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."
Stop kidding yourself, there is nothing dangerous or offensive on the internet.
Stop kidding yourself, and show your kids some Goatse or Zippocat. That said, the "dangerous or offensive" nature does not come from the internet, and is by no means exclusive to it.
For example, when I was 6, I was told there was an invisible man in the sky who drowned all the puppies in the world (except two), and that this was a good thing.
I may disagree with the veracity of your attribution, but I will defend to mild inconvenience your right to repeat a famous misquotation.
Voltaire didn't actually say that.
"The most oft-cited Voltaire quotation is apocryphal. He is incorrectly credited with writing, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” These were not his words, but rather those of Evelyn Beatrice Hall, written under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre in her 1906 biographical book The Friends of Voltaire."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire#cite_ref-18
Pfft! I would like to see them TRY to invade England. Our mighty fleet of a handful of obsolescent fighting ships will easily fend off the invaders for the 60 years or so necessary for us to build up our power generating capacity to allow us to make steel (once we have rebuilt the steelworks) and buy back the industrial machinery we sold off abroad that we need to build that steel into tanks and ships (once we retrain all the brighter media studies graduates so they can add up and use a lathe). And it will be simple to flatten the flimsy chipboard houses (that replaced the factories) to make space for factories (and the rail network that got torn up and thrown away).
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.