Slashdot Mirror
British Porn-Censoring MP Has Website Defaced With Porn
twoheadedboy writes "Claire Perry MP, who has been the main driver of the UK government's plans for default blocking of pornography, has had her website plastered in porn by hackers. But the story only just begins there. Notable blogger Guido Fawkes, otherwise known as Paul Staines, posted on the matter, only to later be accused of sponsoring the hacking himself. During some back and forth over Twitter, it appeared Perry was 'confused,' as she said Fawkes had posted a link to the defaced page, when he had only shown a screenshot of the site. Given the backlash against the government's plans to censor porn and its technical fallacies, the event could be particularly embarrassing for Perry. She is not commenting on the matter, whilst Staines has threatened to sue unless Perry offers a retraction of her claim he had anything to do with the hack."
The tweet: 'Apologies to anyone affected by the hacking of my website sponsored by @GuidoFawkes – proves so clearly what we are dealing with.' Someone needs a lesson about hypertext.
...haven't a fucking clue.
Film at 11.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I was just commenting to a Scottish friend of mine who is a firm supporter of anti-pornography pushes that no matter how good the intentions may be of the politicians who back this kind of thing, inevitably they show their technological incompetence by believing such efforts will not either fall so short as to be worthless or overreach to the point where they have to be disabled to perform even day-to-day tasks.
Ms. Perry has just demonstrated this same technical illiteracy to an extent I couldn't have hoped yesterday to be able to argue as a point without being accused of hyperbole.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Soooo..
What exactly is the problem this legislation is trying to solve? I have seen all sorts of weird stuff on the internet in my years (plus had a few friends that *loved* to send me really wacky things) and yet, somehow, I ended up not being some sort of crazy deviant. But wait - One in a hundred thousand million will be! We must protect the children by censoring half of the internet for the entire nation's population!
Hacking is bad. Censoring the internet for the entire population of your country? Much, much, MUCH worse.
Reminding ourselves that they don't know what they're messing with may make us feel better, but I worry it makes threats like these seem less dangerous. They still can break things we hold dear. Moreso if they have no idea what they're doing. It's like telling yourself a kid doesn't know how to use your laptop: that's the problem, they can throw it on the floor and piss on it. Furthermore, the fact that they are ignorant isn't what's troubling. If they knew EXACTLY what they were doing with CISPA or ACTA, that doesn't really make much difference.
So lets not bother laughing about how they think of the internet as a series of tubes. The internet is not a god, it may route around censorship and damage, but that doesn't mean it's all going to be okay. And how dare they fucking think they have the right to censor anyway. Ignorance doesn't excuse it. You brits ought to bring back the stocks for politicians who try to trample on your rights. Throw porn and rotten tomatoes in their actual faces. And broken glass.
If they knew EXACTLY what they were doing with CISPA or ACTA
Politicians generally can't find their ass with both hands but they don't need to; you can be quite sure that their handlers know exactly what's going on.
Agreed.
"Only cowards use censorship."
Unless the UK is prepared to start doing deep packet inspection and blocking VPNs, external proxies, anonymizing networks and the like, all this is going to be is either some pathetic cookie-based on/off flag or nearly as pathetic DNS block. It will be totally useless, fuck up other chunks of the Internet, and those with the capacity to read a two or three paragraph faq will happily be viewing their porn in a minute. Yes, it will inconvenience some, it will also create a false sense of security, and Cameron gets to go to his shrill and reactionary base and go "see, now the kiddies can't see the titties!"
Do you think anyone in Australia who wants to to view things the Australian government is afraid of can't get it running in a couple of minutes? These things are a joke, unless, as I said, Western governments want to start building China and Iran -like Great Firewalls.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The British ISPs have been telling the UK government for years now, through all the iterations of this "we must block x to save the children" nonsense that it is unworkable. The politicians by now are perfectly well aware how futile this is, but there are always a certain class of voters who will cast their ballot for Canute based upon the notion that he can stop the tides.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Cameron gets to go to his shrill and reactionary base and go "see, now the kiddies can't see the titties!"
Wait until he learns about breast feeding 8-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
When you don't understand how something works, you can't understand the difference between a fix that's easy and effective, and a fix that's very hard and won't be effective.
Example: Somebody who knows nothing about cars can say "Cars keep going above the speed limit. Can you make it so that cars made in future won't go over 70mph?" and be told "Sure, that's not hard, we can do that." They can then say "Cars get used as getaway vehicles in a lot of bank robberies. Can you make it so that cars made in future won't work when used by bank robberies?" and they'll get told "No, that would be impossible, and anything we tried would be either ineffective, prevent legitimate uses, or both."
Most everyone knows enough about cars to understand why you get a different answer to those two questions. But somebody who's completely ignorant doesn't see any difference.
So it goes with the internet. "Can you filter out emails that contain curse words?" gets a "Yes, easy", so the clueless think it should be no different when they ask "Can you filter out web content that has porn in it?"
I've said before and I'll say again: It should be made mandatory that no politician can pass laws on any subject until they've proved a reasonable level of understanding of it.
And if that makes life hard for them, good: It's about time they had to do something to justify their exhorbitantly high pay.
So.. it has come to this