Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't Plans To Censor "Extremist" Websites Via Orders To ISPs
Not content with blacklisting certain kinds of pornography, writes an anonymous reader, according to this news from The Guardian, "The UK government is to order broadband companies to block extremist websites and empower a specialist unit to identify and report content deemed too dangerous for online publication. The crime and security minister, James Brokenshire, said on Wednesday that measures for censoring extremist content would be announced shortly. The initiative is likely to be controversial, with broadband companies already warning that freedom of speech could be compromised."
n/t
When Terrorism is 'Any action that is intended to influence the government', what is extremism? Any idea that the current sitting government doesn't like?
There was once another group of people that went out of their way to censor information their people received, to hide atrocities committed in their name and smash an idea that didn't fit the party line.
As I recall, at one stage, the UK did quite a bit to stop them.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
Historically, far and away the most dangerous information a web site can host is the idea it's good, necessary, and proper for a government to have the power to censor.
That's just based on a silly metric called megadeaths, though.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Maybe they should block the government's web site.
Its almost like they WANT an uprising on their hands...
Imagine the frustration of today's governments. They imprison us en masse, they torture us, they let the 1% rape the 90%, they basically piss away the rights we took back from the old-world monarchies as fast as they can...
And we just sit around and take it. "Oh well", we say, "at least they keep me safe from dying of something slightly less likely than choking to death on a goldfish".
Can you see how unsatisfied our leaders must feel at that level of rolling over by those they seek to oppress? "Stop hitting yourself in the face", the bully says, and here we stand around actually hitting ourselves in the face over, and over, and over. Takes all the fun out of it!
Who the fuck writes a text spamming bot in 2013 and then has a fixed size text buffer???
... whatever
One man's extremism is another man's passion for truth and the rights of the people.
What do the 9% remainder do? Watch? Bloody pervs!
"The more you tighten your grip... the more bits will simply slip through your fingers."
Seriously though, censorship? "1984" was a warning, NOT A BLOODY GUIDEBOOK!
The UK Gov't has its head up its ass.
The United States of America was founded by armed political extremists.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It is true that exposure to truth tends to radicalize people. I say again that no government wants the population to have freedom in communications. People who think a lot can be difficult to control. Secrecy is a form of conspiracy in and of itself. Hiding truth tends to maintain social customs. And people can be manipulated simply by hiding the truth. Right now we have a lot of issues with terrorists from the Arab nations. Apparently they have some dream of bring back the caliphate. But how many of these Arabs are even aware that the caliphate was Ottoman and that Arabs were not particularly respected nor valued by the Turks who controlled the caliphate. For an Arab to dream of the joy of living under the caliphate is roughly equivalent to a German Jew dreaming of the good old days when the Reich was in total control of Germany.
er, that's why they are getting ISPs to block the routes to the sites, rather than taking the sites down.
They already forced ISPs to do it for child porn, then the courts enforced blocks on "pirate" sites because the child porn filters proved that it was technically possible, next step (previously announced, due to come in soon) they are forcing every UK ISP to implement porn (_legal_ porn) filters.
And now it's "block stuff that isn't porn/child-porn/illegal-under-copyright-law, but we don't like it anyway". No surprise.
Might be time stockpile some paper copies of the anarchists cookbook - could start to go up in value faster than bitcoins...
freedom of speech is a total fiction anyway...there is a plethora of restrictions on free speech, not the least being having to be careful of what you say in social settings as to not alienate yourself from whatever group your are trying to gain favor in.
Congratulations, you just confused freedom of speech with freedom from consequences. Speech is an action, actions have reactions, we can call them consequences. Those consequences are limited by the same rules of society as all other consequences, that is, nobody is ever entitled to break the law because of something someone said and thus you are theoretically protected from violent reprisal for expression of your opinion. In practice, the state operates no enterprise engaged in your protection; it operates through reprisal, not ensurance of safety.
I will defend (perhaps to the death, perhaps not) your right to say whatever you want, but also my right to feel however I want about it. Indeed, I will defend my right to my own opinion more strenuously than your right to express yours.
Both rights are critical to a free society.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To be fair, "freedom of speech" does not imply freedom from consequences of said speech, nor should it.
This is a slippery slope, and I've been assured here on many occasions that slippery slopes are a logical fallacy.
Heavy on the hyperbole are we? And "today's governments" is mostly the US government. Our incarceration rate is 1/10th of the US. We don't have a Gitmo. The 1% is getting richer but with the march of technology the TVs are getting bigger, the smartphones smarter so I can't see any real decline in living standard even though the gap is widening. As for rights, go back to the pre-Internet days and see how much they controlled the mass media back then. They're still trying to put Internet back in the bag, for all the attempts at trying I'd say in most ways we're freer in the 2010s than the 1980s, though there might have been a wild west gap in between. Granted, there's not much progress being made but the trend isn't horribly bad either.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In 1985 Margaret Thatcher gave a speech to the American Bar Association in which she said "we must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend". This led to a ban on broadcast of utterances by republican politicians supportive of the Provisional IRA, which in turn led to the absurd situation of news programmes showing video of politicians such as Gerry Adams speaking but with the audio replaced by an actor's voice.
It only drew attention to the extremist's cause, as will be the case here.
pi = 2*|arg(God)|
So in 10 years time, you will again be able to carry the entire content of the "Internet" on a 3.5" floppy-disk.
Seriously - I will make my sites available as onion-sites before new-year.
the wayback machine shows this as very incorrect. i did, however, manage to find a taliban.com site from 1998, which told of a move to http://ummah.net/taliban/ - which by 2000, had again moved to http://www.afghan-ie.com/ - by the 21st of april 2001, this was down as well.
Nonsense. The frog died sometime last century.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169254&cid=14107454
And the punchline is we're still surprised every time the ratchet turns tighter. Every. Fucking. Time.