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German Parliament Enacts Internet Censorship Law
TheTinyToon writes that by a vote of 389 to 128, "the proposed censorship law to block child porn has been passed by the German government. Not surprisingly, a member of the conservative party (CDU) announced plans to also check if the law could be extended to include so-called 'killer games' like Counterstrike, only two hours after the law was passed. More [in German] on netzpolitik.org."
519009
Yay me!
some of the blocks have a very phallic shapes. Like for instance:
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Eew... Think of the children!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Living in Australia I have the joy of having games censored for the localised version. Violent movies are still widely available in comparison, why is it that the games are always targeted and not the movies. There has been plenty of films i've watched over the years I wouldn't suggest to under 18's but for them it is suprisingly easy to hire said movies from the local video shop.
"Once the legislation passes, police officials will have to draw up a list of web sites that feature child pornography and send the list to all telecommunications companies." Might as well just make the list public knowledge. Anyone with the inclination to view the material will be able to find it easier with any list made.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
In the movie Euro Trip there was a scene where the guy goes to meet his German girfriend and a boy does the Hitler salute with the moustache.
It raised an uproar, especially in Germany and many German politicians swore up and down that they had excercised the Ghost of Hitler.
Have they?
If i remember the massive book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", Nazi movies in theaters were do devoid of audience that Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, issued a stern warning against "treasonable behavior on the part of cinema audiences."
First you start by censoring what's available. Then you start by slowly ratcheting up the local propaganda, and then you outlaw any and all unapproved broadcasts and networks.
German politicians are treading the thinnest line possible between Liberty and Hitler.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation"
I'll leave you to guess who I'm quoting.
I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
What is the deal with these people? What is their major problem with video games? Did their digital mothers get spawn camped and teabagged when they were children?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
If you still needed proof that our political system is crap, this is it.
The vast majority of politicians who voted "yes" on this topic could not even explain the base technologies if you asked them. Nor do they understand how their censorship law works, or what its consequences are. Despite having this pointed out to them repeatedly.
It's becoming rapidly clear, especially with the economic crisis happening at the same time, that we're ruled by people who're simply not good at ruling, nor much else for that matter. Their expertise is in politics, i.e. getting into power, not in anything that matters once you are in power.
If anyone shoots them all, I'll be there to applaud. And yes, I write that with my name on it. These people have nothing to lose and they act like it. While I'm not for violence, I'm starting to believe that at least the danger of violence and personal consequences is required or else our politicians will destroy us all - or, if you think about climate change, kill us all.
Funny how it takes but weeks to throw billions at mismanaged banks, but it's taken years and no end in sight to agree on matters vital to the survival of the damn planet.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
In this news, we see the real issue: That the slippery slope of making some information illegal is too steep. The primary issue that free global flow of information will do is dramatically reduce the need for centralized government power at the country level, in many ways. If people allow their governments to start making some information illegal, even for good reasons, then the norm of censorship will be accepted and expanded.
Frankly, the main driver behind making such images illegal seems to be that we don't have the resources or the effort to catch people who actually harm children - so instead they make the next closest thing police *can* find illegal. This is lazy police work.
I believe that a free and open society would work best if there were no restrictions on *access* to information once it is available. Laws would only restrict behaviors: The bits are not the issue, human behavior is. Thus, no image or stream of bits would ever be illegal (as I see it), only *actions* that people take that directly result in harm to other people. This would make the job of police much harder, yes, but the benefits become obvious quickly when reading this news.
If by "violent video games", you mean "violent fantasies of power and grandeur", your point changes.
I do disagree with banning games, but your analogy doesn't attack the logic they are using. There are people alive in Germany right now who remember being caught up in the mythic ideals leading their nation, willingly and excitedly, into war all across Europe and beyond. You can't use arguments about why banning video games is wrong, because they aren't worried about the games per se. You have to explain why the games are different from the Nazi propaganda which so thoroughly scarred their national psyche that the effects are still felt to this day.
Personally, I'd point out that the games aren't ideological, so they don't really push the same sort of emotional buttons that the Nazi idealism did. Even so, I suspect the nation still has an understandable aversion to the glorification of violence. I guess the counter-argument there is that the people playing the games don't bear those psychological scars, being so far removed in time from the war, sort of like how most Americans today don't really have an emotional connection to the great depression and thus aren't as frugal about money (although current events may be changing that a bit).
3 days? One week?
And it's only DNS based AFAIK.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Because "you lied" is a very slippery slope attack for politicians. Every politician lied at some point, and when someone opens that venue, he will get replies likewise.
For the same reason you don't get to see politicians using the promises of their opponents from years past against them. Have you ever wondered why no party ever used the slogans of their opponents against them (as in "see what they promised you last election and now think what you got")?
Maybe because the last thing they want is the voter to remember their promises and their lies.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It indeed may be able to reduce the amount of child porn watched in Germany.
The current expert consent is that it will have zero effect. These will be DNS blocks which are trivially circumvented by using a different DNS server. You could use an open DNS server in a different country or simply run your own resolving server.
The thing I'm worried about is the fact that once you started censoring something, the threshold to censor something else falls. Once you have started, you may easily start censoring some other things, just like those killer games that were mentioned. First the porn, then the games and what next?
Pretty much anybody with some Internet competence is convinced that this is exactly the intention behind this law. Also there are plans to record anybody trying to access a blocked website and start investigating them (read: storm their homes, confiscate all thier computer equipment and telling the neighbours you are a likely a child-pornography consumer), since "they tried to access child pornography", which is a crime in Germany. Looks like an effort to establish a reign of fear. I predict that offering commercial anonymity proxies for webbrowsing to germans could be a good business in the next few years.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The golden era is over. We're all doomed.
The exact reverse can be argued. Due to the empowerment the internet has given to Joe Public, the enabling technologies which continue to come to market and the explosion in independent self expression Governments around the world are panicking into passing legislation which they hope will get the Genie back in the bottle. But frankly, they're pissing in the wind. Human ingenuity will win out over the nay sayers maybe for the first time in history because the development of tools is in OUR hands and the infrastructure is essentially beyond the control of individual governments.
... why the PIRATE party (I hope they come up with a snazzy backronym for that) can expect to get my vote in the elections next fall.
"With 389 yes, 128 no and 18 withheld votes the government passed the so called "Zensursula" bill today with 535 politicians voting in total. Now the plans to repeal on grounds of unconstitutionality begin.
/. yesterday and gives a nice overview of
the things that were done to try to fight this bill. The first paragraph reads:
It's a black day for the digital community and will no doubt have repercussions from tech-savvy voters for the two ruling parties in the upcoming elections.
We've achieved quite a bit with the #zensursula campaign and we can continue to build on this, get better at spreading our message and eventually change this bad policy. I'm happy that the articles here on Netzpolitik have been given a voice in the press and in the minds of everyday citizens. This new information-central world of communication brings us a new degree of openness and we are slowly learning how to use our new digital tools and open source principles effectively. Every day we grow stronger and we'll continue to define and breathe life into these digital communities. Many people are becoming more political and are beginning to share their political views with others, both on the net and in the analog world. This is fun, it's creative and it's a worthwhile democratic activity, so join in!
" The link at the end isn't quite so positive. It asks a lot of the same questions that we asked here on
"After the passing into law of the 'Zensursula-infrastructure' there are undoubtedly many people out there who are feeling disappointed. What more could we have done that we didn't do in the last few months and years? How big does a movement have to be before it's successful? Our group has grown incredibly, so why doesn't anyone seem to understand us?"
I'd do the rest but my translation skills aren't the best and it's already time for me to be getting to class. It's a great article though.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I rather wonder what atrocities could have been avoided if some people had a virtual outlet for their delusions of grandeur or their sadistic drive.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was trying to think of an analogy for dns-based censorship that would resonate with politicians. Got it =D
It's like paying millions of dollars to keep prostitutes out of the phone book.
It won't reduce the amount at all. The reasons are simple, and please excuse when I use filesharing as a parallel. They actually share a few traits: First, both are illegal. Second, both use the internet as a staple medium for the transfer of content. Third, both consist of groups of people that tend to aid each other due to the "siege mentality" associated with it.
In other words, it is quite unlikely that this will achive anything in the sense of blocking child porn at all. Aside of various YouTube videos that already show you how to ignore the filters ("circumvent" is too strong a word, it sounds like there is some work, hardship or hassle associated with it).
If anything, it will make the work of law enforcement a lot harder. Until now, you could at least catch the "dumb" ones, the ones that use no proxy and download their porn directly. Every time there's a sting, you get to see a lot of people (also from Germany) arrested because their IPs have been used to download stuff. Why are people so "dumb"? Because it works. They have no reason to dig into the technical matter, they have no reason to search for solutions, they have no reason to even know about proxies.
Now they get to see a big STOP sign. What will they do? Stop getting child pron? C'mon, we're talking about the major driving force in a human being, the sex drive. They will fire up google and search for solutions. As a (for them beneficial...) side effect they will learn that 'til now they were essentially under the sword of Damocles, any time "their" server was busted they would have been in! So they learn now about proxies, they learn now how to mask behind onion routing... they didn't really want that. They are basically "forced" to use it if they want to continue seeing their porn. And they want.
So what will come out of this? Well, certainly for one, it will look a lot better on the child pron crime statistics. The next sting, there probably won't be any child porn consumers from Germany rounded up. And we'll feel good about ourselves because there are no kiddiporn enthusiasts in Germany anymore.
What the statistic fails to see is that all we accomplished is that we can't catch them anymore. Well done, Mrs. von der Leyen, you didn't manage to protect children, but you managed to protect child porn consumers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If only Germany had protected its citizens from violent video games in the 1930's, imagine how many lives would have been saved!
I'm confused... your point here is "This is one of the countries that started WW2, so they have no right to ban violent videogames?" Or was it "WW2 was not caused by videogames, so clearly videogames can never be blamed for real life violence?"
two-fold, really: germany gets absolutely no benefit of the doubt on censorship, and there are much more important things to worry about than video games.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Did you know that there's a direct correlation between the decline of Spirograph and the rise in gang activity?
Think about it.
As an organisation convicted of serial child abuse affecting thousands of children over decades by a government largely sympathetic to it, the Roman Catholic Church will obviously be a large feature on any blacklist intending to protect children.
source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8060442.stm amongst others.
But, clearly, it won't. Until it does, there is nothing in any of these laws that is protecting children and any proponents of them are clearly immorally using 'think of the children' as a cover.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
I'm fairly sure there is. But do you think he survives long in that shark pool? More over, do you think he gets elected (yes, that essentially leads to 'people are stupid')?
Also, rest assured that even the most honest politician will be caught in that "you lied" trap. Even the most honest man "lies", at least from an objective point of view, if he has incomplete information. Ask a person from times medieval whether the Earth is the center of the universe and he will, objectively, lie to you. If you held elections in 2006, even a honest politician would probably have promised you wealth and growth because he didn't forsee the economy crisis.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
because the first politician to state that is blamed as being PRO-child-porn, "most likely he is also having that at home"!
I don't wether to agree or disagree with your point. Rather I'll try to complement it.
"violent fantasies of power and grandeur" is, indeed, a natural wish that probably lurks into our reptilian brain. It is a natural inclination of humans and the cause of many evils. I can understand that the government tries to tune it down, but unless we do brain surgery on every newborn, it will fail.
It can, however, provide ways to fullfill "violent fantasies of power and grandeur" that harms no one, that doesn't require to invent ennemies in the population or to run in the streets with a crowbar. Games provide such a way. In a game I can kill hundreds of ennemies per second, I can manage a kingdom, I can wage a war, I can do kung fu, without hurting anyone. The government does not want less violent games, it wants more.
But some unfortunate people have a hard time discerning the border between reality and fiction. More frequently, some people will think that the self-image of power and grandeur that they build in games can be transposed in reality, leading to various violent behavior. What the government wants, in complement with violent games, is a mandatory psychology class for all students that explains the basics of human behavior. How ego works, the various bias we have when perceiving others and ourselves, the values we transpose from fantasies to the real world, and yes, what we tend to crave for: "power and grandeur" and how almost every media play on that desire to addict us.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Actually the president has to sign it before it becomes official (which he refused to do in a prior case). Plus the german Supreme Court is already on it too. They sacked quite a few earlier atempts of this government to build a police state (of course to protect us from terrorism and whatnot). It's kind of sad to see these laws stopped only at the last chance.
Slashdot is a great place to discuss and moan, but it isn't the battle site. If you want to change things you need to organise yourselves, write to your representative, get your views across to journalists. Make it known that you are the majority view. Attend political meetings and support those in influence who support your view.
Don't imagine that by whining on Slashdot you will have changed anything.
Unfortunately, it also says (in section 2 of the same article): "Diese Rechte finden ihre Schranken in den Vorschriften der allgemeinen Gesetze, den gesetzlichen Bestimmungen zum Schutze der Jugend und in dem Recht der persÃnlichen Ehre. " = "These rights find their limits in the provisions of the general laws, the laws for the protection of minors and in the right to personal honor". Now, IANAL, but it seems they can simply argue this law is necessary to protect minors, and to protect the "right to personal honor" of the victims of kiddie porn, and is thus constitutional.
Gun ownership is not so much about morality as it is about mortality. Same goes for wearing seat-belts. I guess it comes down to how you measure the public good. The conservatives want to assume that everybody is equal in their self-direction and responsibilities. The liberals want to measure the cost to the rest of us, when people can't be trusted to act wisely. It's interesting that conservatives see morality as something that can be imposed, despite evidence to the contrary (think war on drugs, abortion, or pretty much any other moral crusade), where as liberals think that self-determination and responsibility can be imposed.
It's moral authoritarianism that liberals find so heinous, and for good reason. A true moral standard is humble in its prescription for the behaviour of others. After-all, history is laced with the horrors of conventional wisdom gone mad.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I hope you're dripping that into an IV, not a catheter...