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?
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.
"... 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.
There's nothing to stop non-British websites from being rated by a UK body, and blocked by British ISPs if necessary; they already block non-UK pirate sites for example. They could easily set criteria such as revenue or visitors per day, so sites with say more than 500 visitors per day, or sites with a certain amount of traffic per day would need to be rated, or whatever.
That's not to say the whole idea isn't incredibly dumb and impractical, but there's no technical barrier to those parts, other than scale. The bottleneck would be actually doing the rating, which would be pretty much impossible unless you're talking an incredibly small subset of websites.
Oh no... it's the future.
The medium is the message
Ummm.... this horse has already bolted.
The Internet is built on porn. Nothing she can possibly do will change that.
"There are two sound ways to ensure that children are not exposed to dangerous or disturbing content," she argued....
I think there might actually be a third option: Take responsibility, be a parent.
No sig today...
not surprisingly, it didnt work.
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
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
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
I think there might actually be a third option: Take responsibility, be a parent.
Here's how the British public would respond to that...
... 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.
I have three grown children who grew up in an internet connected house. I never used a filtering system of any kind. Do you know how much of a problem I had with them accessing content they shouldn't have? None. Zero. I suppose parents actually have it a little harder now that 9 year olds have smartphones, but not much.
(Ok, there was that one time when my son was about 10 and and found a naked she-hulk drawing while searching for superhero pictures. We all thought it was pretty funny, but if you want to count that as a "problem', then have fun.)
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
There are over 1 billion websites on the world wide web today.
Presumably she understands quite well how it works. After all, if every bit of content has to be 'rated' before publication (same as with movies), and assuming there will be a large, slow, and expensive burocracy to perform this rating (with all sorts of forms to be filled in, no doubt), it will put a certain end to anyone voicing his opinion outside of large, rich organisations. And that, I suspect, is not an accident but very much the whole point of the exercise.
Poor Brits. After succesfully escaping the totalitarian clutches of the EU, they get this kind of asshole as a potential future leader...
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.
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.
It wouldn't reduce commercial time, just variety. You'd see the same two commercials 12 times each per hour.
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
She is a Christian and feels she has to force her dubious morality and beliefs on everyone else. She opposed same sex marriage on the grounds that Christians "own" it and everyone else can have a civil partnership.
Naturally, she feels shame over internet porn and wants to make sure other people feel it too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nit pick: The UK (and the republic of Ireland) isn't part of Schengen, unless you mean the next PM is so bad at negotiating with the EU that she joins Schengen by accident, which would be fucking hilarious!
Other than that, I think you're spot on. We'll leave the EU and fuck our economy up (even further) while we negotiate to get back to the position we were in.
I think there might actually be a third option: Take responsibility, be a parent.
... leading to some rather unrealistic expectations and standards. It's not exactly a documentary...
As opposed to the realistic expectations set by movies, television commercials, and other mass media? Teach your children to use their brains. The rest will take care of itself.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Age ratings for all the pages? Sure, the Internet is just a black box with a red led on top, amirite?
Poor Brits. After succesfully escaping the totalitarian clutches of the EU, they get this kind of asshole as a potential future leader...
Any one with any sense knew the EU were the ones holding back this tory authoritarian nightmare.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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]
but there's no technical barrier to those parts, other than scale
Ask the Chinese about their experiences in suppressing "subversive" content. Joe-Ping Random-Lee out on the street will probably be able to give you 5 different types of VPNs, proxies, or other ways to circumvent the Great Firewall.
Yet another example of the idiots in The U.K. trying to force their ridiculous standards on everyone. It's up to parents, not politicians. I'm glad they're taking their stupid shit out of the EU.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
"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...
I don't think she even understands what she is proposing.
Leadsom is proposing a Brinternexit.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
Seconded, also the French will not accept TTIP and will block the EU from adopting it. The Tories are crawling over each other to be first to join it with no conditions asked so long as they get good directorships after graduating from being MPs.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
maybe they ought to block/censor religious web sites.
Obviously there are not enough people with any sense. The average person is a moron more often that not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
How Tony Blair has the hubris to appear in public after the Chilcot inquiry (finally) concluded everything about the Iraq war was bollocks is beyond me. The man helped completely fuck over an entire country and still believes he did the right thing.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
"Mr APK, welcome back...
"We missed you..."
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
I think there might actually be a third option: Take responsibility, be a parent.
Sure, whatever. Just realize that your kid will have friends and the chance of all their parents being tech-savvy enough to block porn is slim to none.
Sheesh. The derp is strong in this one.
Who said anything about blocking anything or trying to hide anything?
"Being a parent" means preparing your children for the world. The real world. The one real people live in.
If that world is full of porn then let them see it (but also tell them it's mostly about as realistic as any other fantasy movie).
No sig today...
[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.
... Teach your children to use their brains. ...
Are you kidding me?!?!?!?
Actually having the population use their brains would totally undermine politics as we know it. Do you have any idea how much chaos would happen if people actually started thinking critically instead of reacting emotionally? What would our demagogues^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h statesmen do for a living?
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.)
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.
This is a person who according to Ken Clarke, didn't really want to leave the EU any more than Boris did... basically, these type of people say one thing in order that the party will like them, they can get power, but then do something completely different.
The *only* reason website ratings and "think of the children" narratives are being mentioned now is simply to appeal to the people who may select her. And that's all.
It's entirely self-serving.
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.
For instance those owned by someone like Rupert Murdoch who has a LOT of influence with the Tory party.
It's a stupid idea that would break the internet if actually implemented but Rupert Murdoch has pushed a few of those in the past. He likes government mandated barriers of entry, it cuts down on competition from those who are not so close to government.
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!
Issues like this just further convince me that humans are just animals who happen to be slightly smarter than the other animals on this planet, and as such are incapable of being rational or logical. The obvious answer to this 'problem' (such as it is) is that PARENTS need to police what their own offspring are or are not doing with the Internet, and if they are incapable or unwilling to do so, then any consequences of that are on them, not on any government, not on any website, and certainly not a burden to be borne by the rest of the citizens of their country. But of course expecting animals to be accountable and responsible is asking way too much so of course we all have to endure pants-on-head stupid nonsense like this.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
so of course we all have to endure pants-on-head stupid nonsense like this.
Is that British pants or American pants?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?