Slashdot Mirror
UK Wants ISPs To Be Responsible For Third Party Content Online
An anonymous reader writes "A key UK government minister, Ed Vaizey (Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries), has ominously proposed that internet service providers should introduce a new Mediation Service that would allow them the freedom to censor third party content on the Internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint. Vaizey anticipates that Internet users could use the 'service' to request that any material deemed to be 'inaccurate' (good luck with that) or privacy infringing is removed. No doubt any genuine complaints would probably get lost in a sea of abuse by commercial firms trying to attack freedom of speech and expression."
You need to think of this from the child's point of view! We are doing this to protect THEM!
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Why would we worry about this facilitating attacks on free speech? It is one in itself. Allowing random third parties to censor speech is not free speech. Better is to allow the ISPs at their option to pull content they believe their customers posted in bad faith, which responsible ISPs did with regularity in the US before doing so made them responsible when they missed a case of it. ISPs don't want to be known for hosting BS sites, but several governments have made it easier to take all hands off user content than to enforce reasonable terms of service with meaningful thought and constraint. The US is among those, and I'd bet the UK is as well.
All sites promoting religion are inaccurate, many government sites are inaccurate and Mr Vaizey himself makes assertions which would be widely deemed as inaccurate.
This is inaccurate, nobody with any "talent" is going to perform for a moron like Mr Vaizey. I demand this inaccurate blog posting be removed at once!
We're sorry, but this comment contained inaccurate information which suggested that Ed Vaizey's new plan for the Internet was flawed. It has been removed for your safety. Have a nice day.
Isn't the Third Party in the UK the Liberals? And aren't they part of the governing coalition these days...
first to go should the political party/politician websites, tweets, face book pages!
Then all the advertising sites...
Then the trolls and astroturfers
I'm liking this law better all the time!
can we require the ISPs protect everyone from making stupid purchases online? Or hey how about requiring the ISPs to increase the average intelligence online? After all, all we have to do is demand it, right? They have to figure out how to comply. /sarcasm
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
???
Oh that's right, Voltaire was french - the UK government has never really liked any ideas that came from across the channel.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
I am reminded of the world of Farenheit 451 and the plethora of Sci-Fi books and movies in which the Nazis won World War II. The free world is shackled with fascism on every level, censorship is enforced with capital punishment, and the secret police are in your head.
If truth really is stranger than fiction I can see Germany invading England again in the future to free the world of a great threat against freedom. In the end it will be like D-Day, but in reverse with a coalition of forces eating buttery croissants before leaving Normandy for the shores of England.
I can see it now:
Caller:
"...and yes what they are doing to that kitty cat is cruel! I mean the mean people don't even let the kitty know its a laser pointer dot and I just about cried after it ran into the wall!"
Support:
"Ma'am I know exactly how you feel as we get 'some' of these terrible reports every day. Unfortunately, however, we have already sent the data down the tubes and it could be any number of sub-tubes. I'll put a work order to have the tubes checked out but I cannot make any promises as they've been really clogged as of late."
Caller:
"Thanks!"
If this system is actually implemented I expect rampant abuse with comical results. (grabs popcorn...)
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Ok, despite the fact that the UK like the USA is being run and held captive by complete morons with only self-enrichment at all costs in mind, this is 1 guy. One guy does not equal the whole of the UK.
Entice the citizens to rat on each other for the benefit of the State?
. It's all there. A means by which a LEGITIMATE concern over SPECIFIC kinds of information is removed after a REGULATED PROCESS between parties. He's talking about asking the Daily Mail to remove that story where they accidentally labelled you a paedophile. Or that other one where your address is listed as the local supermarket. Or that other one where someone has posted a sample of the text messages you sent your wife. Or maybe even those pictures you forwarded to your entire address book accidentally.
This is a good thing. Aren't we always harping on about Facebook/Google deliberatly violating our privacy? This guy is suggesting a mechanism whereby that kind of privacy violation can be limited, and everyone immediatly leaps to censorship hysteria.
Don't forget competition.
Schools like this Singapore school which claims that its "genuine" parents are "distressed" by the internet and they needed to do something about it. So they have engaged lawyers, of course paid for by the parents themselves without their consent (or manufactured consent).
Read at Techdirt: Indian School in Singapore sues parent for anonymous comments on his blog
I have been following this for a while. The most recent censorship attempt takes the form of a request to the CERT of India government to ban blogs in Singapore, Malaysia and India:
Techgoss story: Indian school asks CERT to ban three blogs in three countries
View the blogs before they are vaporized ! Archive them at your risk of course !
Blogs under censorship attack: Blog 1, from Singapore which is a "Parents Forum/Blog",
Blog 2, from Malaysia which is a "GIIS Malaysia Parents" blog, and
Blog 3, from India which is a "RSK Parents Forum" blog.
I am sure the school will argue that private education in India needs such drastic measures !
Seriously folks, if we TERMINATED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE anything which even vaguely tries to be rampantly abusive of our privacy and general freedoms on the internet the world would be a better place. People would STOP AND THINK before they showed how completely deficient their thinking has become.
At some point you need to call for the ROFLCOPTER and wait for the sanity-police to come to the rescue.
Kill it before it grows, nuke it from space. Cancel his internet subscription, fire him from his portfolio, he's a complete and utter muppet and obviously has trouble tying his own shoes in the morning.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Oh yeah, and when I say "TERMINATE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE" I mean that should be done to "thoughts, ideas, words, suggestions and recommendations" -> I do not mean we should do that to "people".
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
It seems to be lawmakers do not know what the Internet is. They need to understand that Internet does not actually exist, at least in the way they think.
It's one big dumb unified end-to-end communication network. What people think of as "Internet" such things like search engines, web sites and other forms content, are services provided by machines and real people who manage them on the other end of some tenous abstract link through a math address space. The internet itself is a pipe with no walls. It has no spacial volume - no memory, anything that falters in the tubes, after a while vanishes, never reaching it's destination.
Lawmakersm, please by all means make laws to go after those who do wrong, go after the actual criminals and their equipment.
But do not attack infrastructure, it's absurd.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Please extend this to the phone companies and the postal service.
And yes, that was sarcasm.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Oh yeah, and when I say "TERMINATE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE" I mean that should be done to "thoughts, ideas, words, suggestions and recommendations" -> I do not mean we should do that to "people".
We weren't discussing abortion so WTF else would "kill it before it grows" refer to, if not ideas and such?
BTW the moment smart and wise people outnumber easily deceived yet cocksure idiots, that will be the moment I convert to a pro-life stance on abortion.
Make HIM responsible and liable for all the "inaccurate data", fraud, copyright infringement, user comments and so forth... then maybe after a short while he'll have a better grasp of what the **** he's proposing.
- CN
Or just get everyone to install Web of Trust where the content is supplied by the user not some ISP or secret government agency. Kiddies, if it is red do not go there.
Seems like the parent was trying to find a way to deal with meaning manglers. It's getting so that you can't say anything poetically any more because if there is any ambiguity whatsoever in what you say, people will assume you meant whatever the most loathsome interpretation of it is, and proceed to marginalize you or justify something stupid over it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And phone companies will agree to be responsible for the content of phone calls, too.
Good luck with that.
Wow. 10 years or so into the 21st century, and the Earth is still covered in a uniform 100 foot layer of bullshit. It's never going to end, is it?
So what do all these politicians have to hide that they need the power to censor "speech" on the Internet. Or are they just preparing the way for when their kids get into power so they will have an easier time or perhaps bury the history of their actions because as u know, history will not be kind to these old crufts.
Society use your Sciences
a sea of abuse by commercial firms trying to attack freedom of speech and expression.
Given what goes on in other spheres, it's more likely NGOs trying to attack freedom of speech and expression
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
any material deemed to be 'inaccurate' (good luck with that) or privacy infringing is removed.
I guess that means they'll have to block everything from News Limited then. No loss.
Bitter and proud of it.
From TFA
.....at least to attempt to give consumers some opportunity to have a dialogue with internet companies, as they would be able to do if a newspaper had inadvertently published that information.
Another minister blabbing BS about stuff he doesn't know. You Lord of morons, ISPs don't publish anything on Internet, they just provide access to what is already out there. What you are suggesting is comparable, to a micro level, to asking the postman give you each and every newspaper printed in the world that day, while first opening and reading all of them to see if they don't have anything printed in them that you deem wrong.
ISPs can outsource this job to China. They already have decades of experience and this allows the ISPs to lay blame on the next customer service call.
Could we use this to complain about advertising that is in any way inaccurate?
http://www.erotik-hikayeler.net
The people want freedom, and the government wants control of the people. Nothing new here. Its the same old struggle.
They fear what you may reveal about them and others.
Didn't these guys get elected on the promise of LESS censorship and LESS civil liberties violations?
The only thing they have done so far on that score is to cancel the planned national ID card (and they only did that because it was costing so much money, not because they cared about civil liberties)
Is there ANYONE we can vote for in western countries like Australia, New Zealand, EU countries, US etc that will actually do something about giving people back the civil liberties they lost in the 10 years or so since some idiots crashed a couple of planes into some skyscrapers?
Is there ANYONE we can vote for that will do something GOOD when it comes to IP law and not just listen to the big end of town
So the first websites British ISP's will be asked to censor are:
www.direct.gov.uk
www.parliament.uk
www.fco.gov.uk
www.number10.gov.uk
Did I miss any important British websites responsible for spreading bullshit?
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
please enter this into config file:
us3r=1d10t
Britain is already the country to go to for libel suits; they want to cement this position by getting a monopoly on on-demand censorship. China may have a more powerful censorship system, but it's centrally run and not available to international customers.
Given the nature of the internet, this will not be an issue as long as it is counterbalanced by another country establishing itself as a forerunner on online freedom.
It's a debate. They're discussing the nature of internet privacy. Here's why this is a good idea; here's why it's a bad idea.
By talking openly and by being willing to say something stupid, they can avoid putting the stupid stuff in the actual legislation.
Actually, he is talking about a mediation service - censorship is neither directly quoted or implied.
A Mediation service simply means that if you find someone publishing content on the web you do not want them to, you can write to the ISP, who will forward the complaint to the site owner. in that respect it is quite useful that the privacy of the site owner is actually maintained.
Most responsible site owners already have a contact address to receive any complaints - and if the site does it is likely the ISP's 'mediation service' will simply tell the plaintiff to email the site master first.
In terms of ISPs censoring information - they already do that. Every ISP product comes with terms and conditions and it is possible right now to complain to an ISP about content online, and they may well remove it if it breaks those terms and conditions (a big one is not using your connection to incite racial hatred) without needing to provide a re-mediation service.
ISPs are not in the business of cutting people off their networks. Every user they cut off loses the business of that user and all potential business from that user refusing to recommend them. Since the 20% of users using 80% of the bandwidth are the same 20% of the users who give advice to 80% of the population when choosing an ISP: the ISPs are more than happy to allow their extra traffic.
I live in a post communist country. Well, I have seen communists, their methods..My grand father told me once: Remember, the real comunists will come from west.
And with time passing I see what he meant.
Freedom to censor.
That's a new one.
Sent from my CR-48
Real hacking is getting into a system and getting out without leaving a trace, but, there are thousands of script kiddies and screwed up want-to-be hackers who are out there defacing websites, destroying the credit of and/or stealing from people whose opinions they oppose. This ignorant and offensive UK Minister is just doing the same thing all these "pseudo hackers" are doing. Attacks on freedom of speech will never stop. Between the fascist pseudo hackers, the fascist politicians, the fascist religious leaders and every other fascist whose ideology is based in logic fallacies (If it's on FOX news it can't be true! If the Guardian publishes it, it can't be true!) I believe the majority of people have come to the conclusion that Speech is only be free when it supports their demented ideology. Besides, the UK never really has had free speech, except on the internet. Is it any surprise the gov wants to shut that down?
I see this in connection with net-neutrality.
Every carrier interested in privileging traffic depending on content has to look into content - and is therefore not unaware of the content.
Therefore the responsibility for blocking transport of illegal content may rest on his shoulders.
When politicians start feeling like they need to kick back to their contributors, this sort of law seems like an easy win. They get told comparisons like the ISP is the get-away driver at a robbery, thrown the usual completely unverified "billions of dollars" figures about how much it "costs" and suddenly it sounds like a no brainer.
What to do to curb this sort of idiocy? Easy. Don't campaign against them passing it. Campaign hard to make sure the language isn't specific to ISPs and the digital world.
Suddenly when someone grabs a purse and runs down the sidewalk, the victim can sue the government.
When a bank is robbed, even before the police have suspects the bank can sue the government because the crooks drove away on a public road.
If you get slugged in a bar, sue! The other fellow must have walked on public sidewalks, drove on public roads or took the public tubes to get his thuggish arse there right?
One month of barking at the moon equals a lifetime of preventive advocacy.
Great Britain and Northern Ireland
I wonder if Tor coders could find some way to give more protection to people running it as exit nodes. I've used it a lot, the lack of exit nodes seems to be a big problem. Would it be possible to have multiple exit nodes access servers simultaneously, server logs record source IP from many places, and distibute and obfuscate the legal responsibility, reducing it?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
There goes 95% of Slashdot articles then.
Or heck, 95% of the Internet come to that...
Screw the legislation, just build a big red button into Firefox that means "I never want to see this site again" and it blocks it permanently on the user's profile. This does the exact same thing except it protects everyone else from the stupidity of that individual and also stupid legislation. Not only that, but suddenly, Firefox becomes the UK's dominant browser.
Twinstiq, game news
They can attempt to justify it all they want, but it - like all of the other laws like it - are a direct attack on Free Speech.
Fortunately, in the US we have the Second Amendment which adds the only guarantee to our Constitutionally Protected Freedoms - without it the others aren't worth the paper they are written on...
Of course, for maximum protection from the internet, at least at home, just call your ISP and cancel the service.
Then leash your child to the house, but build a high fence so he/she can't see out and the predators [which are everywhere] can't see in.
Finally, release him/her once they reach the age of 18, knowing you have done everything you could to prepare them for the world.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Ed Vaizey (Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries) "freedom to censor third party content on the internet, without court intervention, in response to little more than a public complaint" Does anyone else detect a little George Orwellian Newspeak in here?
... is if you wake up to find that your country has installed a "Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries."
No good can come of that :)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Id like to formally file a complaint against the domain bbc.com. I find all their content offensive and demeaning to humanity. I expect the domain to be taken off line by week end.