Slashdot Mirror
Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom Thinks Websites Should Be Rated Like Films (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes a report fro The Register: The UK's possible future prime minister thinks all websites should be classified with minimum age ratings, just like films. Andrea Leadsom is one of two candidates left in the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party; the winner of which will become the country's Prime Minister. Although many are concerned with the authoritarian stance taken by her rival, Theresa May, Leadsom's views on many topics -- including the internet -- have come under scrutiny following her unexpected success in the leadership election. Key among those is Leadsom's apparent belief that the best solution to troublesome content on the internet is to have film-rating organization the British Board of Film Classification rate all websites, and have any unrated websites blocked by ISPs. [Writing in the New Statesman back in 2012, she focused, initially, on the need to protect children. "There are two sound ways to ensure that children are not exposed to dangerous or disturbing content," she argued. "At the level of Internet Service Provider, individual sites can be blocked 'at source' by ISPs [...] The other way is with a move away from the standard '.co.uk' and '.com' top level domains (TLDs) for more explicit content, to separate entirely inappropriate sections of the web."] She argues: "Outside of cyberspace, we have bodies such as Ofcom and the British Board of Film Classification that continually work to ensure our children are not exposed to the wrong things. This could be implemented in some way online, whereby a website would have to have its content 'rated' before being accessible online. While it sounds like a massive leap, the majority of new websites already go through testing when they are hosted to make sure that a site is intact and that files and content are free of viruses. This would simply be adding another check to the list, and in reality it is a burden already carried by film-makers."
How about rating Prime Ministers like films? Wouldn't that help even more?
So anyone wanting to host its blog at home would have to apply for a rating ? Does she understand how the Internet works ? What about the parts that aren't in the UK ?
Some commercials have more sexual or violent content than even some adults would prefer to see. It would be great if commercials adhered to the same ratings standards as movies and tv shows, with cable boxes and tvs blocking any ratings undesirable to the owner. (Side benefit: users set allowed ratings to 'G' and instantly receive 90% fewer commercials.)
Please forgive me if I decide I don't want the government to determine what is appropriate or inappropriate for my children and then enforcing it. I think the rating idea doesn't hold water, but I wouldn't be terribly offended if they decided to rate as many websites as they like. In fact, like movie ratings I would take it under advisement. However, I certainly wouldn't want them blocking the content based on their decision to rate or not rate. I am the sole authority in deciding what is right for my children. The government gets no say in it beyond an advisory role.
For those not familiar with what is happening in the UK at the moment, we are about to get a totally unelected leader.
Our Prime Minister resigned after the Brexit vote. Most of the Brexit supporters went to ground too, there was some backstabbing worthy of Shakespeare, and now it's down to two candidates to replace him.
Only members of the ruling party get a vote on who it is. The general electorate has no say, and this new ruler can stay in power for at least another four years unless something unpredicted happens.
The choice is between Theresa May, an authoritarian bigot who is openly racist and wants repeal our human rights, and this woman who is a religious fruitcake and, for good measure, also bigot. She lied during the Brexit campaign and lied her CV.
At least with Trump and Clinton you get to vote.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Films only need to be rated if they're in theaters and even then they're not rated by the film's producer but rather by the MPAA, which isn't a free service. Home videos, as an example, pretty much never receive MPAA ratings.
If you require websites get rated by an independent third party you make it a lot more expensive to launch a website. So much so that unless you're in it for the money it probably wouldn't be cost effective to actually do it. I mean, if they wanted to create a search engine that only shows sites that have been rated, that'd be one thing, but to expect the whole of the internet to be rated is naive
And what happens if the content of the site changes? Does every wikipedia editor need to pay $100 to have their addition of a semi-colon reviewed by this hypothetical MPAA-like agency?
So... let's make a website forum based on a Disney cartoon, targeted to children. It receives a "G" rating (probably something different in the UK). There are insufficient moderators to manually read every comment before posting. One day a naughty person posts some potty-mouth words, which are then seen and repeated by innocent children visiting the site, before a moderator is available to remove the offensive post. What's the rating now?
I know it's a very specific example, but the underlying problem is that websites change constantly, sometimes by visitors.
Also, who pays whom to rate every website for the UK? This sounds very unfeasible.
No, the prime minister is wrong and websites should never be rated, never!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
You'd think the 'A' at the and of 'MPAA" would be a clue, but nooooooo....
No sig today...
I tried to submit my home videos to the MPAA for rating, but they just ignored me. Apparently, they didn't take seriously a three-hour documentary about a man who dresses up his penis like action figures.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well I am an American so the US ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R) are the only ratings I'm really familiar with. Are you suggesting it works differently in different countries? I would expect in every country that ratings are done by an independent third party because the idea of people rating themselves seems laughable. I mean, if people could rate their own movies, then why not have every porn movie be self-rated to the equivalent of G? Ratings are meaningless if they're done by yourself.
Why would anyone without knowledge and experience in the particular field should be permitted anywhere close to making such decisions. Proposals like this of hers are too dangerous even to consider them in the first place and show that she has no freaking idea how the internet works.
I firmly believe that anyone who wishes to become a politician and vote in a particular field should undergo a formal application process. For example one like this:
1. Education and knowledge verification. (Scope: Education)
2. Psychological evaluation. (Scope: Removing extremists from the pool of candidates)
3. Writing a paper on 'Why do I want to become a politician?' (Scope: Motivation)
4. Dumping all the successful candidates who have got this far somewhere in the middle of an Amazon jungle with food and water rations lasting 3 days to teach them how to work together and not against each other. (Scope: Teamwork)
Due to the nature of test 4, failed applicants are not given any additional attempts.
Whoever gets past, gets the jobs.
"... the majority of new websites already go through testing when they are hosted to make sure that a site is intact and that files and content are free of viruses."
I did not know this about websites and I, for one, will sleep much easier tonight knowing that the majority of websites have been tested to be free of STDs.
Thanks, Andrea!
I knew I needed to stop reading Slashdot and finish my PhD when I started to miss articles by Bennett Haselton.
The medium is the message
Theresa May is the odds on favorite but it's interesting that she was in the remain side of Brexit. Wasn't the whole point of this was to find a new leader among the leave Brexit side? I still think she'll trigger Article 50 but end result will be almost nothing will change. Schengen area, free movement of trade, nearly all the EU regulations will apply in the UK. Only thing that'll change is that UK won't have any representation in the EU while still paying the exact same amount of money in to it.
David Cameron will be remembered in the same breath as Neville Chamberlin and deservedly so. Don't worry Tony Blair at least you can show you face in public.
not surprisingly, it didnt work.
If you require that I rate my speech or have my speech rated before I can publish it, that is censorship.
If rating Web sites is a good idea, then why not rate books too? This is a long overdue initiative, which would put the UK right up at the top of the Fahrenheit 451 Censorship League. Of course there are some practical drawbacks, such as the unlikelihood that any government flunkey or private contractor would be willing to read the whole of any book. But it would be very amusing (not to say revealing) to see a list of books that Andrea Leadsom would consider dangerous.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Seriously, I have an immediate visceral reaction to any politician that tries to play up the 'think of the children' angle, especially conjunction with technology. Such people inevitably have a poor relationship with technology.
...how about you randomly police movie theatres to see how well that whole "rated-R" system is actually enforced.
...how about you randomly police music stores to see how well that whole "explicit lyrics" system is actually enforced.
...how about your randomly police people's homes and see how well that whole "mature" rating is actually enforced.
The nightly news these days is practically a form of visual terrorism when thrown in front of children, and there's no ratings or warning system in place to keep them from showing the latest violent viral video to anyone and everyone that will help their ratings.
I could go on here, but I think you see my point. Ratings are not the problem. We have plenty of that those failed systems everywhere. Enforcement IS the issue, so before you want to set out on yet another moral and ethical mission to tame the wild e-West in order to "protect the children", wake the fuck up.
"There are two sound ways to ensure that children are not exposed to dangerous or disturbing content,"
Yep: mothers and fathers. Not, however, big brother.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
There is one problem with the proposal. The film ratings are entirely voluntary and done by the content producers, you can still buy unrated movies (typically lower quality but Netflix is full of them). There are various ratings for sites ranging from decided by church ladies to voluntary web rings. Google kind of has a filter that's fully automated but it's still possible to get around it. Censoring content never works, even regional filters are being circumvented both in and out of the U.K. (BBC IPlayer and Netflix respectively)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Fuck this rating system shit.
1 doomed from the get go (most ISPs will not slit their throats)
2 Dynamic content anyone??
3 way too easy to Misrate something
4 GoodThink anyone??
5 wanna start riots?? this would be a good way
They don't want to debate the big issues which they don't have a clue how to solve. So they raise shit this to distract the population so they don't focus on the import issues. I refuse to believe out politicians are that stupid.
Parental supervision.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Wannabe Prime Minister.... Wow what a title, no hate at all expressed XD
They are already, porn sites have a tag on them to flag them as adult content. Web censoring companies ALREADY rate websites.
The problem isn't that the websites aren't classified, it's that the Tories optional 'web-filter' isn't used by Britains, they are given the option to have a filtered web and they reject it. So both her and Theresa May are dreaming up ways of forcing the censorship onto Britains, in different approaches.
Andrea Leadsom is the slightly less insane of the two, the other one, Theresa May, is pushing the digital economy bill which makes it a crime for a website to display porn to a child, but that requires every porn site know identity information for every visiting Brit, which is an insane privacy violation.
Theresa's also the one with GCHQ behind her, she pushed their mass surveillance law through the first vote, and has insisted that every British person be tracked and logged and have their internet browsing inspected without warrant.
... the word, "blocked," jumped out at me, so tl;dr, but, "NO!"
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
As this will affect the UK only, who cares? ;)
Thank god for Brexit
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.
Ads rob bandwidth/speed, security (malvertising), privacy (tracking) + anonymity.
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively. Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)
Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads w/ firewalls.
Avg. webpage = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... & ads = 40% of the size.
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "I've seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )
There are over 1 billion websites on the world wide web today.
Their loss!
I think an optional website file, like the robots.txt file, that web browsers would read optionally could be useful. Add it to html5 spec. Those sites that choose to support can.
Again optionally. Better self monitoring than letting government get too involved.
Maybe it's about time the UK just added * to the blocklist...
While there are so many things wrong with, I can't overstate how it would affect sites with user submitted content. Every website would have to be moderated and not like remove objectionable content but cannot post until moderated.
Wanna attack like a website, keep posting graphic content to it. If the site has has a moderation team, this provides a simple method for a DOS attack by oveloading the moderation system. Also since the moderation cannot be automated, all you need is a access to some IPs(depends on size of moderation team and assuming the site blocks an IP whenever it finds graphic content originating from this IP), bonus you also have generated complaints from users without static IPs who now cannot post anything. Running a blog with comments? Don't have a day job or sleep
And if you depend on removing content after submission, good luck on keeping your rating. Sites like Slashdot that don't usually remove content are fucked .
Put some code like "PG", "All", "Adult" on the site not age. There are too many disparate and country specific age issues all over the place. Age restricted in one country is perfectly permissible in another country. Use Codes not age.
Having ratings applied by a secret cadre hasn't made them all that meaningful either. "Rated PG due to scenes of minor peril." What the fuck does that mean? Is that really useful for information for deciding if you should watch "Ice Age" with your 6 year old? Is the mild peril in "Ice Age" slightly less mild or more perilous than the G-rated "The Lion King"?
PS: I can remember (barely) when movies didn't have ratings. Shocking, right? Oh, and when ratings were new, people understood they were guidelines that had little real meaning. My father took me to see at least one R rated film before I was 10, the only lasting impact of which was an appreciation for the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
I have the impression that most of the time when people say they want to protect children from being exposed to something, what they really want is to protect themselves from having to answer questions that make them uncomfortable.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Movies typically do not change much after creation
Movies are not hosted in countries outside of your legislative reach
Who does the rating? Who pays?
Parents should parent, not rely on a nanny government, which cannot ever correctly choose what is right for a child
Silence is a state of mime.
So the choices boil down to either an authoritarian whackjob who has a fucking hard-on for mass survellience, or this clueless moron who wants to block websites that haven't been rated?
The UK is fucked...
You never voted for David Cameron in the first instance. You voted for your local member.
Actually this is technically true for the US as well - they do not actually vote for Trump to Clinton they vote for someone who will go to Washington and cast a vote to select Trump or Clinton as the US president....which could lead to some interesting events if they change their mind after being elected.
Things like SafeSurf and PICS were supposed to rate the web. They failed. If people want their content filtered it's not hard to find services that will do it. And that should be precisely what happens in the UK too. It should not be hard to pass legislation to require ISPs to ASK explicitly yes or no does someone want filtering during sign up and provide online controls so they can toggle this setting at any point thereafter.
No, she's not stupid. She knows her constituency. They will vote for her because this resonates with them, the likelihood is she doesn't give a damn about the issue. Look at her 'motherhood' newspaper interview and faux outrage... Bread and Circus.
Yeah, I know: wannabe president Clinton wanted to build a fence, until her political handlers told her that it would play better with some of her voters to change her story.
She seems to be very confused... she compares it to virus scanning, for example. So perhaps she thinks we can invent an AI to judge the site. Personally, if I invented such an AI is charge serious money for it, and use that to build a mansion to put my Nobel prize in, but still...
I don't think she even understands what she is proposing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Age ratings for all the pages? Sure, the Internet is just a black box with a red led on top, amirite?
Remember that she's over 50, so grew up before the Internet was endemic. As a result she doesn't have an instinctive understanding of how it works. She therefore parrots the phrases that she thinks make sense, whilst the kids who grow up with it merely giggle at their elders ignorance.
[I'm in my 50s myself, but as an IT professional, I can claim to be an internet colonist, even if not a resident]
What a useless, stupid cunt she is!
The useless bitch should get lost and stay lost!
"Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom Thinks Websites Should Be Rated Like Films"
Translation:
"Wannabe Prime Minister Andrea Leadsom Is A Gormless Wanker"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
How do you manage the scenes with multiple characters, like the marriage scene where 'Stumpy' and 'Midge' tie the knot?
I don't think she even understands what she is proposing.
Leadsom is proposing a Brinternexit.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
There's two assholes. One asshole just changed the tune from diarrhea to normal shit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yMmG5p0Ll8
And as far as tech education, and the attentiveness to actually listen to her tech advisors, goes; Hilary has proved enough in that aspect as well when she blew all the farts she did after the Paris Attacks in regards to encryption.
maybe they ought to block/censor religious web sites.
Just rate websites like video games.
E for Everyone
*online experience may vary
"There are two sound ways to ensure that children are not exposed to dangerous or disturbing content,"
Incorrect, there is a third. Also the 2 proposed ways are not as effective and halfhearted. I propose we just poke the kids eyes out, that way we can be absolutely sure they do not see porn, and Mrs Leadsom can then sleep peacefully.
[Sir Galahad the Chaste is watching the Castle Anthrax Scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when an Internet Ratings Board warning pops up on his screen]
Ratings Board: We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril.
Sir Galahad: I don't think I was.
Ratings Board: Yes, you were. You were in terrible peril.
Sir Galahad: Look, let me go back in there and face the peril.
Ratings Board: No, it's too perilous.
Sir Galahad: Look, it's my duty as a knight to sample as much peril as I can.
Ratings Board: No, we've got to find the Holy Grail. Come on.
Sir Galahad: Oh, let me have just a little bit of peril?
Ratings Board: No. It's unhealthy.
Sir Galahad: I bet you're gay.
Ratings Board: Am not.
She thinks gay people shouldn't be allowed to get married thanks to her particular kind of Christianity, a brand which, however, apparently does not preclude a bunch of toffs from dressing up and tally-hoing around the countryside, hoping for a pack of dogs to rip a fox to shreds - because she wants to have a vote on fox hunting to give people a chance to bring it back.
On point one, her name is an anagram of "some dread anal."
And now she's a) suggested that being a parent makes her a better choice than her rival, who is not a parent and then b) has had the gall to bitch that the journalist who asked her the question dared to publish her on-the-record answer.
TL;DR: she can fuck right off.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A useless step like this will just cripple or kill the web hosting business in the UK.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
What rating would the prime minister candidate give this website? How about if the company that provides ads to be displayed on that page accidentally or "accidentally" slipped an ad for a pornographic website into the list of ads to be displayed? Would that change the candidate's rating? How about if a random commenter had posted a section of an ultraviolent story filled with graphic depiction of torture, murder, and cannibalism?
Tell you what, Ms. Leadsom. I'll name a website, and if you can rate all the pages on it for the next seven days and have the general population agree with 50% of your ratings at the end of the week, let's go ahead with your plan. I name the website Reddit, including all its subreddits. Your time starts now. Good luck, and may whatever deities you believe in (if any) have mercy on your soul (if you have one.)
U, PG, 12A, 15, 18. Amusing warnings of things like 'mild peril' (and other less silly things) also appear in the British system, done by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification). There is also a Restricted 18 rating which defines where you can buy or watch those.
CGI and green screen.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm not a parent so I've never looked into this, but every time I hear someone like this woman ranting about ratings. This could be solved a lot differently if we added something to HTML specifications. A meta tag be it. A company who feels their website is safe for children could add the meta tag to their website that says it is for purposes of this conversation "GA", "PG", "R", "X". Mandate that any site that displays pornography rate their site. The browsers then have parental controls added that basically say this browser can only access certain material if a password is entered. If a site fails to put the tag it is treated as X by default.
It would be the responsibility of the parents to make sure the access controls were configured properly on their children's devices.
Google could then when it does searches get this setting from the browser and only return content with the correct tags.
No external rating board needed.
It would be a constitutional crisis, I feel certain of that.
In a representative democracy, the power of the monarchy would be acceptable under certain emergency situations. However it would have to be something like "the elected government isn't reachable and we have a great need for some central organization and direction. There's a monarch here who is used to the halls of power and is reachable. OK, that will do in a pinch."
The Brexit simply doesn't rise to those levels. The whole thing was and is voluntary, there was a referendum for goodness' sake. Taking action on the vote will take months or years and it will all be orderly and organized. There's no emergency here at all.
It would assign a stars rating and a big red percentage of good reviews number to each rated site. Underneath would be a list of links to authoritative reviews in publications like the Greater Southeast Duluth Shopping Cart Advertiser, plus many counterparts in random foreign villages. In the spirit of adventure, about half the links clicked on would lead to comically snarky 404 pages.
I don't understand the objection people have to rating websites in principle. Afterall - a rating based on whatever benchmarks is just semantic metadata which should be included on all websites. As to the details - I'd make the website owner rate their own site - right away most porn sites would be correctly rated with just a a couple of lines of code. Then I'd make it possible for people to tell their isp to automatically block non-rated sites, and whatever rated sites they like. For websites that lie about their rating (a G-rated porn site for example), I'd threaten to block them entirely. I can't see why an opt-in process like this would be objectionable. And why all this bother? As a tech guy with kids, I really feel it is almost impossible to stop them accessing stuff I don't want them to access. I don't want them seeing beheadings, and I don't want them seeing most of the obnoxious porn out there. I do all I can at home, but then some kid at school shares a video of the sorts of violence that a child would historically only see in worn torn countries? I think that's a problem worth addressing.
So it's not product labeling, it's censorship. Let's look at it from the other side: Why would any web-site pay for government approval? So a few million Brits can download the latest Windows security updates. Yeah, let's see what happens to Great Britain when that doesn't happen. (fewer Win 10 installs?)
Even if web-sites were willing to pay the publishing fee, there are billions of web-pages, so the UK government can't read them all. There will have to some automated scraper to detect naughty words like 'sextant' and 'masticate'. Besides false positives, there's plenty of history on what happens with censorship programs/regimes.
That's why you idiots are being lead to believe democracy is bad.
It's well known that democracy is bad but Churchill explained it best: "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
While there's no "standard rating system", pretty much any site that is not appropriate for kids have either on its rules or on the main page a warning that its not for minors.
Of course, this might be just a censorship move that both the old conservatives and new libs want, while the old libs and new conservatives dont.
There are people that wish that the internet were like pay per view and subscription TV channels
If there was a way to do it, you could safely bet that Teresa May would be pushing for it
Turkey 1923.
Your other point about going backwards makes sense though.
Here's a clip, the line occurs at about the 2:20 mark
Help! I'm being repressed!
You can be jailed for speech the government doesn't approve of so this is a logical extension. The problem isn't her Christianity per se, it is the lack of a Bill of Rights for English subjects preventing them from becoming free citizens.
If this law passes, I can see it already:
- Porn sites decide to move to SSL/TLS.
- 16 year old "children" keep watching porn.
- Politicians "denounce" that people are circumventing the system, and Jesus is unhappy.
- Crypto gets the blame! Child molesters are using cryptography to expose our kids to porn!
- Crypto is evil! Let's ban crypto, or "control" it better.