practices? I, for one, don't always agree with "experts" or even real experts. My surgeon doesn't perform surgey on me without my input, even my permission. If you are a web developer your boss has input, even though it's you who are the expert.
Free Martian Whores!
http://www.hpmosebach.de/page_1171959671197.html
Anyone wanna check the "virgin killer" image at this site? Is it blocked in UK?
It's certainly censored from google image search...
Under the current plan it seems to me that content it allowed to remain on the web. This means that even though it may be illegal in the UK, persons outside of the UK and motivated viewers in the UK can still get access to it. But what if the user were contacted? Well, first any well known organization would likely remove that content rather than experience the publicity of hosting such content if the knowledge became pubic. Second, any public hosting company would likely remove such content just as a matter of course. One can imaging parents posting pictures that some might consider questionable, and the free hosting service removing those pictures, thereby leading to a reduced ability for the common person to express him or herself. Third, some people may sue to have the content taken off the list. if most of the content is not legitimate, then one might see a string of cases in which every outcome was in favor of the filter. This might lead to a situation where it is assumed that the filter was accurate, and therefore solidify the de-facto status as a means of limiting freedom of expression without due process.
IMHO, the best option is have no mandatory filtering. ISPs who want to filter are of course free to, and can use different types of filtering as a method to sell their service. In the US, Christian filters are quite popular(it is interesting that a search also brings up software to allow a wife to spy on her husband, indicated that christians might have a problem). A nation might also impose a certain type of filtering as an option that ISPs are required to provide, but user are free to choose or reject. In the UK solution, which I think is kind of lame, it seems that contacting users would be costly and counter indicated. While one could reduce cost by publishing a list, this would just make matters even worse.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
so, for example, the webserver is in moldova: you need to censor it, because you can't shut it down. according to the most socially liberal and libertarian of moralities, you have a duty to censor child pornography
effectiveness, impact, any argument you are making: completely pointless and besides the fact
if you encounter child pornography, you fight it. whatever that entails, even if you think it is a token gesture. to ignore or accept child pornography as inevitable is not an intellectually or morally coherent position to take, according to any moral code in any society on the planet
plenty of behavior in any civilization happens that is incredibly difficult to stop entirely. that doesn' tmean you don't fight it. it also doesn't mean you accept it. what you do is you wage a continual low grade war agains tit you can never win. that you can never win the war doesn't mean you don't fight it
you make trash. every week, you take the trash out to the curb. you, in maintaining your house or apartment, are engaged in a "war on trash". you will never win this war. so, o you stop taking out the trash and live in your filth?
one of the effects of resisting fight, and not accepting things like child pornography is you minimize it. making it more difficult to get, but not impossible to get, actually makes a difference on its quantity. so this is what you live with
but you don't accept it. this is intellectually and morally incoherent, according to any morality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Since when do megalomaniac control freaks need reasons to justify their actions?
Why Doesn't the IWF Notify Those Whom They Block?
Because their main weapon is surprise!
Well, surprise and fear . . . and vicious devotion to the pope . . . wait . . . their three main weapons . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I was going to press you on this, but then I found a counterexample to your world view.
May the Maths Be with you!
that punitive decisions against the government are in actuality punitive decisions against the people. however, the government can and should and must suffer for doing the wrong thing, even though the eventual financial toll falls on the people. this is because the eventual toll for the government doing something wrong also falls on the people, so the people suffer no matter what happens
furthermore, the news generated and the bad press of such a trial affects the current ruling party, so there is an interest in not seeing such punitive action ever seeing the light of day, meaning that the need to maintain correct lists is important, and receives such care and diligence, only because the threats of punitive action exists
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't see what the Independent Wrestling Federation (IWF) http://www.wrestlingiwf.com/ has to do with child pornography.
The top reason I believe you will never see the list is because some of them are probably under investigation.
Some are very hard to track down.
I'm in favor of someone easily being able to tell if a website is on the blacklist (in as much as I'm in favor of this whole concept to begin with), but "notifying" websites? How? Send them email to webmaster@soandsosite.com? We all no that's not overrun with spam. And no one would send spam to that address in the same format as a blacklist notification, right? What if it's a subsite? Do they dig up each sites author's email address? Do they edit for people putting weird things in their email to avoid spammers?
This just really doesn't seem feasible. Maybe they could have a site where anyone can register for notification for a wildcard URL string. But that brings up a whole different set of issues.
Most of the people trying to access the page through British ISPs got a 404 error or a similar error. They weren't even told that they were being censored. If something like this happened for a small website, someone would likely just assume the site was down. People realized that wasn't the issue in part because Wikipedia shows internal links to pages as blue if a Wikipedia page on the subject exists and if not shows it as red and directs to a page for you to start that article. So users could see that en.wikipedia.org was fine elsewhere and that pages linking to the Virgin Killer page had the link in blue meaning that the Wikimedia servers thought there was a page there. If this sort of censorship happened for a small website people trying to access might not even realize that the failure to access occurred due to censorship.
How do the IWF identify websites with "child porn" on anyway..? As another comment said, viewing child porn is illegal.. do they have some exclusion from the law or what? They must have some grounds to "ban" a website, and the only way I can see possible, is for them to check themselves..
rather than censor it
and you speak of morality?
this term, "morality", i don't think you understand it
best that you not talk any more about morality, until you have further matured and have gained a better understanding of the concepts involved
for your sake, god i hope you are only 13 years old
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
and it is not the only tool at our disposal
along with the other weapons we have for fighting child pornography, censorship is a valid and valuable part of the arsenal
what do you suggest, not fight it at all?
fight it with methods that is worse than the child pornography itself?
(and no, censorship is not one of those methods)
please: try to define to me a better way to fight child pornography
or try to define censorship of child pornography websites as somehow worse than child pornography
or, try to argue that not fighting it at all is the best course of action
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"If several people came forward to say that the IWF had blocked, for example, their photographs of nudist children (which are not illegal), then it might undermine support for the IWF blacklisting system and for their mission in general."
An image is "child porn" in the UK if it offends against "the recognised standards of propriety", even to a minor extent. In other words, images are illegal if they are offensive to the jury (who are considered able to "apply the recognised standards of propriety"), and some juries have found nudist photographs to be illegal. Such juries include those in R v Graham-Kerr (1988), R v Mould (2000) and R v O'Carroll (2003). Those cases are notable for reasons other than the fact that a person was convicted for possessing nudist material and should threfore not be seen as anomolies as regards the nature of the offending material.
As I have said before, the IWF is not solely to blame for blocking access to pages which contain photographs of nude children; the issue is that the UK has a law which criminalises the possession of images which a random group of people find to be morally offensive. On the other hand, if the IWF didn't deliberately mislead people into believing that indecent images are always "child abuse images", people wouldn't be so shocked when they find that photographs of nude children are labelled as child pornography and therefore blocked.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
point out my logical fallacy
as for my ad hominem, i doubted that the person was older than 13 years old
you'll notice he replied, and stated he was slightly older than that
in other words, based on his faulty thinking, an inability to consider all of the concepts in play, demonstrating most probably an inexperience with all of the concepts, i suspected be was an immature person, and my suspicion was confirmed
so there is no ad hominem attack, unless you are saying it is an insult or an attack to call someone a teenager
likewise, i doubt you are very cognitively mature, seeing as you have an inkling of rhetorical terminology, but not a very good grasp on how to actually use those rhetorical terms correctly
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
better than censorship
modded as insightful to boot
i weep for humanity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a job for Wikileaks!
I can understand the problem with images of children - or indeed adults - being raped or otherwise sexually abused. But seriously, what is the problem with a picture of a naked child?
If you wish to become aroused by such an image, or even masturbate to orgasm, then that is up to you.
But to ban such images just in case someone wants to enjoy rubbing one out seems stupid to me.
the servers might be in another country
that other coutnry might have no treaty obligations with you
i've already bought this fact up to others in this thread, and they said well then go to war
and the comment was modded insightful
there are people who would rather go to war than just censor the damned server!
that's either depressing or hilarious, this idea that you can't censor ANYTHING
there are plenty of things you censor, for plenty of good reasons, according to the most liberal and libertarian of thinking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
didn't you just complain about ad hominem attacks?
the complaint only has validity if you don't engage in the behavior yourself
it's a rhetorical concept you should familiarize yourself with: "hypocrisy"
besides, it wasn't an insult. i doubted the guy was cognitively mature. he verified the suspicion. where's the ad hominem on my part?
an ad hominem implies an off subject smear of someone's character. i didn't smear anyone's character, and i wasn't off subject
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If they block by hostname, it would be a bit easier to notify a site so long as it has up-to-date whois info. If it's by IP or something similar, then who knows how many sites are hosted beneath a given address.
Well, I'm from Canada. I'm pretty sure everyone responsible for any large collection of computers is responsible for somehow "viewing or possessing child pornography." Seriously, you don't believe every single naked or sexual image of every girl on the internet is someone over 18?
- What if you have two teenagers on your network exchanging pictures of each other?
- How do you prevent any illegal activity from occurring on your network?
- How do you tell how old someone is? Can you tell the difference between a 16 year old and a 18 year old?
- Can you spot the illegal images in the millions of random GIF and JPEG images crashing around your network?
- Canadian law also covers written and drawn descriptions. How will you stop that?
- If the police suspect your company of having this stuff on your network, they will likely get a search warrant and seize all your computers (and backups.) How will your business deal with this?
Essentially, under Canadian law, almost everyone with a computer is guilty of possessing child pornography. If you have a run or own a big network of computers, you are guilty.
The scary thing is, in some countries the cops are starting to get really serious about this. In Britain, someone estimated the number of pedophiles at 60,000 to 70,000 people! That's 0.1% of the general population, and 0.2% of the men. Doesn't that number seem just a little bit too high?
If we just keep watering the definitions down, and expanding our terms of reference, then eventually we will be able to arrest everyone for something. It's always nice to start with the weird and strange people first. After all, those teen male computer hacker geeks, they always have naked images on their computers. At least one of them must have an image of a girl that is less than 18 years old!
Teenagers have already been charged in Canada under these laws. For the moment, computer professionals haven't been targeted by these laws, but it is only a matter of time. Once a computer professional is targeted, they will have a very hard time proving they are criminally innocent. In the mean time, their career, reputation and businesses will be completely destroyed. All it would take, is an accusation.
more ad hominem
in a complaint about ad hominem
what do you need me for?
yell at yourself
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
tl;dr
"New Labour" really hates dissent so they like to make sure that there can be no appeal against the decisions they make by, for example, creating or supporting Quangos like the IWF to carry out their dirty work whilst avoiding the responsibility or the statutory over-sight that would be required if HM Government did this officially.
Personally I don't see it stopping until the IWF get sued.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
continue in the body should be executed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The creation of laws is politics. The creation of laws in other countries is a political matter for those countries. If you want to go further than that, you might want to read up on Clausewitz. The people you think of as bellicose are actually realists; they understand the concept of sovereignty, which you clearly don't.
the presumption that your country (or most likely, your personal or your sky daddy's) laws apply to everyone everywhere is arrogant in the extreme.
About which you know nothing.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Uh, no.
Not even close.
According to this 2006 report only 5 countries in the world totally outlaw child porn. Lots more have laws against it to some degree or another, but simple possession is legal in many countries and in some there are absolutely zero laws against it.
Caveats: Yes, I'm sure things have changed some since 2006. (I know Brazil criminalized simple possession in 2008, for example.) Yes, in many places where making child porn is technically legal, other laws against child abuse would be broken, thus resulting in a de facto ban on making and marketing child porn. But it's a huge, huge error to say that viewing child porn is illegal "in most places."
I think it would be more accurate to say that "most places" realize that raping kids is a crime; that fighting *that* crime is a worthwhile use of resources; and that criminalizing the possession of crime scene photos is probably best treated as little more than a silly distraction.
One thing I noticed when looking at the Virgin Killers page while it was being blocked was that it pretended to be a 404 error (a very unconvincing one). This is presumably part of their "don't alert people" ploy too, but it confounds the majority of people from being able to discover that it's being blocked.
Doesn't this only really make sense if there's some connection between the police investigation and being put on the list?
My understanding is that it is IWF policy to notify the police when they block an image, so in at least some cases there is such a link...
A more fundamental question:
Why doesn't the UK dump IWF and censorship?
Why should we hope to have 'appropriate' censorship, or hope that censor 'mistakes' can be 'corrected'? When we accept censorship as a tool 'for the common good', and get caught in Byzantine discussions about which speech/'content' is more or less 'harmful' and should be less or more free (instead of adopting a simpler view like the one in the US First Amendment), we are already sliding down a very steep, very slippery slope.
Anyone wanna check the "virgin killer" image at this site? Is it blocked in UK?
Works for me, and my ISP supposedly blocked the wikipedia article (although it had unblocked it by the time I heard about the controversy).
What the hell does this have to do with the International Weightlifting Federation?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Why the hell has this been moderated to -1? It might be uncomfortable, but it's certainly worth classifying as Insightful.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
Wish I knew. Damned insightful comment brought down by spineless mods that just give it an overrated mod so they're not accountable. pity.