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France Votes Tuesday On Net Censorship
angry tapir writes "French lawmakers will vote next Tuesday on a proposal to filter Internet traffic. Part of a new security bill, the measure is intended to catch child pornographers. However, once the filtering system is in place it will allow the government to censor other material too. Slashdot has previously discussed Australia's proposed ISP-level filter."
Well, we're gonna build our own internet! With blackjack and hookers! Hmm, wait a minute...
The religious minority in France is probably going to be the deciding factor in this vote. I'm not talking about the catholics here.
Please vote for Alex P. Keaton for President!
Nick: Yo, Alex!
Censorship on the internet has nothing to do with stopping [insert favorite bogyman here]. For example: If Governments of the world really really cared about Child porn, there is no way in hell they would subscribe to TRIPS, GATS and other trade agreements that push so fervently for expansion of intellectual property (IP) rights worldwide. The majority of Child porn comes from poor developing countries - called "Source Country" exploitation. Many research and commissions inquires have overwhelmingly [References below] found these trade agreements severely disadvantage developing countries. Basically it guarantees keeping poor countries poor by denying them the same abilities to develop as the first world countries once enjoyed (refs below) .
Do we see your government moving to solve this major worldwide source of child porn? No of course not - they are too busy negotiating ACTA in the backrooms. Child porn is just another bogyman to push through controls on the internet - and as a result your going to get worse IP restriction AND internet censorship == the complete opposite of actually solving the child porn problem (and the closely related human trafficking, and poverty, starvation...). It could be said: If you support internet censorship then your also supporting the continuation of child porn... I know of no other place where we can debate and call into question/try to pressure our leaders to answer questions about draconian restrictions on the third world like ACTA will impose.
References (of many) you can find on the internet linking IP laws and trade agreements to continuing poverty of the developing world:
The GATS and TRIPS are both examples of rich countries investing their most vigorous negotiating efforts on agendas where the gains will accrue overwhelmingly to companies located in rich countries. They are examples of a one-size-fits-all approach being imposed and, most strikingly, of rich countries now pulling up the ladder, trying to deny developing countries the very policy options that rich countries used to manage their own economic development.
http://www.cid.org.nz/advocacy/Phil_Twyford_-_CID_Trade_Forum.pdf
Commission on Intellectual Property Rights declared the internationally-mandated expansion of intellectual property (IP) rights unlikely to generate significant benefits for most developing countries and likely to impose costs, such as higher priced medicines or seeds. This makes poverty reduction more difficult. The intensively researched, 180-page report is entitled Integrating Intellectual Property Rights and Development Policy. It is the culmination of much study and follows on more than a dozen meetings and workshops, 17 working papers, an exhaustive literature review of the field, visits to several developed and developing nations and a major conference. The report makes some 50 recommendations aimed at aligning IP protection with the goal of reducing poverty in developing nations. Topics include IP and health; agriculture; traditional knowledge; copyrights, software and the Internet; and the role of WTO and WIPO in advancing developing country interests. The Commission is an independent international body made up of Commissioners from both developed and developing countries with expertise in science, law, ethics and economics. The Commissioners come from industry, government and academia* (see list of Commissioners below). "Developed countries often proceed on the assumption that what is good for them is likely to be good for develo
"catch child pornographers"
AKA, pour apprendre ce qui piratent les filmes et musiques par internet....
Tabarnac!
As an Australian, dare I say I'm waiting with bated breath. The French dumping that section wouldn't help our cause, but passing it would hurt it - the Aus govt is already looking for rationalisation and "me too!" works for voters here.
The whole bureaucracy we have to put up with in these times is far worse when they attempt this bullshit to lead attention away from false promises and actual governmental improvement. Fuck the system basically, especially when there's no history of revolution over here.
The lawmakers are voting this, it has nothing to do with mulsim vote by the population.
As a mater of fact, the vote will be mostly by the (watered down) equivalent to repulicans, so expect a lot of christian.
In Germany, a law was passed called Zugangserschwerungsgesetz. It said the Federal Criminal Police Office delivers secret list of blocked domains to the ISPs. After the elections in 2009 the government changed and even though the law has come into effect, the new coalition prevented the feds to give out the list. So de facto, Zugangserschwerungsgesetz has been rejected now.
This is partially the success of the German Pirate Party, which both thrived because of this law proposal (membership decupled in a few months) and forced a public discussion about this law (otherwise it'd just be rubber-stamped: "oh, this law is against kiddie porn. Good!"). It astonished me that the PP actually succeeded to bring common sense into the debate, because politicians often tend to turn of their brain when they hear "kiddie porn". Partially the success was also due to an online petition which had 134,000 signatures (which made it by far the most successful petition in German history).
It is also doubtful that the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz will pass German's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court, which in the past has proven to value human rights (such as article 5 of Germany's constitution) very highly.
I thought Sarkoszy was essentially a dictator when it comes to all things MAFIAA.
he pushes in laws that have been voted against all the way up to the european parliament.
#include <sig.h>
If they didn't make possession illegal then ordinary citizens with spare time would be able to help track down those who actually make the material.
Child porn, the European root password to society. In America, it's "terrorism". I'm sure the politicians rejoice that the people let themselves be programmed to respond in such a simple way to these root passwords...
Appearantly the terrrrrists don't cut it anymore, so we pulled another one out of the hat. Or maybe just that terrrrrists don't work in this context because, well, there's really little harm done by webpages that tell us how we infidels will all go to hell, so someone else had to fill the void.
So let's imagine how this works for a moment. Someone sets up a webpage with kiddy porn in a country where such a thing is legal and the only way to fight that would be that ISPs in France are required to block it.
Anyone here able to point out the three problems with this approach?
First, there is NO country on this planet where child porn is legal. Not a single one. Instead of blocking such a server, go there and raid it. It's illegal where it's hosted. Shut it down. Simple solution.
Second, blocking does jack in a world where international proxy servers exist. So unless such a law is installed worldwide, the blocking means jack.
Oh, one might argue that they're pushing for it, to get it internationally installed. That leads to the third problem:
It's not distributed through webpages. It's not on webpages you could filter. It's working along the same channels that most illegal content travels. Hacked FTP servers, P2P and usenet.
So there's now two possibilities. Either our politicians don't know what they're doing and they're trying to appear like they're "doing something". Or the whole thing is just a strawman for something you could not push through because of public resistance. Personally, I think it's a combination of the two.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's no secret that he's pretty strongly pro MAFIAA, thinking how his wife is directly involved in the pressure for more IP protection.
And he has to. I mean, be honest, if you look like her, would you stay with a troll if he couldn't collect your bridge toll?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
0.????
-1. profit!
This will lead to one thing only; those savvy enough or caring about privacy and freedom will jump off in darknets, shadownets, unionrings and dissapear from the "radar" and jump through proxies or VPNs.
It'll create these "underground movements" with a club-like and elitist sense of self, as annonymous, with secret handshakes and what have you.
Those using the internet to chat up girls, share their pictures on facebook or what have you, will continue to use their computers as glorified TV-sets.
And why would that be a bad thing? You are concerned about "your internet experience being taken away", it'll just get more cool and secretive for you, while for the 9yo cousin the internet is "pretty with rainbows and unicorns" and not fapping old men trying to have them send pictures.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all against censorship and muffling freedom of speech, but the internet has grown a bit out of the "lets see what we can do with it" as alot of peopel are exposed to it. We'll just have to bend into a few curves to have the same experience, but is that really an issue?
To me it just seems these lawmakers at one hand are worried about what can potentially come out of the internet biting teens butt, but otoh not wanting to kill freedom of speech alltogether.
During "Blackout Europe" (3 strike policy law on EU level), I've written my European representative to urge him to recognise the internet not just as "playground for innovation" but also as basic right and medium to exercise freedom of speech, which was received well. So in my naive world, I'd like to think they do care about free speech, but also protecting some weaker people in society. It's a difficult balance, but internet-censorship wont make a difference to all the crying nerds: we'll get our tools and methods to get around it and nobody is going to proscecute you for that. Its not that we've been desensitized and media got a bit like a loose whore people need to be exposed to that involentary: Make it a bit harder to get but not illegal... fe, like porn used to be in the 90s; being younger as 18 you had to get creative to get porn, but we got it anyway without it been blasted in our field of vision constantly.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
The pedophiles will just use Tor or come up with some stenographic technique to hide their stuff. Meanwhile everyone else will suffer from burdening the costs of implementing and maintaining such a system.
Child porn occasionally gets posted to fetish image boards by Russian spammers. So France, say good bye to 4chan.
Your children won't be any safer if some random pervert can't get his jollies from images anymore. Without an outlet, these pervertss will bottle it up until they can no longer hold back. Innocent children will most likely suffer due to such legislation.
Pedophiles aren't something new. They have existed in humanity for at least as long as recorded history. Putting our fingers in our ears and going lalalala will do nothing to protect our children or get pedophiles the treatment that will enable them to participate in our society.
I would like to see the creation of programs where pedophiles can go in and receive counseling without getting a life long stigma. Perhaps we could create child-less towns out in the middle of nowhere so they can live their lives without temptation. We could do more research on the brains of pedophiles and develop drugs to re-orientate pedophiles to a more healthy age range, preferably in a delivery mechanism like the Norplant birth control so the pedophile just needs to get it replaced every few years.
My cousin was molested as a child by her father's boss. He fled to France to avoid prosecution. It did significant trauma to my extended family. I want to prevent such things from happening to other families and to do that we have to work with the pedophiles so they get help and don't hide in the woodwork, being consumed by their desires yet secluded due to fears of being expelled from society.
Locking up people who have thumbnails of child porn in their browser's caches does nothing to solve the problem either and creates a new class of victims, those who went to an image board for a legal fetish that is far removed from child porn but got spammed by the Russian child porn spammers. It is a crime in some places to delete it from your cache, leaving many people in a no-win situation caused by ignorant and useless politicians.
Please think before wasting tax dollars and giving people a false sense of security. Every wasted dollar could be better spent feeding, clothing, and educating children, or perhaps fix up a nation's crumbling transportation infrastructure or installing optical fiber to every house.
Well, again the discussion who should do what. Should these sites be blocked or should action be taken against the people who are responsible. My personal opinion is, that blocking traffic does not work, as it is hard to block IP addresses, as one IP Address can hold several websites, which normally are legitemate. So only blocking through the DNS server of the provider would be an option, which can be fooled so easily.So that kind of blocks have no impact or use. In my opinion, the governments should make sure that the provider/owner of the sites gets prosecuted in the country where the server is located. That will work, if measures of pressure will come in to effect, like blocking all that countries IP traffic to and from Europe. There is no country which can allow something like that to happen. The legal side though is different. The EU-Law says clearly and that has recently been confirmed by the EU Commission, that it is Governments and providers NOT allowed to block content on the internet. There is a EU-Law which provides the freedom to receive everything you want, either by means of the internet, air or other means. (if this law is good or not, I leave that for the reader to judge). The law is based on the fact, that not the receiver is to blame for something, but the one who causes it.) In my opinion, there should be a EU wide control organisation, part of the Justice Department / EU Court of Justice, which will take action for the EU against countries who enable People to have website which hold Child Pormografy or other illegal stuff. Only if it is done on a large scale there will be any chance for success. By the way, the EU already said it will bring France for the EU court(s) if they would vote for this law. That is also the reason, why Germany has not implemented the law, as they also got a negative advice on the implementation from the EU.
China holds that their internet censorship follows international norms. Sadly, France is proving them correct.
one of the things which I do is manage some web sites which take several thousand hits per second. We don't even notice the slashdot effect for example.
Anyway. In China we have a problem with 'clipping'. The traffic looks like a square wave rather than a sine wave. It indicated a performance limitation or choke point. So we opened up a second datacenter and balanced the connections between them. entirely different network, everything.
So the square wave remains, but now half the connections to each site. I.e the problem isn't our network or systems. The customers all come from different networks, so the most likely issue is a proxy or filter which is running out of connections or capacity.
No such problems in europe or america.
Homosexuals aren't something new. They have existed in humanity for at least as long as recorded history. Putting our fingers in our ears and going lalalala will do nothing to protect our children or get homosexuals the treatment that will enable them to participate in our society.
I would like to see the creation of programs where homosexuals can go in and receive counseling without getting a life long stigma. Perhaps we could create colony towns (or more like prisons) out in the middle of nowhere so they can live their lives without temptation. We could do more research on the brains of homosexuals and develop drugs to re-orientate homosexuals to a more healthy sex, preferably in a delivery mechanism like the Norplant birth control so the homosexual just needs to get it replaced every few years.
I just wanted to note the fruitlessness and the cruelty of your idea. Oh, I forgot, homosexuals are protected by law now.
The point GP was making is that poverty in the so-called Third World is a factor in child abuse/porn. And that IP laws are designed to keep so-called Third World pauper.
And I'd say she/he has a point...
Germany pwns France since the Franco-prussian war, so, there is nothing really newsworthy here...
But, may is this a good time for the Germans take another holyday trip in Paris?
I have been surfing the web since 1993 and have yet to see one single picture of a child engaged in sex. I see pornographic pictures everywhere in the internet, it's "rule 34", but not a single one of these pictures has a child in it.
However, inexistence of proof is not proof of not existence. If you start from the assumption that child pornography does exist somewhere, then you must create very powerful search tools to find it.
And a very powerful tool is too tempting to be left alone, if it does not accomplish its primary task there might be other uses for it...
What is it with all these internet filtering attempts all over the globe? There's the classic one, China, there is a project in Belgium (and it's actually in use, the purpose is to stop pedophiles, but ironically, the only site on the list so far was a site that outed pedophiles, it's blocked because it violated those 'people's' rights, but only on DNS level (*)), the Dutch also have a similar approach, and Australia wants to follow suit.
The good thing here in Belgium is that a judge has to order the site blocking, not some bureaucratic office, so there is a recourse through law to defend your site against it, if you must, but still, such attempts are futile, technology will work around them.
(*)http://www.ispam.nl/archives/9116/belgische-providers-blokkeren-anti-pedofielen-website/
I thought Sarkoszy was essentially a dictator when it comes to all things MAFIAA.
Not only when it comes to MAFIAA. He wants to be a dictator in all areas of life.
She could use him to perfect her dwarf tossing skills...
You had me up to the last two sentences. Saying we can't act against one form of perversion because another form is protected is excellent argument for why no forms of perversion should be protected.
I love when governments use Child Porn and Terrorism to control its people through fear and lies. Here's to hoping that France doesnt fall victim to this pathetic tactic.
The reality is, Child porn is a tiny fraction of everything on the Net, and It can be masked in encrypted files etc... So lets just fucking stop using these boogieman tactics to try and control the people, and their freedoms.
I have a older friend who often needs help with his computer. He's a paranoid former American so he's afraid someone might be monitoring his phone and his internet connection. ( I don't know why, the only thing he talks about is mathematics. The only thing you'll find on his computers is math papers. )
Point is that, for his comfort, I use a remote desktop software and pump it through ssh so it can't be tapped. Now, supposing that the governments start monitoring traffic so they can block certain sites and track who's sending what to whom, what are they going to do with encrypted traffic where they cannot discern the content. Do they just assume that since it's encrypted it must be evil, where most people just want to preserve their privacy and safety, and block it as well?
How will the law handle Virtual Private Networks between employees and employers, between corporate sites (yeah, I worked for an outsourcer and one of our customers used a virtual private network through the internet to connect their offices. I was in network support and got a call one day to call a particular network provider somewhere in the midwest to tell them to fix the traffic on one of their routers so our customer's VPN through the internet would work faster. We had no direct contract with the company. They were just one of many links in the anonymous chain that carried the traffic between sites.) or just between friends who share enough common interest in something not illegal that they VPN their home networks together, perhaps working on their own film or music album.
If anyone thinks that some legislation to force ISPs to monitor traffic is going to make the problems of child pornography or music and movie piracy go away, they are terribly naive. Such legislation would be similar to asking the post office to start opening mail to make sure it's not being used to send child pornography or pirated music. But, there are laws that say the mail cannot be routinely opened for such inspections and, when it comes to sending LARGE amounts of data (say a terabyte), a hard drive sent through Priority Post beats the internet for bandwidth pretty much every time.
Yeah, I'm posting anonymously in fear of the zealots who will think that I'm advocating using encrypted network connections for such purposes. I don't need to advocate for it. It's likely happening already.
is CP the new bin ladin ?
When you don't know how to fight someone honestly, there is always the possibility to throw in a joke.
You've clearly chosen your line of attack!
I sometimes see jokes on Obama's color. Not any better!
Has anyone here ever found "by accident" a kiddie porn website ? I bet no, because there is no such thing. They use other channels and are very secretive about their business. A public website would be like a stand selling kiddie porn DVDs on the streets.
This law is a pretext to censor more sites in the future. Sarkozy said himself that once the mechanism is in place they will see how it can be applied to intellectual property "issues".
Control is the name of the game.
And if the Internet has to come out and get the people whose interest are not to prevent child pornography from spreading on the Internet (which they usually aren't), they will come and get them.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
Liberté, égal........
La connexion réseau a été interrompue.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I saw an unofficial poll on theL'Express web site yesterday where only 25% were for this, nearly 1/2 were against, and the others were either undecided or apathetic. So that's a 2-1 margin in favour of those against this law. However admittedly there is a self-selection bias in the poll.
It's no secret that the interent is a huge threat against the government control people!!!They trying to shut off the people thats what the evil politicians are doing with this crap shit!
What's next? The French version of Tiananmen Square?
France censorship is ponderous man, ponderous.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.