Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Seeking To Expand Scope of 'Voluntary' Website Blocking
An anonymous reader writes "The UK Internet Watch Foundation, which already works with most consumer broadband ISPs to block websites that contain child sexual abuse content, could soon see its 'voluntary' remit extended to include internet sites that contain 'violent and unlawful' content."
This is exactly why we should not allow internet censorship at all; the more sites are already censored the easier it is to add another one to the list.
... and just route all their traffic through China? DNS, traffic, all of it. The system is all set up and running, waiting for them to join.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
That is a surprisingly rational way to refer to child pornography: it both describes the real problem (that children are being abused) and excludes things like "sexting" (at least as a descriptive term it does; I am not a UK citizen and I cannot comment on whether the government there considers a teenager taking a nude self-portrait to be "sexual abuse").
Palm trees and 8
Please fight this bullshit to its death.
If you guy want to catch up with us chinese.
Next it will include content that "paints the government or government officials in a bad light."
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Become a customer an ISP that does not have a relationship with IWF. AAISP is one... there are others.
before everyone cries censorship, i think it's worth pointing out that everyone here reading this is likely to be a rational thinker, e.g. of a certain minimum level of psychological complexity.
do you all realize this is a specific developmental level? a level which, even in the developed world only perhaps 60 or 70% of adults reach? and outside the developed world, far fewer?
an attribute of this particular developmental level is a capacity to internally generate ethical judgement. in other words, rational thinkers do not need to be "protected" and are better served by being given free access to information and encouraged to make their own mind up.
not so for people below this developmental level, who may easily be swayed into unethical behaviour through emotional arguments. a society which does not make some effort to shield such people from content which might cause them to behave in antisocial ways is heading for trouble.
of course - an ideal solution would manage this without censoring those people in society capable of independent, critical thinking.
but considering that any society consists of humans at a variety of developmental levels is fairly important for looking at this in a rational and big picture way. at very least, developmental psychology should alert us to the fact this is a complex problem with no easy solutions and certainly no panacea solution.
If this angers you then join the Open Rights Group (the UK equivalent of the EEF).
Government is founded on and defined by the principle of coercion: it is the organization holding the special right to employ coercion as its business model. No other organization can hold this special right; otherwise Coercion is the essence and key tool of every government; otherwise it wouldn't be government.
Where government is present, voluntary association is not. Calling anything having to do with government "voluntary" is nothing but a blatant lie -- everything government does must be either a direct threat of coercion or an implied threat of coercion, by the very definition of government.
Because there are a lot of fictional works and movie depictions of Rape, Murder, Robbery and other "violent and unlawful" stuff. Movie trailers and excerpts of books are often online at studio and store sites. I think they call it advertising.
Nice one! :-) But I think a far better solution is to protect society from 'underdeveloped' people by locking them up.. I mean, what the hell.. If we're going to delve into the absurd here, may as well go all the way
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
If we accept this argument, we must then accept that these people cannot be relied upon to participate properly in a democratic system without supervision, and it's a short step from there to disenfranchising the whole lot of them altogether.
May the Maths Be with you!
Unlawful = not pro-Israel/zionist
The Internet Watch Foundation’s “Crapland” child-friendly Internet theme park has gone bust after only three days.
An information board at the entrance depicts the classical painting Smell The Glove by Scorpionaggio (courtesy National Portrait Gallery) and welcomes the visitor on a “flight of the imagination, travelling down the magical pathways that teenagers have used to get their porn for centuries,” and which have been specially opened up for the lucky children invited to come. “Just like Michael Jackson’s Neverland.”
Advertisements promised a “Clean Kiddie-Friendly World Hollywood Special FXs, Blind Faith plane ride, Nevermind swimming baths, Houses of the Holy rock climbing & much more!”
The reality when it opened on Saturday evening was somewhat less impressive. Spurious 404s, lying customer service staff (“for the authentic Internet experience!”), HTML 2.0 and web searches through AltaVista. “It looked like a website from 1995 or a paper chart of what it should look like,” said customer Jimmy Wales. “It was like they’d stacked dial-up modems on both sides of a path together, stuck some printouts on a TV and stuck a keyboard in front. We were waiting two hours and they charged us £10 for a photo with Mary Whitehouse.”
Two curtain-twitchers and a Whitehouse were attacked by irate Internet users. A posting on 4chan showed a busybody having a fag behind the grotto.
Then, on Tuesday evening, Crapland closed. A statement by the management said this was due to “intentional organised crowd manipulation and event sabotage and unscrupulous and inaccurate negative bias media that quoted our words accurately in full.” A woman dressed as a particularly hefty Pepperpot stood outside shrieking: “The IWF’s dead. Go home.”
Cable internet users who unwittingly signed up for the Crapland experience are giving up and getting DSL broadband instead. “It’s been a complete Virgin killer.”
http://rocknerd.co.uk
these people already aren't "participate properly in a democratic system without supervision" in the sense that they are making irrational, emotional judgements which are being fashioned (or "manipulated" if you like to look at it more cynically) by those in society who are in positions of power and influence.
and guess who the powerful people are? by and large, the rational people, the critical thinkers. developmental level is a very big factor regarding how likely we are to occupy a position of power and influence in society.
example - the bosses of some companies are quite direct about telling their staff which political party they are "supposed" to vote for.
so actually - i am just shedding light on how it's ALREADY working in a sense. just trying to add an extra dimension in to our meaning-making, that of cultural evolution and individual levels of psychological development.
do we believe in evolution? do we believe in the science of developmental psychology? then why not make use these ways of knowings to make things work a bit better!
The biggest issue I have with the IWF is that they don't even display a blocking message. Their firewall software just returns a fake error message. They are effectively filtering UK internet without anyone knowing. Most people have no idea who the IWF are or realise that most UK internet connections are censored.
The three largest ISPs in the UK (90% of all internet users) all hijack your DNS NXDOMAIN responses by default, eg you are opted in without asking
see.
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Virgin+media+DNS+hijack
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Talk+Talk+DNS+hijack
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=BT+DNS+hijack
none of it by explicit consent (like "yes i pay you to sell my privacy and out of the deal i get nothing of any value")
its not the politicians you want to be afraid of, its these so called "entrepreneurs" who are desperate enough to think selling your own customers data to anyone who pays them is perfectly acceptable business and secure practice, and wont cost businesses time and money (he still doesnt know why his DNS is screwed, he had to work around it).
get root or even DOS 62.6.40.178 & 92.242.132.15 (the middleman marketing companies servers) and their neighbours and you have 10million+ BT users DNS settings, its such a dumb idea that one of those sociopaths on "the apprentice" could of invented it
jerks
before everyone cries censorship, i think it's worth pointing out that everyone here reading this is likely to be a rational thinker,
I would dispute that premise. For example I have read many posts here that support religious views. Then again they may have all been trolls...
60 or 70% of adults reach?
That number sounds too high, however it may just be my confirmation bias kicking in. Do you have anything to support those numbers?
Great idea. Why don't we give them a 2 and a 1/2 party system with a biased media and plenty of entertainment. They will never know.
You like this http://tinyurl.com/4yn3fuq
WTF is 'Violent and unlawful content'?????? Are they going to ban you tube now, how about the 9-11 plane crashes - 3000 die, that's pretty violent and unlawful!! Actually I think it's distasteful watching people die and gaining entertainment from it, but the line is too hard to draw between that and safety videos and newsworthy videos.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
i think it's worth pointing out that everyone here reading this is likely to be a rational thinker,
I would dispute that premise. For example I have read many posts here that support religious views.
Okay, everybody but you. Is that better?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Its certainly more precise, I'm not convinced its better though.
Well??
This is major b.s. they should be THANKFUL when some dumbass posts such content on the web so they can use it to track down the originating perpetrators of the ACTUAL CRIME and arrest them.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Indeed, why stop there.. you can next also block any site that 'promotes immorality' or 'encourages civil disobediance'. And while at it, why not have a 'make your neighborhood safer' website where you can post the names of 'troublemakers' and politically inconvenient types.. Hey.. why not dispense with websites altogether, and just incarcerate anyone who might commit a crime in the future....
Censor this Hit me, Beat Me, Suck me, Fuck me.