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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."
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.
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>
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.
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.
She could use him to perfect her dwarf tossing skills...