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Munich, The Censors' Convention
A number of articles have appeared in the online press about Munich. Half of them are just rehashes of press releases - nothing very useful there. Some of them are fairly in-depth (we think CNET and the NY Times had the best coverage), but none of them really give you the big picture. We're going to try to. Let us know how we do.
The first thing that the press is missing is that there are (well, were) two meetings in Munich, not one. The first is the one you heard about: a meeting called by the Bertelsmann Foundation, part of the huge Bertelsmann publishing empire, which sponsored the Internet Content Summit. They're getting together to have a little feel-good session about "self-regulation" of internet content. By self-regulation they don't mean that end-users regulate their own behavior; they mean that ISPs regulate users instead of government doing so directly. Users will still be regulated, of course. And the regulation will be driven by what the national government wants. It's just that government will lay their heavy hands upon the ISPs, and the ISPs will act as the enforcers rather than law enforcement. Think of it as a distributed system - government assumes the role of a second-line rather than first-line manager. At a previous internet content summit, this type of regulation was described as "soft law" versus "hard law", and we think that's a good way to think about it. They are not talking about voluntary, individual actions of corporations - they are talking about imposing laws and restraints on the citizenry through another means. Self-regulation = soft law, but law nonetheless.
The first meeting is interesting for a number of reasons, but not terribly ominous - the people meeting were not previously working together, and all that will come out of it is thoughts and ideas. The second meeting is rather more dangerous.
The second meeting, scheduled in conjunction with the first, was of the principals of INCORE, Internet Content Rating for Europe. This group consists of a number of European corporations and protect-the-children groups and their sole goal is to establish a single rating system for use across Europe (they're also coordinating with Australia). Of course, the members of this group overlap significantly with the first - for example, Jens Waltermann, director of the Bertelsmann Foundation and sponsor of the first meeting, is also one of the prime movers in INCORE - which ought to tell you why the Bertelsmann conference is so slanted towards ratings systems as the sole means of protecting the children.
But why is this going forward? As at least one slashdot poster pointed out in the discussions of last week's article, rating systems have been discussed before, and haven't come to anything yet.
What happened is the government (the European Commission, in this case) decided to get serious. They buckled down, and at the end of 1998, allocated funds to be spent on the development of a global rating system. About $11 million is allocated to be spent on developing this system, so the corporate participants can be reasonably assured of being reimbursed for all their plane fares and hotel costs. (Question: if it's so voluntary, how come the government is paying people to develop it?)
The European Commission's plan runs from January 1999 to December 2002, four years. 1999 is scheduled for development and meetings. 2000 is scheduled for rollout and beta testing. 2001 and 2002 are allocated for the encouragement process and tweaking - making sure everyone is toeing the line. There's plenty of time allocated because it's important to make sure that the resulting rating system aligns with national laws - for instance, since Germany outlaws hate speech, one of the rating categories will involve hate speech, and Germany will outlaw the transmission of any content rated in this category into the country. Laws can be "hung" off the rating categories, if they're set up properly.
The rating system will be based off the American Recreational Software Advisory Council's system, that they originally developed for video games and then, when threatened by Congress with the CDA, transformed for internet content. (The funny thing is, for the first year that RSACi was being promoted for use on webpages, it still had all the original references to video games. Pretty sad.) RSAC was recently folded into the Internet Content Rating Association, basically so they can revamp the RSACi system and submit it to the European Commission for approval and funding. Who is the chairman of ICRA's board of directors? Jens Waltermann again. Are you beginning to see a pattern?
Civil liberties groups world-wide have finally recognized the threat that government-mandated rating systems pose to the internet. The ACLU was the first major group to speak out against them, in their 1997 paper Fahrenheit 451.2: Is Cyberspace Burning?. But for this Munich conference, the chorus was loud and close to unanimous - the Global Internet Liberty Coalition condemned it, the ACLU condemned it, Electronic Frontiers Australia condemned it, Internet Freedom (UK civil liberties group) condemned it.
Several civil liberties groups managed to wrangle themselves invitations to the conference. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is attending and distributing a book free of charge to all participants (besides the attack on free speech, EPIC is irritated because the European Commission has also recommended that online anonymity be strictly prohibited for all European Union residents - after all, if they're anonymous, it's harder to make them obey the law). Nadine Strossen of the ACLU published the statement she's making to the Conference, harshly opposing the labeling requirements; even Esther Dyson, a tremendous supporter of rating systems, expressed her unease at the slant of the conference.
Strossen's comments above neatly summarize the civil liberties community's objections to so-called self-rating systems, and we urge all readers to take a look at that link above. She makes several points:
- Self-Rating Schemes Will Cause Controversial Speech To Be Censored
- Self-Rating Is Burdensome, Unwieldy, and Costly
- Conversation Can't Be Rated
- Self-Ratings Will Only Encourage, Not Prevent, Government Regulation
- Self-Ratings Schemes Will Turn the Internet into a Homogenized Medium Dominated by Commercial Speakers
Strossen is far more eloquent than we are, and she makes the points extremely well. Take a look, it's worth your time.
But back to the conference. The main document to come out of the conference is their Memorandum on Self-Regulation (538K), released yesterday. A number of "internet experts" contributed to the report - mostly these same people we've been seeing, representatives of the companies that want the Net to be kid-friendly (increase profits!) and protect-the-children groups from throughout Europe, and representatives from various governmental agencies. They lay out their censorship proposal in some detail. The basics are laid out in a single phrase: "Content providers worldwide must be mobilized to label their content...".
Prepare to get mobilized.
"It is in the best interest of industry," they say, to take the steps necessary to "enhance consumer confidence" and meet "business objectives." The suits invited must all have nodded their heads to this one: if only they could get the obnoxious people off the net, then all the soccer moms and grandpas would feel safe enough to fire up a browser and finally type in their credit card numbers.
So, problem: naughty stuff on the net. Answer? Open source! <spit>
On p. 59 of the 60-page memo is a neat diagram that looks almost like an API to a multi-layer code library. Except in this case, the bottom slice is the underlying technology of censorship (PICS), and the top slice is the user's experience of censorship (at the browser).
Sitting on top of PICS is Layer 1, in which the content creators - that's you, me, and everyone else who makes anything public on the internet - label our data with a "basic vocabulary" of keywords. If we write porn, we call it porn. Simple enough so far?
Next comes Layer 2, which is where the fun stuff starts to happen. Here, third parties can invent "template profiles." These combine the keywords in interesting ways. The idea is that in one country, the ratings systems will typically rate porn as bad but violence as OK; in another, perhaps the opposite; someone else will invent a profile for use in schools that blocks everything noneducational; a profile for your company's router might block all sports but let profanity through; a national profile for Australia might block all sex but let stupid political grandstanding through; and so on.
These template profiles should be, according to Bertelsmann, "open source."
How are they going to do this? They can't rely on a NetNanny or SurfWatch to rate the net: censorware has been a dismal failure in practice, the software just doesn't work because there's too much of the net and too few censorware employees to evaluate it all.
What they need instead is for you, the author, to do their work for them. Remember that "basic vocabulary" of keywords? It turns out you're not just going to pick porn vs. non-porn. Oh no. After all, you have to provide enough information for the profiles to work with.
That means you're going to be rating everything you publish according to:
"e.g.: gratuitous violence,
frontal nudity,
explicit sexual acts,
crude language,
vulgar language,
sports,
extreme hate speech,
arts,
aggressive violence,
death to humans,
medicine,
non-explicit sexual acts,
strong language,
history, ..."
E.g.? E.g.!? There's more?
Well, there has to be more. In fact, Bertelsmann has only scratched the surface. In order for there to be enough "template profiles" to be worth mentioning, the variety of keywords has to be extreme.
Be ready to run down a checklist for everything you write and decide whether it contains gratuitous or non-gratuitous violence, explicit or non-explicit sex acts. Please rate from 1 to 10 how much art and history was in that last post of yours. Don't think you'll have a choice about doing it - your ISP will be enforcing it upon you, as a condition of service.
And the "template profiles" that are provided for the end user? These profiles are just simple sets that group the predefined keywords together. If I'm the CEO of NetSitterPatrol, I group keywords 1, 3, 5, and 12 together and call it "NetSitterPatrol Profile."
And if I'm a national government that's cracking down on porn, violence, hate speech, or vulgar language (your government wouldn't do anything like that, would it?), I'll just add the keywords for indecency, abortion information, hate speech, racism, or whatever else I want to censor, and give the list to the backbone providers in my country to filter out and protect the delicate citizens. Hey look, I'm an open source programmer!
by Michael Sims and Jamie McCarthy
What can an insigificant Internet peon with no connections, such as myself, do to stop this? I agree with the thrust of the essay; this is horrible.
From an anarchistic point of view, anything that trains large numbers of people to distrust the government and evade its rules can only be good. If this law goes into effect, it won't stop "bad" information from being distributed - it will only hasten the collapse of governments worldwide as people wake up and realize that they've sold their freedom for some minor conveniences.
I will never ever rate my homepage. As simple as that.
Interestingly, letting the educational system go to pot (as we've done here in the USA) serves both corporate and government interests. Corporate interests, because the educational system produces a lot of dumb, gullible consumers. Government interests, because an ignorant electorate is easy to manipulate.
Basically, I think it's by design that public education in this country is so terrible.
The Puritans did it, the Mormans did it. I envision something in the leiu of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand when the movers just got fed up with the way things were being run and dealing with the system, so they went off to live amongst themselves.
This won't work. It's silly. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't address the problem. The web is merely one service on the internet, yes, delegated port 80. If we simply create a new service on port 8081, say, and call it httpe, and it is otherwise identical, what have we solved? And who uses which? If everyone just switches over to httpe, it's the same deal. If only "porn" people and "bad" content gets sent there, it's the same filtering/rating problem! Simply renaming it makes no diff. Go away.
You go to prison. Misrating is illegal, Consumer.
The USA broke the British Empire (they wanted access to the consumers).
They created their own ("spheres of interest" anybody?), they just refuse to police it, because then they'd have to give up the cocaine.
Are government sites then required to register in .safe? How about educational and research sites? Sites about abortion and birth control? Are those "safe" for kids under 18? Guns.. guns are protected by the 2nd ammendment.. can we not teach kids about the Bill of Rights anymore?
The British govenment tends to rather like the ability to censor stuff, the official secrets act can be (and is) used to cover almost eveything they do. Also, given that somebody has just been convicted of running a porn site, even though it was on a US server, I think our use of the veto is VERY unlikley.
You use a combined system - you use existing internet connections so you can still see the 'real' internet, and then you form local uncensored-internet-exchanges for localised data distribution and internet tunneling to link all the various sites up.
Use the 10.0.0.0 set of IP numbers for this network, and allocate them all as a mini-internet. Since regular internet users not on the lan won't be able to be routed to 10.0.0.0 addresses it should be safe, and you just make sure everyone who gets access to the uncensored is a legal adult.
Given there are already anonymising proxy caches (in effect) on the internet they could be provided as a second level for end users who want access but less hassle (ie. they use a secure web proxy cache to access the freefromcensorship net web pages if they don't want to make the effort to do tunneling for the whole shebang).
Would be pretty inefficient IMO to be tunneling all this data, but cable modems/ADSL etc is coming available just in time.
If anyone has ever read the Otherland books by Tad Williams, I kind of envision the Treehouse (or whatever the place is called, its been quite a while since I've read them) being born of something like this... (though I kind of thought their occupants were a bit script-kiddyish).
How about some sort of simple, low-powered radio transmitter/receiver plugged into your computer? Like a packet radio, but with emphasis on internet-like applications utilizing radio waves.("radio Free Earth?" :)
:)
With enough of those things concentrated on one area you could easily build a network of transmitters and receivers. It would be suitable for urban and metropolitan areas, ie. lots of people.
The small costs, if any, of sending a radio broadcast and the freedom would probably make up for the lack of high transmission speeds. Implement encryption stuff above the transmission layer to prevent eavesdroppers, and so on.
Or, if your friend lives in the next apartment (on the same window level) build an optical link using a laser and so on, creating an interbuilding network system.
Guerrilla networking...
Slowly I see our small world of computers and it's network, the internet being turned from the free and open forum that it is into a commercial, government (aka big bisiness) wasteland. People don't care about freedom, or about their privacy, or corruption and all the other bad things that plague our world. They want nice frilly bitmaps and talking paper clips and the latest 'kewl stuff.'
There don't even seem to be any 'good guys' anymore, I had hope for the E.U. but it seems to be becoming just like the USA. Even in my country protesters and reporters have been treated in anti free speech ways over the last couple of days.
Why oh why does no one care except the people who can do nothing?
>Other countries with a history of terrorist acts on their soil have also outlawed anonymity (England and >Germany), but Italy and Norway allow it.
...
I think you're wrong about Germany there. Law enforcement officials here have been complaining frequently about problems with anonymous signup users (AOL free 50h accounts etc). Though you are supposed to enter correct information in the signup procedure, there is no law that says "you are not allowed to stay anonymous". Of course ISPs have to take the new 'telecommunications law' into account that demands easy access to the ISP's log data. But on the other hand, there are Internet Cafes and projects like terminals in railway stations that usually grant absolutely anonymous use.
Sure, you could not do business as an "Anonymizing ISP" here, but you could probably not do that anywhere.
The new call-by-call ISPs (run by telephone companies) are in fact a new source of anonymity. Most of them have a pretty slipshod way of generating and keeping log information. If someone is to be prosecuted, the logs could already be passed on to the Deutsche Telekom, the ex-monopolist that still owns the local networks and erased at the ISP itself, and so on.
In practice, they have big problems tracking even the dumbest script kiddies that were already reported to the police.
I think that anonymity isn't more legal or illegal here than anywhere else.
Just remember anon.penet.fi
nj@realworld.de
That's a great idea, however porn isn't the main issue. It's just one of them. We'll also need a .FSO (free speach online) domain and a .NCE (non corporate endorsed) domain. Or we could all just figure out a way to hassle those responsible until they leave things the way they are. mcrandello@my-deja.com
The Civil Service love censorship. The way I see it is this, the British can sign up to any document the commission comes up with, any backlash at home can be directed at the EU, and the Govenment gets bronwie points with the EU as well.
I know at this point that we are not yet talking about legislation. But we will be, if things continue; now is the time for action.
There are three things you cannot do:
1. You cannot allow this legislation to pass and then try to get around it with technology. If you develop a new protocol to sidestep censorship (even one that does not involve computers, like the printing press) then the government will eventually ban that protocol. Even if they cannot prove you are using it for (e.g.) porn, they will be able to prove you are sidestepping censorship, and that will be enough. (They'll ask, "What would you want to bypass censorship for?")
(In fact, the censorship of the internet is an example of this: the U.S. government started censoring the media in the early 20th century, then the Internet was invented, and it gets around that censorship. So, government action occurs. Why has it been so slow and clumsy? Because of technical incompetence and popular opposition. Both reasons are vanishing fast.)
2. You cannot allow this to pass and just say that it is inevitable. That's all that Hitler-type dictators want of you. They aren't depending on your enthusiastic support, they are depending on your indifference. You've got to state your opposition. (Ayn Rand said it first.)
3. You cannot compromise with these people. Censorship must be opposed at the root. When a thief breaks into your home, should you "compromise" and let him take half of what he would have taken? No, you oppose him at the root, at the idea that he has any right to your property, which he has not earned. The root of censorship is the idea that individual rights have to be traded off against the "public good." (Ayn Rand has more to say about this.)
So read Ayn Rand and write op-eds, write letters to the editor, write your legislator! Post on Slashdot!
--An Ayn-onymous Coward
While you guys are all knocking down this method of regulating the internet, you suggest nothing that could be used to protect the young from pornography and violence on the internet.
If you guys don't come up with some good solution, you will have one forced upon you. You may not like the idea of internet control, but I think you are in the minority, and putting your heads in the sand will get you nowhere.
Restricting pornography or violence on the internet hardly qualifies for the Farenheit 451 or the 1984 scenarios you portray. Ones right to express ones views are not limited by this kind of regulation.
That sounds good but wouldn't that just be the next thing to be regulated? I mean, here in the US you just can't get ahold of an FM transmitter and start broadcasting without being shut down in short order (unless noone knows about it at all, which kind of defeats the purpose.) I have a feeling that if folks went around and set up all this equipment to work around one set of regulations then they would just make it illegal to do so. Call me crazy but it just seems like we would be running at that point. On the other hand if it does become reality then that may be a good option... McRANdello
> Now, this a certified Very Bad Thing (tm),
> since German publishers are notoriously
> conservative and stuck-up.
Which one of your seven asses did you pull this one out of? So, in your view, which country's publishers are particularly liberal and humble?
> If you are German, don't flame me, I have
> very good German friends that I respect and
> care about -- thank you very much
Oh, where have we heard that one before? I'm not racist, I have lots of black friends. God, you're transparent!
Basically, yet another xenophobic troll on the loose. I guess this chap would be much more relieved if Ted Turner were behind this, and if it took place in Atlanta: hey, he's bad, and Atlanta might be the bedrock of sleazy Baptism, but at least it's all happening in America. And we know that deep down--despite all outward appearances--all Americans are basically good!
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Chattanoog, TN
haha gotta love that
As a parent of two young children, I certainly do not want my kids to be exposed to a lot of stuff on the Internet. So what's my solution?
I don't let them use the Internet. (The oldest is only 5, so she's too young, anyway.)
When they become old enough, I will let them use the Internet, but only under my supervision or that of an adult I trust. Also, I certainly would not allow young children to watch television unsupervised, given the amount of garbage on TV.
However, these decisions are mine as a parent. I do not want governments making decisions for me.
In my opinion, parents who do not regulate what their children are exposed to are negligent. They shouldn't push their parental responsibility onto governments.
Another comment posted about taked about the parent's duty to be parents. I completely agree. If a parent doesn't make clear what morals he or she expects from their children then things like Littleton will happen, continuously. The much touted "teenage years" where kids relentlessly rebel against all forms of authority is not a bad thing, a product of degenerate kids. It is a necessary testing of the morals and example that their parents have showed them. How else are they going to find out what is true? Socrates - "The unexamined life is not worth living."
This leads me to two points.
1). Those parents who care (more than I think we realize) are always going to be concerned about what their kids see on-line. They realize they can't be there every moment and they there is alot of stuff out there that they personally are going to feel is offensive and harmful to their kids. The pressure for rating/censoring the net is not going to go away until those concerns are meet.
2). As adults, people should have the right and the reponsiblity to examine thoughts and ideas that put them outside their comfort zone. Even adults need to regularly challenge what they believe. People and society cannot grow without an open and contemplative zone of exchange. The net may not succeed at being that, but is this potential that I believe people want to protect.
The result: If the internet community doesn't take steps to support and properly implement a workable system that meets concerns about minors and content then inevitably government will. And it will botch it. If you value what you have now, then the internet community will have to come up with its own solution. There are a lot of smart people out there, who if they put their minds to it could come up with a workable system. Best of all it would be from the bottom up. A net standard grown from the buttom would ensure that it is not the hostage of any group or government because it would be bigger that both of them. This is the way that standards in a free society have always be developed in the past, by "the consent of the governed". The point is that as the net grows it will be exposed to new users who will be unfamiliar with it and who will have concerns about it. The internet community must learn to bend with these people and try as best it can to meet them half way. If not, these people will ensure that change "from about" is imposed. Which is no one's best solution.
You're never going to get everyone to agree on what is and isn't porn. However, it's pretty obvious to anybody with any training or experience in making an aesthetic judgement what is art and what is wankin' off material.
There's a legal precedent, and there's a cultural basis for differentiating between erotic art and pornography.
Deal with the fact that wankin' off sites are pornographic. Stop trying to be cute and split hairs, when it's obvious which hairs are growing on what part of the body. (sorry for the metaphor, but it struck me as kinda apt)
Are artistic old masters porn ? Is a bomb a chemical experiment ? Is a discussion of encyrption technology maths ?
Those are all good questions. I'm sure we will benefit from exploring the issues.
The one thing we can say for certain is that an "anything goes because we can't tell the difference" answer is the wrong one.
No. You are a web writer.
Those guys with the squeaky adolescent voices in the "Nerds in Outer Space" program are the publisher.
As such, they take a considerable risk, allowing anonymous coward posting to go on in this forum.
tell us more about your secret fantasies, Mr. Cornhole.
I'm thinking that once this 'standard' gets approved a lot of people will write little scripts that will report random ratings on a web page. Kind of like the old NSA bait program... Trees, a poem: Trees are pretty. Trees are PORN green. I like VIOLENCE trees. Won't you come HATE SPEACH sit Under a tree with BLASPHAMY me? And another thing... If this gets implemented, wouldn't it be amusing if hackers broke into web sites and implemented this program, and did nothing else? How long would it go un-noticed? Not that I think anyone should hack anything ever.
Right! :: instead of :: Why do kids take drugs ? Let's do something about that !) than the causes.
People always externalise faults. It is easier to ban the effects (e.g. kids take drugs, drugs are bad, ban drugs
For the parents it is easier to demand that the whole internet and any other physical or virtual place that the kid might be exposed to be banned than to actually do some parenting themselves....
Someday somebody is going to have to explain to these people that any Internet simple enough to be censored is not a useful Internet. (It would be something inferior, like TV) Perhaps this could be turned into a theorem, like the one that says that a system of axioms cannot be used to prove its own consistency.
:-)
If you really feel that this is about people failing to "do your job as a parent?" then maybe you should really that that is exactly what people are trying to do in these debates. Do their jobs as parents.
Hmmm, assuming I'm a big-oppressive regime with a secret-police force capable of exerting covert force against any individuals or groups that I deem to threaten my plans for domination of the masses...
:-/
If there is _ever_ a case where I'm willing to use any and all dirty tricks (threatening family members, framing with child porn, secret abductions, etc) it would be to shut down the development of secure protocols that would undermine my ability to monitor and control the flow of information among the populace.
But then, that's just all hypothetical, anyway.
Would they have to watch Usenet newsgroups religiously, and download patches and recompile their rifles between each shot?
Would the rifles backfire often, but be very easy for the soldier's next-of-kin to disassemble, fix, and reassemble?
Lots of questions to ask here.
Hey, for whoever's interested in voicing an e-pinion, here's some interesting email addresses:
internetcontent@bertelsmann.de
info@incore.org
I imagine the addresses make it pretty obvious which address goes where, but we should probably just cc: both anyhow.
Do you suppose no one ever wanked off to great nude paintings in the era before photography? Picasso got past the sentimental nonsense in his paintings of the artist and his model - the artist is a bull figure fscking (rating: suggested but not expressed obscenity) the brains out of the model.
However, there are two things that we should push with Congress that could at least help shield the American part of the net from this foolishness:
The courts may already be moving in this direction, but IMO we can't afford to wait for them. Legislation to implement these principles would establish a strong position for freedom, and, at the same time, solve a number of nagging questions about who's responsible for web content. This should only take a two-paragraph bill, and if we can't muster enough support to get one introduced and passed, then we're in a lot more trouble than we thought. Write your congressperson today!
What "we"? Slashdot readers? Rebels and nerds? Figure you could get Bertelsman, Murdock, etc. to go along with the plan? No? Well, then, we will be locking ourselves out of the net, leaving it an open field for coporate interests only, thus achieving their objective for them. When the Communist coalition got a majority in the Czech parliment through fraud, the other ministers (save one, who committed "suicide") resigned in indignant protest. Boy, that showed them: the Communist-led majority went from 55 to 100%.
Don't be stupid. If you want to lock yourself out of the discussion, the governments are not going to demand that you be let in. You might as well build a prison and lock yourself in it and see if the government objects.
Most people tend to act like sheep... It'll only make them think "It's life..." and go back to their business.
This reminds me of the Stalin and the goat joke...
I agree. Orwell is highly relevant and should not be moderated down. If it weren't for Orwell, we wouldn't even have a good language for condemning this - and he knew how important your language was. Simply because we've all heard of this book, we're supposed to dismiss its ideas as we watch them come true. Boo to the moderators on this one.
I don't know how to deal with "protecting the children", however. Actually verifying that the person at the other end of the browser is an adult - notwithstanding logins and such - is impossible short of extrememly Orwellian measures of the sort we are trying to resist. I suppose we can have accounts and make people pay through some tracable means like credit cards. If we were to do this, though, we would have to construct the archtitecture so that online activity could not be traced, as people would have every reason to be paranoid.
In fact, I'm sure the corporate bozos are watching this, and that will be their "solution" - a private, members only, adults only, totally monitored extranet at, of course, extra cost. Porn will not really go away, there's too much money to be made there, but this will establish who's in control.
The Nazis would be relevant even if Bertie had no historical links to them. Along with Communism, they show us most clearly what we are trying to avoid and why. They prove it is not a fantasy, but something that can and has happened in an advanced industrial society. I, too, doubt that Aryan supremecy has survived in Bertie, but this does not mean authoritarianism hasn't. The latter continues to serve their interest, while the former would be, at this point, counterproductive.
Foods Not Bombs, a group that feeds poor people without asking permission, is on a list of "terrorist organzations" because they break the law. This is the kind of game we're looking at here. Arguing about porn is actually good because the governments have to maintain the pretense that this is what they care about, but, regardless of political strategies, we should understand what is really going on here.
Good suggestions, especially about the .kid, but this ignores the vast amounts of free porn that are out there. Why should I have to pay?
The government has no real interest in controlling spam, and, to the extent that it discredits anonymity, it is quite politically useful. This is an entirely different matter. If you don't think governments are capable of working together when they have an interest in doing so, go do a search for "World Trade Organization" or "GATT".
It's tolerated so long as it's a minor nuisance. If it became a serious threat to powered interests, it would fade fast.
The only real problem with setting up a physicall seperate net is the cost of the infrastructure. The software and know-how and the boxes themselves are something the community(tm) could provide, but who's going to be laying cables?
If this had all been forseen long ago we could have started lobying the government(s) to limit commercial use of the internet in proportion to how much private companies donated to public infrastructure. That would have been nice (and, yes, I know that corporations have put a lot of money into that infrastructure, but the flaw is that the infrastructure was not legally pre-defined as some kind of public trust).
Yes, it is ironic to wish for regulation to have pre-empted further regulation. There probably would have been a lot of problems with it anyhow.
On the upside, at least we are not dealing with a finite resource: the FCC has a good excuse for regulating airwaves (finite) but if someone can privately get enough money together it is still possible to make a Public Internet Space--like the Public Broadcasting System but with less government involvement.
I guess it all boils down to finding money for a public trust.
Get rid of the jerks behind it. If Jens Waltermann died from a shooting, a car bomb, or a well-placed bottle of flaming petrol (or the Bertelsmann Foundation board similarly), this attempt would grind to a halt (no money). It would also give anyone thinking of pushing this sort of shite a serious attack of nerves.
There was free speech before the Internet.
This is just plain intolerance, the same intolerance that cause Hitler to murder millions of Jews. The same intolerance that caused the Catholic church to imprison Galleleo, and murder non-conformist during the inquisition. The same intolerance that has retched the freedom from countless people through history. This intolerance will cause all that participate to become lesser that those who carried it further, since that's there inevitable goal. Welcome, the new witches of Salem.
What if everytime we are online, we open some windows to web site owned by Bertelsmann & Cie... It could be an everyday slashdot affect, no hacing, no illegality, just people that want to read again and again the same site...
Owner of unused bandwidth may make some script to reload these site every minutes/hours to have a permanent slashdot effect.
I think this is something we can do...
What do you think? Does people know which sites are owned by Bertelsmann? Maybe some "links to Bertelsmann" could help.
Any man willing to give up any of his freedom for a false sense of safety deserves neither. -- Benjamin Franklin
Interesting point re adverts. Even on so called Adult type sites on free hosting servers, the banner adverts on the pages are more pornagraphic and suggestive than the pages content. I for one object to the banner adverts, especially the pages of them one encounters on some sites (particularly Japanese sites). They slow down, or at times completely halt, pages downloads. Thankfully I don't have an accont that charges by the hour.
Uhm, hackers wrote Linux. You're probably talking about CRACKERS who CRACK into a system, not that I would want anyone to CRACK a system - you know - I REALLY don't want anyone to CRACK whatever database all these lables will be stored... ;)
There is an endless supply of similar "good questions" one could derive. It is not clear that they are answerable individually, much less en masse. The problem is intractable. Therefore, yes, "anything goes" is the right answer. The only way to deal with these issues is with judgement calls, and the only democratic way is for people to make their *own* judgement calls.
I think Freedom (www.zks.net) is something like what you have in mind.
BTW: Why are people like the ACLU pleading to these greedhead toads "If you do this, corporate hegemony will be assured"? Isn't that like telling Saddam Hussein "Mr. Hussein, if you kill these people there will no longer be any threat to your power".
So the idea is: put it in the sig. you use for posting to Usenet, here, and similar places. Something like: "If the PICS proposal(insert link) passes, you get to post 1K of censorship-enabling keywords with each post to this forum". A more elegant phrasing would be cool, but this would make people think a little bit.
I raise the bid by 100 zorkmids
Enoughs enough. Death to censors
Does Jon Katz get to wrtie the TOS for the new CensorState? I bet he starts glowing about this like a pig in the mud.
I will gladly put in a few bucks to start a JK auction on this concept.
See CGIProxy for a CGI script that acts as a proxy (easier to install and requires less access than a true proxy). Great for bypassing work- or school-based filters.
>> Now, this a certified Very Bad Thing (tm), >> since German publishers are notoriously >> conservative and stuck-up. > He did say that *publishers* were conservative. > A country with hate-speech laws will tend to > create more law-phobic publishers than one without. No, he said the publishers were "conservative and stuck-up". Since one has little to do with the other, I tend to dismiss the whole statemement as ethnically slanted. Especially his apologetic explanation that he has German friends shows he was well aware of the tone of his messate. Anyway, 'nuff said. One slap on the wrist won't convert any troll. Uwe Wolfgang Radu Chattanooga, TN
Can the government physically prevent murder? No. It can punish murder when it occurs. The law is based on punishment not prevention. The same applies here. Yes, you can hack around it, but when they catch you your (censored) is grass.
The jist of it is that self-censorship isn't censorship from a constitutional standpoint.
Here are some URLs about alleged Bertelsmann/Nazi links:_ 19.sml s ch.htm
http://www.foxmarketwire.com/wires/1216/f_ap_1216
http://www.thenation.com/1998/issue/981228/1228fi
http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/b910.htm
Orwell is highly relevant and should not be moderated down.
I agree, that moderation and two other equally unfounded calls of "repetition" were M2'd. There is justice after all...
Patterns! How to control the Internet is the goal. Government fears an uncontrolled communication system. So they prepare to attack the weakest link. The ISPs. Censorship, taxes, pressure, buyout, government licensing, etc., etc. The pattern is shaping up. Munich is but a sideshow. Frank Fearless
Of course people will mislabel their pages (some, on purpose). Then a government will make a very ugly, highly public example of one of these "criminals". Everyone else will fall into line for fear of receiving a similar punishment.
Fascism: the New World Order.
ps: Tipper Gore is very much in favor of this kind of labelling... I know who I'm not voting for in the year 2000 elections.
[1] in principle, "he or she", in practice, "he".
Well, there's the octogenerian Lady Birdwood in the UK -- see 1/4 way down this page: The British-Israel World Federation bookshop in Sydney increased stocks of Holocaust denial material and anti-Semitic literature and became more overtly concerned about "the Jews." It continued to sell The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Longest Hatred: An Examination of Anti-gentilism (produced by the racist dowager, Lady Birdwood of London) and Holocaust denial material from the Institute for Historical Review, as well as a number of other Identity, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel books and magazines.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that the whole censorship issue is being looked at from the wrong direction. Namely, trying to censor everything on the net. We all know this is not possible. First off, there's just too much out there. And if someone wants to find something, they'll find it. Putting up laws in the path of accessing information only makes people figure out other ways of posting it and other ways of getting to it. That being said, wouldn't it be a lot easier for these people to go at it in a different direction? Don't try to censor everything in sight - approve what you will, then limit the access to those things that are approved. Lets say that instead of a list of bad sites, there's a list of good ones. Only these can be accessed. But this wouldn't be for everyone. ISPs could offer 'censored accounts' for people that wanted them. This way concerned parents could know it was much harder for their kids to access 'unwanted' information. Things like IRC and newsgroups could also be restricted or disabled on these accounts. People that don't want this kind of restriction could access the net via 'open accounts.' Approval to get on the 'good list' of sites wouldn't be mandatory, but may be useful depending on what the site was being used for. You wouldn't have to do something like register every page on GeoCities, you could just say the domain name was approved, and allow access to all pages under that domain. Yes, I know, this wouldn't be easy. It would cost a bit of time/money. It would still allow people to see some links to unwanted material. But it would also allow people the choice to censor themselves and/or their children or not. Wouldn't this be much better than mandatory censorship? How possible would it be to actually do something like this? This is an idea I've had floating in my head for a while, and I'd appreciate any feedback.
xhornet@hotmail.com
(I'm not the only one that thinks the concept of 'intellectual property' is completely bloody ridiculous, am I?)
Bestseller im Dritten Reich: Die braune Vergangenheit von Bertelsmann
It's a link to a transcript from the german tv-magazine Monitor.
(Babel Fish is your friend)
It's important to emphasize that the Commission is not elected and is more powerful than the Parliment that is. This is going to be one of the first of many authoritarian nightmares that Europe is going to see coming out of its Maastricht nonsense. They have been insufficiently paranoid and will pay for it. That being said, European culture is very liberal sexually. Germany has a widely popular (at least when I lived in Europe) game show where the losers have to strip. There can be lots of popular support for fighting this, but it's going to mean fighting "Europe" itself - which will shortly become very popular, too, as reality sets in and people get past the post-national fantasy.
Here are some URLs about alleged Bertelsmann/Nazi links. It looks to me like there is something to it:_ 19.sml s ch.htm
http://www.foxmarketwire.com/wires/1216/f_ap_1216
http://www.thenation.com/1998/issue/981228/1228fi
http://www.usatoday.com/life/enter/books/b910.htm
Basically, they want to scare web page publishers so badly over the possible consequences of mislabeling content that they'll cheerfully self-censor themselves, removing any content that's "questionable".
Together, The People are far more powerful than their government. But we don't unite against the government, so we get dominated. It's exactly the same dynamic that allows a schoolyard bully to dominate a hundred kids each of whom is only slightly smaller than himself.
Methods of "soft-regulation" can be more dangerous than direct!
Unless, of course, your site *does* contain hard-core, incest, bestiality, and vulgar language, in which case you rate it as "cute and fuzzy bunnies, appropriate for all ages". They can't prosecute all of us.
The one problem that I see with this is that they may not have to. Note that this is a "self-policing" system... or, more accurately, a system policed by the next layer up. So your ISP is required to police you, and, presumably, their ISP is required to police them, and so on up the chain until you get to the big backbone networks that don't have providers, just peers. These are few enough that the government can effectively put pressure on them, and in turn make them put pressure on their clients, and so on back down the chain, until your ISP tells you to rate your stuff correctly, or you'll get booted, because they'd rather lose you than lose their whole business, because their ISP has just told them the same thing...
The guys who own the wire have the real power here, so they're the ones that need to be brought into line for the government to enforce this. Unfortunately, it may just be practical for them to do so. You think Sprint is going to go head-to-head with the Feds over what J. Random Webmaster puts on his home page?
The Green and the Liberal parties probably will be against that. :-((
But that won't be of too much use since they only make up a small portion of the European Parliament.:-(
The big people's parties (conservatives and social-democrates) are very likely for censoring and together hold more then 2/3 of the seats.
Sebastian
Yes, what you propose is to me the natural way of dealing with the problem, and it should probably slow down the move towards the abyss enough to justify calling it an effective halt. However, don't assume that your opponents will behave as predicted at every turn. Just stay informed about their moves, and change your response accordingly.
I don't buy the argument that erring on the safe side of the line (i.e. rating a picture of a naked CPU board as hard-core pornography) would automatically be declared illegal, as you can come up with a number of plausible defenses for this. Since the effect would theoretically be to prevent minors from seeing your CPU board, the harm done to them is essentially nil. As a safety measure, put the extreme rating in your HTML editor document template, and add a note in the documentation that the user is supposed to adjust the rating according to their content after they have finished it, meaning that most users won't even care what the rating says unless they have filters enabled in their own browsers!
The only thing harmed will be the rating system itself. It will be fun watching the censors argue that your prudent act of self-censorship amounts to legal obstruction, and that kids may be harmed by not seeing your harmless CPU boards!
But if they insist that your content must match your rating, by all means, go ahead and add such content, just for the sake of the censors. If they complain about that too, ask them for specific guidance about how to rate each and everyone of your pages. Ultimately, they will have to do the rating themselves and place it with the recipient, an option they have had all the time. It's their job anyway; you shouldn't be forced to do it for them.
However, first we need to wait for the initial rating system becoming law (and you may as well fight it in other ways). No need to disclose your intented tactics to the opposite side in advance. Let them bear the full financial burden of introducing a useless law, to teach them a lesson.
Outlawing sheer creativity is doomed to fail.
No keywords for me. They can index my pages or censor me. Seriously, nothing that impinges upon this many peoples freedoms will pass without a huge and messy fight.
Either that, or it will be unenforceable, like UNISYS and their vague and ever-changing patent claims.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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You don't need to do it at the IP level, especially considering that IPv6 will be getting serious use Real Soon. Under IPv6, DNS is all the more important, because IP addresses are too long to remember.
...
... but I think that'd look rather ridiculous in court, at least in the USA. The current gods of DNS need to be taken down a notch anyway ...
So create your free network at the DNS level -- make a new top-level domain, *.free or *.foo or something. Get users to add your root nameserver to their resolver configuration, or better yet, get various distributors of nameservers (e.g. the Debian package maintainer for BIND) to add it to their default set of root nameservers. (Just don't be an idiot like Mr. AlterNIC did, trying to crack into the "official" DNS.) DNS is just a distributed database system, so nobody can force people to use a particular set of nameservers
Use Secure DNS for key exchange, thus enabling IPSec for opportunistic end-to-end encryption. (IPSec support is a mandatory part of the IPv6 standard...) Use DNS to direct people's connections to anonymizing proxies, so people's own computers don't ever see the IP addresses of the Web servers or other facilities they're accessing.
Most likely someone will come along and try to make it illegal to distribute BIND or a resolver with "unofficial" root nameservers in its config
I have been in touch with Jens Waltermann of Bertelsmann and it is his assertion that "Bertelsmann was closed down by the Nazi's in WWII and anything but a supporter of the regime" and "Reinhard Mohn, once owner of Bertelsmann, was criticised in Germany for instituting one of the first systems to have workers participate in the company both financially and in management".
Can someone provide an authorative online reference to substantiate one or the other of these two different stories we are getting here?
Funny part about this is that if this stuff is put into effect, we wont be able to talk about the President:
Bush or Gore
(but we could talk about Bradley!)
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
Damm Straight That is what I did.
Just dump this hidden in your web page...
gratuitous violence,
frontal nudity,
explicit sexual acts,
crude language,
vulgar language,
sports,
extreme hate speech,
arts,
aggressive violence,
death to humans,
medicine,
non-explicit sexual acts,
strong language,
history
Then put this in for funny
Exposed buttocks of zombies or Frankenstein's monster
Exposed buttocks of Bart Simpson or Elmer Fudd
Exposed buttocks of early cave men
Exposed buttocks of Klingon's or Romulins (Star Trek)
Exposed buttocks of Data (Star Trek)
Exposed buttocks of male or female Human Beings
Exposed breast or breasts of any of the above who are female
Exposed genitalia of any of the above. Examples of what Nudity is NOT:
Exposed buttocks of Chewbacca (Star Wars)
Exposed buttocks of C3P0 (Star Wars)
Exposed buttocks of ape-like, alien creatures when it is clear that their normal appearance is unclothed
Exposed buttocks of Rob Malda
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
So the Internet is the battleground, it's friendly territory, our strongest force is information. Some of that information is essential, it's what makes the net so important, this is good info. Then there's other information that is either corrupting or dangerous, the dark side of the net, this is bad info. Of course, good or bad are mere opinions, depending on individuals. Authorities would like to filter out the bad stuff and only let us access the good stuff. They want to control the information we can access so that they can keep controlling us and stay in charge. If we can't stop them, we must make sure they can't take over the net, we should mix the information so good and bad become one. If all the info that is considered bad is blocked, that block has to block all good info as well, so they can't have one without the other.
We could rate all of our content to be most extreme, even if it's a FAQ or HOWTO, so volunatry ratings would turn out to be useless. To make sure mandatory ratings wouldn't work, either, we could put extreme information into our FAQ's and HOWTO's. Add pornography, violence, hate-speech and explain why...
You don't have to support that additional content, basically the censorship efforts forced you to add it, so explain that to your audience to raise awareness. It's better to start early, before it's too late, while there still is an audience. Okay, I admit this seems a bit extreme, but it's appropriate to the extreme threat of censorship that's facing The Net As We Know It. The Internet is something special, we can't let any authorities ruin it, that loss of freedom would be far worse for our children than any unrated content could ever be...
Let's do it for freedom, the kids, and us too!!
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
Keyword ratings just don't work. If you specify the keywords with too much detail, each web page becomes 10 K of keywords, and 1 K of content. If the list of keywords is not ridgidly fixed, you also end up with "the chicken problem", where a hard core sex site is rated the same as a cooking site, because the both have the keyword "breast". The fact that one of them refers to chicken breasts is not an issue to someone blocking keywords.
If you don't permit enough detail, then things which shouldn't get through do.
For a set of good examples of this, using RSAC to prove the point, see here, but specifically this link, which rates both Alex's Haley's Roots and a pornographic, racist novel using RSACi, and finds that they both have to be given almost the same rating.
Bradley
But who gets to define 'misrating'?
I would say it may be impossible to rate politically correct or acceptible speech. What was considered offensive speech in the 60's in now considered politically correct. For example, my mom was kicked out of church in 1968 when she marched in the civil rights parades in Southern California. What she did back then was considered very inappropriate and now is considered very commendable. If people had not participated in that civil disobediance back then, there might be many of a darker skin color riding the back of the bus today.
It is dangerous for the government to rate speech, such as what we have on the internet. What may be acceptible now may be the same ten years from now. Limiting what we say can cause disorder and war, not protect our children.
These people who wish to rate our speech on a coercive basis are very dangerous if not greedy.
What is needed is a technical solution to this, and the furor over "protect the children" will die down. If people quit getting porn shoved in their faces, they're happy. They don't care if it's a technical solution or an international treaty enforced by men in black helicopters, they just want it.
--Dan
Of course, you realize that to many of the bible-thumping "won't someone think of the children!" proto-Mrs. Flanders types -- such a label would be a positive thing, not a negative thing. Most of these people are used to the church dictating what to think, what to read, what to say, what to believe, the whole nine yards. So if the minister gets up at the front and says that so-and-so is going to tame those lawless infidels out there on the internet, Mrs. Flanders will trip over herself to vote for them -- not against.
(Of course, I'll be the first to admit that this is a grossly unfair sweeping generalization.)
--
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
But who gets to define 'misrating'?
In about 3 seconds flat you get into the same situation as present British 'indecency' laws, where learned people get to sit about for months on end debating what 'extreme hate speech' really means.
And under whose laws would it be illegal?
Is one country really going to care that much about the other country's 'evil' ratings? About as much as US porn sites currently desperately try to stop those in less, erm, enlightened communities from giving them money even though it is against the local laws, I suspect.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
one problem with that is that a large amount of the internet is now commercially sponsored. My ISP gets part of its money from call charges, but also is a major portal, with revenue from banner ads etc. Without these commercial presences, I don't see how the common man is going to have access to this uncensored network.
How exactly could this be fought? People say they'll simply never rate their pages, it seems to me if this goes through they wont have a choice. What can be done to stop it before it happens?
Emory: Uh..we're still..beta testing that.
Oglethorpe: What you're testing is me and my patience!
THe only reason no one has put these conservative freaks out of their misery is they're not
worth the bullet, and they do have a point from time to time.
They are worth the bullet.
about "Soft Law" is that this way the law-makers can get away with insane stuff that would cause their heads to be ripped off by the people if they really wrote this up in a bill instead of this undercover stuff.
It seems to me that a self-rating system is a very good idea, and that these proposals probably don't go far enough. Now, before you explode, let me explain.
The system that is being proposed seems to be a way for people to rate their sites, so as to describe their content, but only in terms of subjects that people might find offensive.
This doesn't go far enough - a *really* useful system would have a standard set of classifications for a *vast range* of subjects. - it'd make web searching so much easier - a bit like Yahoo! but with a much larger search space, as it'd be robot-generated. Those who would wish to filter content could do so by cutting off various branches of the content description tree. Searching for things could also become a lot easier - with a standard description system you wouldn't get the vast number of incorrect matches due to homonyms.
The problem with this is deciding how to structure the content description tree - there's a lot of decisions to be made which might not go down well with some people.
thoughts?
Tim
Im in!
Of course eBounty(tm) would use SSL and Stronghold with some nice anon fullfillment system for the "participants".
50 qutaloos on the head of the New Riech Marshal.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Who the fuck is going to fucking censor our fucking words? The fucking euros? Fucking congress? Fucking fuck those fuckers, they can suck my fucking white munchole before I start wearing a fucking Yellow Triangle on my tshirts.
We havent fucking learned dick about this shit in the last 1000 years? Tiem to stand up and lift one finger in the air and the other on pen and say "You want my fucking tax money, then fucking blow me and your censorshit crap you god damn over blown american euro ausy whatever mother fucking fucker"
Or words to that intent.
Long live eBounty
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Yes, you probably should remember anon.penet.fi.
It was taken down - ironically enough, not by the government, but by the Church of Scientology. But the fact that it was taken down is disturbing to anyone who wants to form or count on a similar service.
D
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I don't think there's anything in these rating systems that would prevent sites from continuing to use spurious keywords as you describe.
Here's an interesting experiment: Search for the same keywords with AltaVista's "Family Filter" on and see what happens. If the filter works like other filters, it will censor some of the "good" material you're trying to find, and let through much of the "bad" material, too. I don't think any form of ratings are going to change that.
D
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The pro-censorship governments of China and Singapore are already using these ratings to determine what people should not be allowed to see.
The problem with mandatory ratings is that it makes their jobs easier, and it also puts the censorship weapon in the hands of whatever governments want to use it. Ours, for example - consider the number of Internet censorship proposals that have appeared in Congress.
The European Community plans to allow each government to create a "template" for censorship - Germany's, for instance, will forbid "Hate Speech".
It's a bad proposal, and while I'm not sure if it would work (who the heck would call what they write "Hate Speech"?), I'm inclined to nip it in the bud.
D
----
Again, we see the framing of the problem incorrectly. Instead of saying, properly, "Self-Rating Will Allow Users to See what they Wish" they frame this as censorship.
Users will be able to see what they wish?
Tell that to Germans (who won't be able to view "hate speech") or Australians (who won't be able to view anything that the Australia Broadcasting Authority turns its nose up at).
Jay (=
I think there will be a division in the Internet of the future.
Which would be a bad thing; Jakob Neilsen's article on "Metcalfe's law in Reverse" suggests "the value of partitioning a network into N isolated components is 1/N'th the value of the original network."
You'll have the current structure, which will consist of homogenized "Appropriate for viewers of all ages" tripe and dominated by commercial entities. Then you'll have an underground Internet which will be built by people who have left all that behind in disgust.
Which, unfortunately, won't be as many people as we hope.
This Internet will either run on top of the current internet in the form of an invitation-only VPN (Quite feasible with the higher speed lines becoming available) or done with dial-up hardware of various sorts (Possibly even store-and-forward only.) Being effectively a private entity, it will be beyond regulation of the ISP's.
I see two problems with this:
Here's more of the "chilling effect on free speech" at work; since many people want to reach the widest possible audience, they will elect to rate their sites -- and therefore, want to strive for that PG rating to get past all of the filters.
Jay (=
This whole thing reminds of the period when the printing press was invented and the Church was none too happy about it. Just look what happened once information was available that didn't have to be obtained from an elite group (the Church hierarchy and their scribes).
Modern day governments, like the medieval churchs, seem to be clinging to the notion that they, and only they, are the one true source of information and power. The Internet threatens their position of authority. You can attempt to cloak it in ``we're protecting children'' but, IMHO, what's happening is an attempt to diminish the utility of the Internet by assorted govts who fear what it brings.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
People have been taking about writing to Members of the European Parliament -- what can a U.S. citizen do? Is there a Bertelsmann U.S. company to whom we can express our displeasure?
Or, should we be trying to spread this word to U.S. media outlets?
-Dan
I have written a truly remarkable operating system which this sig is too small to contain.
Unternet (emphesizing "resisting The Man" with a German twist)
...
Undernet (a la the underground railroad)
civilrights net
resistence net
liberty net
freedom net
protection racket (OK, I had to have a little fun here)
safe net (emphesizing how little saftey we as individuals have using a protocol which allows big brother to know our every keystroke -- or at least our every mouse click on a URL)
Substitute "protocol" for "net" in any of the above, for even more choices.
I would like to see something at the network layer which would allow greater anonymity, encryption, and the like. Maybe a plugin for IP v 6. The problem is, at some level the packets have to actually reach their tartet. Perhaps a double blind routing system of some kind
Alas, many of the suggestions above are probably trademarked as well -- but you need to find a name you like which isn't and trademark it yourself, since what you are doing is very helpful and good for the public, and will therefor make you a big, fat target. (Just ask Phil Zimmerman.) No sense giving the bad guys any more ammunition to use against you (such as trademark law) than they probably already have.
Best of luck!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Thanks for your "clarification". Unfortunately I have a hard time agreeing with most of what you have said. I will pick up some of the disturbing points and "clarify" them with my own opinion.
1) You say that there is no anonymity against governmential organisations in e.g. Germany. IMHO you miss that there is some odd concept called "Datenschutz" (engl.: "protection of data") which is very strong here in Germany. It is mainly about governmential organisations not being allowed to do ANYTHING with the data gathered about citizens but use them for those very strictly defined purposes they were collected for. AFAIK there is nothing comparable in e.g. the United States of America.
2) Another point troubling me is the one about this "Nazi-Bertelsmann". If what you say is right, you damn sure know a lot more about the history of Bertelsmann than I do. But the point is that it is "history". Nowadays Bertelsmann is not out to help the "Arian Race" empower itself on top of the world, but like A LOT of other big multinational media companies Bertelsmann is trying to control and squeeze-money-out-of-it as much of the market as possible.
I do not like the idea of censorshop in any way. I do my part by advising people on security and data protection issues and by discussing censorship problems and promoting anti-censorship loudly. But bringing the nazis and/or microsoft into every discussion about such matters is really getting me.
Fare you well, Peter
-- NoWonder of WonderWorks/OmegaProject
While not all countries are bound by the equivalent of the First Amendment, I find it difficult to believe that this won't somehow undermine this protection. The U.S. Supreme Court has rendered some very significant decisions, voter approval notwithstanding. And that's what makes it so valuable - it was designed to factor out the "will of the majority." It will be most interesting to see first, how far this effort actually goes, and seocnd, what happens when it is contested on constitutional grounds.
Seriously - if web sites are rated on content, and since the Bible contains all manner of violence, sexual misbehavior and the like, it will undoubtedly be filtered. Unless of course, these templates allow for exceptions, like "Filter out all gratuitous violence, all sex, and anything deemed immoral. EXCEPTION: anything associated with Christianity or the Bible."
If I were Pat Robertson, I'd be hopping mad.
What does everyone think about an Open Source military? Can we do that? It might help us get more sway in the real world.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
You think that there will be a big messy fight do you? well, i certainly hoped so. When the US Government tried to pass the CDA, the whole WORLD cried out.
/. article)
But when the Australian government successfully passed legislation to make Australia have the 3rd most restrictive internet laws in the world, there wasn't a peep from the main stream media about it.
actually the government passed it in 2 weeks, whilst discussion the GST lasted for MONTHS! (and continues still). The main (read "only") reason it was passed so easily and quickly (full support in both houses by both major parties) was so that the Liberal government could pass the GST.
they want to use a filtering system. ok... but how does it work. well the system endorsed and passed by our Hon Minister for Telecommunications, Information Technology and (wait for it) the Arts (mmmm... i get it, the arts ppl get the pizza for us IT ppl.... frowns) lets porn though, but bans many free speech sites including the bible. (read the press release from the EFA)
don't you love the fact that the source code for linux may now be illegal on the internet in australia because of some of the comments in it (read this for the
just my little contribution
\\||//
----ooo00ooo----
The Self rating part would still have to be forcibly applied to alot of people with contreversial views. Hate groups for exmaple, are not going to rate their content as racist or hate-filled, they would more likely rate it as nationalistic or somesuch. Since they want to be heard they have a vested interest in not rating themselves logically. If you require everyone by law to rate themselves non-fraudulantly then it's not really a self rating system, and we're sort of back to square one aren't we? I dont think we can force labels in this country (USA) so how would this work? What about elsewhere in the world? Clearly XXX sites will love to self rate themselves as the worst and raunchiest, but what about all the other people on the perimeter of the mainstream who are trying to get a voice?
I'm all for people rating their content, but once you start filtering based on that I dont know if I agree. In a self rating system there's nothing stopping a KKK site from using a rating of "Happy-Happy Joy-Joy", which would then cause all of the filters to drop "Happy-Happy Joy-Joy" to the floor since it's been connected to a hate group.
I guess I think self rating is good, but I think the government and the infrastructure people need to stay out of it.
-Rich
I dont know if she's all that evil.
At least she was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. I cant hold too much against a lady who was at least paying attention to what her kids were doing and listening to. She didn't need to go national with it though. She could have just taken the tape away from her daughter and have been done with it.
You could always have first lady Clinton and her getting terrorists freed to try and win over votes in a senatorial race, or her numerous shady business deals...
-Rich
... self censorship.
... It's actually EXACTLY what they want.
;) but doesn't this trash about "what the web should be" make you sick? Who's web is this anyways? And how can "they" judge all the non-corporate surfers so harshly?
Big corporations love this
On one side the corporative culture has always had a very high self-censorship level. "It" expects it from all it's employees. So therefore the internet self censorship shift will not bother the corporate users.
As a good example, my school dearly wants kids to publish their work on the school's website. But it's quite clear: They will read each and every work and pick only the ones who best represent the interest of it's "marketing" department. They don't need this self-censorship thing.
On the other side, free speech and the right to think will suffer. Having people do their own self-censorship is just another way of imposing that all healthy "corporate way of life" on the world. Buy a car. Go on expensive trips, buy that expensive clothing and jewlery. Do your bit for the deficit. Your life ain't complete without it. Obay your boss. Come in on time. Increase your performance. Stay later. Make a "reasonable web page". Support your local government. Hate the baddies we target and enroll so we can ship you wherever we screw up. Hell if you shine our boots we'll even give you a doughnut.
Ok, this is a little extreme
Obi Wan Celeri
Don't forget that Germany is recovering from one of the nastiest historical events in a long time: "free popular democracy" led to the Nazi party. As much as they hate to admit it, they all joined the democratic herd and voted for Hitler and his boot-licking Jew-slaughtering entourage. When the dust and ashes settled, they felt really bad about it. It's like waking up from a hangover, only it's "oh fuck... I just slaughtered 6 million people."
The Germans now have a political system that is censored--you can't form a party based on hate, you can't run certain types of hate groups, etc.
They (the German people) advocate censorship, and trust the stable, hate-free government to protect them from Neo-Nazis and religious nuts. Their entire national attitude toward the Internet would scare the shit out of a civil libertarian from America. Just a little global perspective for y'all.
Let's see... that's 3 references to genocide, I used the words "Neo-Nazi", "fuck", "Hitler", and "shit", and also made a broad generalization or three about Germans. I guess that means I get censored. Well, hey... fuck 'em.
-Jurph
I know what you mean. The first thing Hitler did when he came to power was "silence" anyone who opposed him, and by the time we found out about it it was too late anyway.
---------------------------
"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
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The stupid proxies we use at school are already are biased enough as it is. They don't allow you to go to AD&D sites, but they'll allow you to go to sites that are against AD&D. They'll ban you from godlovesfags.com but it lets you into godhatesfags.com, tell me that wasn't the work of the government...
Imagine how this will be on the national level. I'd be banned from half the useful information on the internet just because it was controversial or conflicting with the ideas of one of the people that decides what sites get what ratings.
If this does become a reality, I can tell you right now I'll be fighting it with every ounce of energy I've got. You can't tell me the script kiddies won't be cracking away everyday in protest. Since some countries would ban different things (ie Germany - no hate speech...which of course translates into any speech that is controversial ) I would definately set up a system of proxies in the US and send massive amounts of email to be forwarded to the germans showing them how to use the proxies. Get the idea now? Civil disobedience is also on the top of the list, I'm sure a lot of sysadmins would be glad to rate ALL of their content as "sexually violent racial slurs" or something like that. Then when kids can't get in to te useful information, they complain to teachers or parents, and in turn to congressmen and such. Another plan is the ever popular petition. Everyone on my block and everyone in my school and everyone in my email address book would be glad to send around petitions or take a few seconds to sign one. If the leaders of this beast receive 6 billion signatures, and a few billion emails, do you think theyd get the picture? Maybe not, but it would be worth it. If EVERYONE does EVERYTHING in their power to shoot this down, I think we can.
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"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
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OK,
Apart from saying how terrible this will be, we need to put together some kind of action plan to combat this. We need polite, well worded and intelligent arguments as to why this won't work. We need a central repository of MEP's email/snailmail/telephone addresses (MEP == member of the european parliament).
Being rather paranoid, I think that this is a case (as others have mentioned) of Big Business(tm) creating a law to make money. But simply saying that to our MEP won't make a blind bit of difference.
I think we need an open letter that we can all sign and forward on to our parliamentary representatives (Local/National, etc)
It looks like the proponents of this law are well ahead of us. We need to catch up.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Not entirely correct. Sure, you might be able to (rather pretentiously) state "this is not-art!" when looking at pr0n. And you might be able to say "this is art!" when looking at artistic nude images. But.. what about some horndog wankin' off to artistic nude images?
So artistic nude images might still be wankin' material, and someone's trying to censor people who are producing wank-inducing content... now they see some very erotic art that turns them on, well, they basically have to put it in the same category as pr0n.
(meant to add this)
so definitions of filter categories/"keywords" have to be written to say unambigous things like "displays frontal nudity" (which includes quite a bit of art, and is still not clear on the subject of partially transparent bikinis), and the like.
The project ,,Self-Regulation of Internet Content" deals with the problem of harmful and illegal content and the protection of minors on the Internet.
Banning porn wont keep teens from discovering their hormones and having unsafe sex.
Education, not blind ignorance, is the way to protect minors.
THANK YOU! I was sitting here trying to remember what the name of the city was that all the lil hackers hung out in in that book and it would NOT come to me. I have a feeling something like this WILL come about if the government keeps interfering like this.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
The person's point was that we might have to build entire new networks to get around this censorship. A good example is to try to rebuild the old UUCPNET. Yes, the UUCPNET was slow as hell, but that is better than the Internet if you can't speak freely on the Internet. Or even if you don't recreate the UUCPNET, try to build a new network which is public but is not accessable to the general public so it doesn't catch the government's eye. Slowly transported freedom of speech is better than no freedom of speech at all.
DES Khaddafi KGB genetic jihad Uzi Rule Psix Qaddafi cryptographic Peking Mossad Legion of Doom Albanian Serbian Saddam
The simplest solution for keeping kids away from porn, drugs, hate, and dangerous plans to build bombs that will blow their fingers off:
Take responsibility for your kids!
The pollitical battle cry of "We must protect our children!" is utter hogwash. I cannot remember one proposal under that tagline which involves spending more quality time with your kids. Not one encourages parents to truly develop deeper relationships and take interest in your children and their friends. Worst of all, not one brings up the point of fostering an attitude of personal responsibility in your children.
We seem to be hell bent on creating Nanny Society 2000. Supervise our kids while they netsurf? No, well fix that in software and with content rating. Sit with our kids and watch TV together? No, the V-chip will keep them from seeing the pseudoporn on Showtime while they watch their TV and I watch mine. Go see a movie with them, and discuss it afterward? No, Billy heres a ten spot. Have fun at the movies with all the PG-13 your tender little eyes can absorb. Im a hip 20th century dad who uses all kinds of electronic babysitters so that (as mandated by the advertisers) I Can Have My Life Too TM.
However, all of the pseudogovernmental regulations in the world are not going to do a damn bit of good when Billy has an opportunity for real trouble. Lets face it- The net is only one of the many potentially damaging situations that kids will run into daily. Sure, content ratings may make it "safer" (at a high price in terms of freedom). Yet those ratings wont matter when the joint gets passed around at the make-out party. The only real solution is to have a relationship that allows you to instill self discipline and responsibility for ones actions.
So you still want an electronic babysitter? Fine, easy solution. Why not make the browser/newsreader keep a detailed read-only history file. Tell everyone that net access is being monitored on that PC. Make sure that your expectations about appropriate content are known. Give the kids their own login (especially in a public setting) or keep track of when they are on the computer. Now they can surf while you mow the lawn. Then go check the logs. If you see content that is against your morals, talk to your kids about it. Apply sanctions if necessary. This approach has two benefits: Its your free choice to use it, not some government-in-bed-with-the-media regulatory decision. Second, you know what is really going on. I would rather know that my kids were looking at titties, than not know that they spent the last two hours looking for porn that wasn't blocked. Then I could deal with it how I wanted to, rather than trusting the ratings and filters to continue working.
-BW
I won't rate my own site if this comes to pass, although I don't know what my ISP's position is. I do know that a lot of ISP's won't require ratings either. Call it civil disobedience. If this becomes law in the US, it will quickly reach the Supreme Court as a violation of Freedom of the Press. Under US law, the government can censor obscenity but they can't censor a site for merely refusing to rate itself.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Moderators, please rate anticypher's post up. This is a proof of what's happening. Bertelsmann *is* a monopoly, but isn't threatened by US antitrust laws since it's a German company.
.02
The worst of it is Bertelsmann has a pretty nasty background, to say the least. We should start boycotting this publishing goup and write to our dear Euro MPs about our concerns.
Maybe they're trying to do today what they managed in the 1930s with the Nazis: control all information from the source to the distribution channels. Geee... smells like an ugly conspiracy. And we're quite tied up since we have to rely on ISPs who themselves have to comply with certain laws...themselves made by congressmen more or less controlled by the big, bad industry. Ouch.
Now, how many peeople are conscious of what's happening, and how many actually give a shit if the Net is censored or not? Sadly, Europeans have shown very little interrest in European elections for the last decade or so, and corruption scandals are pretty usual among European Commission members. There's a profound distrust in our representatives building up, mixed with a complete lack of interrest in what they're doing. Most people will just complain, but will never *do* anything. We're in deeeeep shit, my friends.
One more thing... Bertelsann being such a huge publishing group, I bet they also publish porn... How ironic.
My
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
I was bothered by both things because they had nothing to do with what I was looking for. And the first one showed up in the top 20 on the search engine.
Again, you are arguing against the search engine technology. In this particular case the search engine had no clue what you actually had in mind. What you asked it to do was to find you web pages which had the word 'Bleys' somewhere in them. The engine did exactly the right thing. It's a rare word, so you basically got all there was. I don't understand what you are complaining about, unless you are really arguing for banishing porn, etc. to a different space, separate from the "normal" net.
Thor et al were never MENTIONED on the page, but were still used as meta-tag keywords.
So? Meta-tag misuse is extremely common. I fail to see what it has to do with ratings. In both cases you are basically saying that the search engines are not intelligent enough and can be misdirected by meta-tag abuse. Agreed. Will ratings help? No.
I understand what free speach means, thankyouverymuch.
Who am I to judge?... but we may understand it differently. From the context of the discussion it seems that you advocate enforced site ratings (voluntary won't help you in the KKK case) so that by default you will not see content offensive to the general population. Well, I think that this will be VERY harmful to free speech and will lead to the disneyisation of the net. This is exactly what the Slashdot people are up in arms about.
Is there, in theory, a connection [between Norse gods and racism]? Sure. Is it a connection any sane adult would make? Probably not.Does it end up being lovely ammunition for the Christian Right? You betcha.
Do you really advocate that the 'net should censor itself because of what the Christian Right might think/do?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Incident #1: I had forgotten the URL to a particular Amber fan-fic page that I like, and I remember that I had found it in the first place using the keyword "Bleys." I somehow ended up with several porno sites in my search results because the url was "http://www.pornsite.xxx/hotpics/bleys/corwin/teen 1.gif" or some such nonsense. There were three or four of them on the first search results page. *sigh*
And what's so horrible about it? You found out that there was porn on the net? The search engine did the right thing: you searched for keyword "Bleys", you got sites with it. Or you really want to play-pretend that there are no naughty things on the 'net? I can understand this case as a call for better search engines, but you seem to think that this shows the need for ratings. Not IMAO.
Incident #2, which I'm actually much more irritated by: I'm a pagan who follows the Norse gods. It's bad enough that some of the Norse pagan sites have a "racialist" slant, but it's even worse when the KKK has Meta-tags on its web-page that include Odin, Thor, and Freya. Can you imagine the impression that some kid doing a research project on Norse mythology would get if he did a web search for Thor and came up with the KKK home page??
Sigh. I don't think you understand what the expression "freedom of speech" means. You seem to think that your view of the Norse gods is the "correct" one and other views, especially ones which you find objectionable, are the "wrong" ones and so should be eradicated, or at least kept in the ratings' dark closet never to be shown to ordinary folk. I am no big fan of KKK, but why in the world do you think they have no right to their own view of Odin, Thor, etc.??
What would a kid doing research on Norse mythology think? Well, if he is a smart kid, he'll think that the world is a diverse place and there are sure some strange people around.
I've got no problems with voluntary standards as long as they remain truly voluntary rather than coercive
Unfortunately, it doesn't work this way. Obviously, no reasonable person would object to people describing their sites in keywords for the ease of finding these sites. The problem is that legislation or industry self-regulation quickly follows.
Once upon a time it was thought that ladies and gentlemen do not use words like 'fuck' and 'cunt'. All voluntary, right? So how come there are seven words that nobody can say on the radio?
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
From the article:
Self-Rating Schemes Will Cause Controversial Speech To Be Censored
Self-Rating Is Burdensome, Unwieldy, and Costly
Conversation Can't Be Rated
Self-Ratings Will Only Encourage, Not Prevent, Government Regulation
Self-Ratings Schemes Will Turn the Internet into a Homogenized Medium Dominated by Commercial Speakers
Again, we see the framing of the problem incorrectly. Instead of saying, properly, "Self-Rating Will Allow Users to See what they Wish" they frame this as censorship. This is no more censorship than my choosing not visit foo.com is censorship. How can it be censorship if the information is out there on a web server?
The cost issue is a red herring, what is the cost of rating a web page compared to a server to host the page, and actually production on content? And don't tell me this process can't be largely automated.
Conversation can't be rated. Fine. Don't rate it. There are exemptions for certain types of content in the proposals.
If you waste your time reading the paper linked to above (don't waste your time) you see the argument that somehow this rating system will encourage govt. regulation? What's the argument for this? Nothing. Nada. That's because there's nothing to back it up. Its opinion and an ignorent one at that. The situation in Austrilia is mentioned for some reason, but that has nothing to do with ratings...
Oh, and she finishes up with the mandatory Leftish bash at Capitalism. Yawn.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Germany's constitution already forbids the viewing of "hate speech". They don't have a right to see it in the first place.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Germany is a democratic country last time I checked. They are more than free to amend their constitution should they desire. Given their past, I don't think that's going to happen, but there you go...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
>> Now, this a certified Very Bad Thing (tm), since German publishers are notoriously conservative and stuck-up.
>> If you are German, don't flame me, I have very good German friends that I respect and care about -- thank you very much
> Oh, where have we heard that one before? I'm not racist, I have lots of black friends. God, you're transparent!
He did say that *publishers* were conservative. A country with hate-speech laws will tend to create more law-phobic publishers than one without.
As such, I wouldn't doubt that the publishers are conservative. I mean, if you do the same thing as everyone else, you're unlikely to get singled out for punishment.
This seems unworkable unless rating accuracy is somehow enforced .. and that means somebody, somewhere has to rate my pages anyway, to check I'm not lying. Back to NetNanny...
How's this supposed to work ?
Okay fellow slashdoters, we have a problem. Our enemy (and make no mistake, we have enemys, and Bertelsmann falls quite squarely into this catagory) holds one of the ultimate trump cards in the Game of manipulating the populace: The Welfare of the Children, Who Must Be Protected. This is NOT going to go away, we can not ignore it.
We can attempt a campaign of education (always worth the effort, but not always succesful); or we can finaly play dirty politics, and squish this bug.
The Cards we can play are the following (add more if you think of them) :
*You Dirty Nazi - play up on the publisher's association with the Nazi party as a way to discredit them in the EU. No one wants a monster protecting their children.
*You Dirty Babilonian - play up on the dangers of comfortable slavery, with plenty of biblical referances. this will get you the silent majority in your pocket.
*You Dirty Profeter - play up on how MUCH money this will make Bertelsmann, and that end users wont get reimbursed for the time they spend rating their content. no one likes to feel used, especialy by Big Rich Guys(tm).
This really must be killed, censorship is bad, GLOBAL CENSORSHIP is to bad for me to get my mind around.
-Crutcher
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Does this make too much sense for people to actually implement it? Suppose you're a site that wants to cater to the kiddies. Get a .safe (or some similar wording) domain. Filtering software would then only have to make sure the kids were going to .safe sites. Easy and almost foolproof. Hell, maybe even make a law against purposefully putting content on there that kids shouldnt be seeing. I for one would love to rake in the money by accepting registration fees for this!
Expect within 10-15 years you will look back on the '90s as the golden years before the big evil governments woke up and took back control. Not only do we have to fight this at the law making level, we also have to create bigger and better protocols and workarounds to make it impossible for tier 1 & 2 providers to filter content.
Now, I know this has been tossed around a bit, but wouldn't the best solution to removing the backbones' ability to filter be end-to-end (strong) encryption using secure protocols for every service? As ssh has shown us, encrypted traffic doesn't need to be that much slower.
I'm surprised nobody is working on a secure service suite. I would, but I lack the programming talent to do anything other than write obfuscated perl, but a lot of groups (l0pht, etc.) surprise me by not doing anything of this sort.
Ideally, this encrypted IP network would:
1) help preserve anonymity
2) increase security
3) foil censorship on the network level
4) take pressure off the NAPs, by giving them the excuse "Hey, its all encrypted, there is NO way we can know whats going across our network, therefor we cannot be held responsible"
Seems like encrypted IP would provide us with solutions to a lot of problems. Why isn't there a bigger push for this tech?
Yes. The Green Party. It is much stronger in Europe than here. One of their 4 Pillars [i.e. paramount values] is Grassroots Democracy. The Greens are in the government in at least three European governments, as well as the European Parliment. (And, as long as you're at it, please support the American Greens as well.)
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Hmm. So, what happens if we all rate our sites as containing hard-core, incest, beastiality and vulgar language?
Easy. The entire system breaks down.
Sorted.
Nick.
A friend and I were talking this past week about a "parallel net" whereby all the same protocols would be used, but this net would be private - ie, not connected to the "World Wide Web" as such. They could not link to each other w/out ...say, spawning another connection. Rather like different IRC servers.
.COM-free internet? The suits are all sorts of nervous, they want something that's safe for Jr and gramps. fsck 'em. Why not create something that is not only beyond policing, but beyond their desire to do so? Give them their damned commercial space! How about a net that is without a single commercial site?
.edu's...
.02
What would stop someone from creating such a parallel,
What would this require? Someone to set up a separate sort of DNS server for pointing to the correct hosts? Some participants? I mean, I hate to see fractioning but I pine for the days when most of my search results came up with
I want criticism, I'll take flames as well.
Quux26
http://www.intap.net/~j/
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
" 5. Self-Ratings Schemes Will Turn the Internet into a Homogenized
Medium Dominated by Commercial Speakers"
Thats the goal of Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann is a multinational company which owns pay-TV and TV channels, advertising companies, newspapers, publishing companies, a share in AOL and much more. They have huge assets in non-physical 'media intellectual property', ie. sports rights, movie rights, sattelite frequencies, etc. Bertelsmann controls a fair chunk of Germany's TV-news feed to ordinary germans, and subsequently Bertelsmann has entrenched political connections to the establishment. Bertelsmann's main business plan is to _control and own information and information sources_, no matter what type of information. And the Internet as of now 'threatens' much of Bertelsmann's 'core business': proprietary information. This pretty much explains why Bertelsmann is in the center of Internet censorship.
--Coke
His name is Alex Allan and I would think that if anyone can do anything about the whole mess it would be him. We just need to convince him that censoring the net would hurt business because, let's face it, he's not there to protect OUR freedom, he's there to protect the UK's economic interest in what all these suits seem to see as a new global trading system.
Oh, HA, I've just noticed that they call him a "Former High Commissioner to Australia". Lets hope he's not planning on following the Australian lead there then.
I've depressed myself with that now.
We should mobilize for defense not attack. That we can do allready by taking our democratic rights of openly disapproving of such bullshite, informing peers about the situation, do not buy from too large global companies, vote a party that has a clue, let stoopid suppliers and ISPs dry out in the sun etc.
Very intersting post indeed. But having read your disclaimer, I have to be a little suspicious. Do you have any sources with more information concerning the past of Bertelsmann? I'd be very interested in reading more on this subject...
--
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Ok. What if I disable my DNS and connect to an IP directly? (Just teasing, but you get the picture: no rating/censoring system works 100%).
--
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Now, before you write me off as a crackpot and figure that they will side with the censors, think about this. Universal censorship like what is being described here has never been done before. Usually, censorship is relegated to certain types of media (television, radio, periodicals) that the church doesn't have to worry about. Universal censorship will attack them as well, and churches live or die on free speech. From the perspective of a preacher, free speech is not a God-given right. It is a God-given mandate to speak the truth no matter who wants to lock you up for it.
Well, then, what does this have to do with universal censorship of pornography and violence? Read a bible. There's some nasty stuff in there. You have hosts of sexual perversions, bloody wars, dashing babies against rocks--and a book of soft-core porn right in the middle (Song of Songs/Solomon). There is real danger of the bible itself becoming censored.
Beyond that, imagine all the restrictions on internet preaching. Face it, Christians rail against such things as homosexuality and abortion (gambling, line dancing, shock-rockers...) early and often. To a Christian, doing this is guiding people towards the light; to a censor, this could well be hate speech!
The last thing most religions want is a homogenized Internet, because few religions consider themselves mainstream.
--The basis of all love is respect
Okay, so I'm NOT a CS major or anything (nine months left in architecture...), and 99% of everything I know about computers I got from dinking around with them in my spare time.
</DISCLAIMER>
A lot of people have mentioned alternative browsers, alternative protocols, parallel webs, and the like. That's great, but is any of those realistic? (Maybe the new generation of browsers, but I don't see a parallel web sprouting any time soon.)
What about using text-only browsers to bypass rating filters? I know everyone gets all excited about being able to see pictures on their browsers, but people lasted decades content with binaries that had to be downloaded and decoded separately. And most complaints about the rating proposals/censorship issues revolve around the impediment of ideas. Now we can get into a long philosophical argument whether or not pictures are ideas, but for now let's just stick with text, okay? (Besides, pictures are just formatted text anyway.)
My point is: your school/business/whatever using [insert censorware]? As long as you can get a telnet connection to a shell account, it seems that you could just use lynx (or some other UNIX-based text-only browser) to bypass all that junk. You don't get to look at pretty pictures (at least not right away), but the information (read: text) is all still there.
Of course (and here's where the disclaimer comes in), none of this really matters if it is your company's/school's firewall (or equivalent) that is blocking the information, or if you can't get telnet access.
Not that that has ever been a problem for me. Most places I've worked, even the people who knew what they were doing were clueless on blocking telnet access while still providing web access.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
Someone once made the comparison of the Internet to the Wild West. I forget who it was--I believe it was Nicholas Negroponte of Wired and MIT--but with things like this, it seems ever more apt than ever.
The premise of the comparison was that the Wild West of the USA was once wild, untamed, mob rule--yet still on the whole tranquil, at least for the first Europeans who arrived (Davy Crockett types) who also got along with the local Indians. Then the later settlers came in, who promptly began trying to "civilize" everything--imposing rules, laws, institutions and so on, both on the earler settlers and on the Indians living with them. The previous occupants resented this and tried to fight back, but ultimately the settlers--and especially the corporations who followed them--won out through force of numbers and money (and, in the case of the Indians, through guns and disease). This is exactly what is happening here: a large, multinational company--hand in hand with other "interest groups" recently become interested in the Net--are trying to impose their value system on the wild, untamed Internet. I'm as angry as anyone here about it, but let's face it, there is little to be done: money (and power and influence) talks.
Furthermore, those suggesting a free Internet Jr. to run parallel to the current one ignore that, eventually, it too would be swamped by corporate interests--someone would begin using it for profit, and as soon as that day arrives, it's the beginning of the end for Internet Jr. as others begin elbowing their way in. Nevermind the logistics: who would set up the backbones? Where would the bandwidth come from?
The crazy part is that the Internet is already being Balkanized anyway, as China, Singapore, and others are in effect building parallel Internets that only have limited access to the greater Internet--precisely to screen content for political purposes. Censorship is already taking place on a massive scale, and self-censorship--i.e. by not seeking or clicking on subversive or unacceptable content for fear of prosecution or persecution--already takes place as well.
I wish I knew of a solution, and hate being such a pessimist, but my gut feeling tells me we just have to get used to it--or go out and vote for liberal/libertarian parties up the yin-yang, then pray.
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
recently on freshmeat i found an interesting announcment:
the open GRiD project
very interesting. if that project would be successfull then it would improve the power of search engines..but also make censorship very easy. one could get a very accurate messarement how much a page is lets say: right wing, left wing, pornographic, critical towards this and that, etc...
the difference to the self censorship mentioned here is that it would be done not be the person who owns the site but the people who link to that..
mond.
This is a bogus system. It relies on people cooperating with it. Well, don't. Don't supply a rating, or if forced to, give the worse possible rating, even for innocuous content. Then, when people can't get at innocuous content, they'll turn their browser's filtering off.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You don't see what's wrong here?
You say that it's a matter of people only seeing what they want. He points out that, in fact, it a matter of people seeing what the government wants. You say that's OK because it The Law.
So censorship is OK when it a matter of law? If it was suddenly illegal to, say, view all documents critical of this plan, that would be OK because its a law? Just because the German constitution is fscked up doesn't mean that we should accept it, and while we're at it, adopt the same notion of 'rights'.
Go!
Join!
Now!
---
"Who pill da cubby custar?"
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
I have no trouble with the fact that Bertelsman has a shitty online selection, but I despise their attempt to press the internet ever more firmly into their profit driven initiatives and rating-systems.
... Does anybody know of European groups (that we can support) that would lobby against this?
Maybe it's time that us Europeans learn from our US friends to fire off a letter at our representative/government when something like this happens. I have always found the typical US response of "write your congressperson about this" a good idea
We should not leave politicians in their ignorance toward anything that's related to the internet and computers.
This is one of the more obvious pitfalls of self-regulation, and just about all forms of censorship: different people view different things differently. Perhaps it's a cliched example, but should a nude painting be marked as 'porn' due to the nudity? You're never going to get *everyone* to agree on whether something is obscene or not, and considering this is supposed to apply to the whole net, local standards are irrelevent.
I *hope* something like this could never pass, but i fear it could. Even if it were for the most part unenforcable, the worst laws are the ones that aren't consistently enforced. And the part that scares me most about these stories is how 99% of the population will probably never hear about them.
--
'I love it when somebody's own sig describes how much they suck so much
more concisely and elegantly than I possibly ever could.'
hot foreign sheep.
The real problem i have with these rating systems is that they quickly stop being voluntary. What happens if your ISP refuses to host pages which have a rating of more than 5 on violence or some such stupidity ? What happens if your ISP is forced to charge you extra for "self-regulating" your own pages ? We have seen how maovies in the US with a rating higher than R never get shown in theatres or how producers self censor movies to get the R rating (stanley kubricks latest is a fairly good example).
How could the EU ever enfource this? The web is HUGE, and many sites are updated daily. There is no way they could keep an eye on everything. Not to mention most of the Internet is not in their territory. Where do they draw the authority to enact these laws. What will the punishment be for failing to self regulate?
Of course, you would have to strip out the ratings on the content you proxy (else the keywords will be caught anyhow), but then your proxy would be serving unrated content, which is expressly forbidden by the protocol. At best data from your site would blocked because it lacks ratings; at worst your ISP would be pressured to shut you down.
You also suggest:
Actually, I'll bet the sysadmins at Bertelsmann and other large publishing houses wouldn't do anything of the kind. A boycott from independent information providers will do little more than cede the battlefield to corporate interests by default.
And that's what this proposal is really about, isn't it, turning control of the Internet over to moneyed interests? Previous censorship initiatives have been based on ideology; thus, they were doomed to failure because in the end the censors can't all agree on what, exactly, to censor. This proposal seems to be rooted in plain old greed, and it's a lot easier to get people to agree on that.
And if it goes through, it will probably work. The criminal genius in this plan is the byzantine system of keywords. Under this system, any sort of online publishing will require an army of specialists to work out the rating and keep it up to date. Who can afford to retain a staff just for working out keywords? I'll bet Bertelsmann can, and I'll bet they're not too busted up about the fact that many independent publishers can't.
This is a proposal that has to be nipped in the bud. Protests after the fact will be too little too late this time because the protest will fall on deaf ears, if, indeed, it manages to reach any ears at all through the filters. I know that if I were a censor the first thing I would block out would be criticism of censorship.
-r
The latter statement does not follow from the former.
"What is your definition of justice?"
"Justice, Elijah, is that which exists when all the laws are enforced."
Fastolfe nodded. "A good definition, Mr. Baley, for a robot.... A human being can recognize the fact that, on the basis of an abstract moral code, some laws may be bad ones and their enforcement unjust. What do you say, R. Daneel?"
"An unjust law," said R. Daneel evenly, "is a contradiction in terms."
-- Isaac Asimov (The Caves Of Steel)
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
And while I'm not saying that porn or the KKK site should be *banned* or anything of the kind, having this junk that I'm not trying to access show up because I did an "innocent" search doesn't exactly thrill me. And I can certainly understand why it would not thrill a parent.
I understand what free speach means, thankyouverymuch. Show me where I said that the pages should be taken down or made inaccessible? Anyone who is looking for the KKK (odious as I find it) can still type KKK or "white power" or whatever into the search engine, or just type www.kkk.com into the browser and see what happens. But having the KKK page meta-tag "Thor" so search engines will pick it up is about as annoying as XXX spam on a pagan newsgroup because someone happens to be discussing skyclad rituals. Is there, in theory, a connection? Sure. Is it a connection any sane adult would make? Probably not. Does it end up being lovely ammunition for the Christian Right? You betcha. Is it a waste of bandwith? Yep.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
What I was trying to address is the overall unlikeliness of completely free porn being available on a widespread basis. As A. Lizard says on his excellent Child Safety page, free access to dirty pictures is EXTREMELY popular, and most sites can't afford that kind of bandwith unless they charge the free-porn folks extra money. And I don't think most free-porn folks will stay in "business" for long unless they have "better" things to offer to their paying customers. Or at least *more* pictures.
In other words, you wouldn't be likely to get much free porn even IF nobody objected to it. (At least, it's not the direct cause. I suppose you could and probably will argue that it is an indirect cause. *shrug*)
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
The only ways I can see around this are either changing the law to permit porn distribution to minors (not bloody likely) or setting up a free Adult Check service of some sor that was considered valid. Otherwise, it's going to be pay-to-play, in the name of protecting the children, the Church, and the Holy Spirit, world without end, amen.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
First of all, porn sites don't charge money because of "restrictions" -- they charge money a) because they can and they know people will pay, and b) because porn is very popular, and eats lots of bandwith.
Secondly, a workable "first step"/compromise along the lines of what the original AC was proposing would be something like this:
1. Have the
2. Have a
3. Leave the rest of the net alone.
Folks who wanted ordinary net-access, which would include access to
Folks who wanted the
Thoughts? Could this work?
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
On the one hand, censorship is a very bad thing. I think we can all (for the most part) agree on that. And even most "voluntary" systems have the potential to become de facto censorship (look at what's happened to movies thanks to the MPAA rating system, which BTW doesn't tell you anything about what's actually IN the movies
On the other hand, two recent incidents from my own web-surfing make me wish there was something that could be done so that, at the least, search engines don't spit out something that isn't what you're looking for (and that you definitely wouldn't want to BE looking for). And both of these give me some understanding as to why a parent would *want* to use blocking software (silly as I think the stuff is).
Incident #1: I had forgotten the URL to a particular Amber fan-fic page that I like, and I remember that I had found it in the first place using the keyword "Bleys." I somehow ended up with several porno sites in my search results because the url was "http://www.pornsite.xxx/hotpics/bleys/corwin/tee
Incident #2, which I'm actually much more irritated by: I'm a pagan who follows the Norse gods. It's bad enough that some of the Norse pagan sites have a "racialist" slant, but it's even worse when the KKK has Meta-tags on its web-page that include Odin, Thor, and Freya. Can you imagine the impression that some kid doing a research project on Norse mythology would get if he did a web search for Thor and came up with the KKK home page?? (My boyfriend and I discovered this via 2600's web page, which talked about the past hack of the KKK site.)
I have ratings tags on a few of my pages, and I'll put them on ALL of my pages when I finish my move to drak.net. I've got no problems with voluntary standards as long as they remain truly voluntary rather than coercive. And I'd much rather have to self-rate than have the government step and rate for me.
But as far as setting up a standard goes, it's damned if we do and damned if we don't, so to speak. The "chicken breast" problem has already been mentioned, but if you want something more sophisticated, you're going to have to deal with the more "complex" rating systems, and even those won't give you all the info you'd like to have. (Case in point: someone rating the KJV Bible using SafeSurf. *chuckles*)
On the surface, the VCR seems like a good idea, but it was come up with by Solid Oak, a company I wouldn't trust farther than I could throw my station wagon. (They make CyberSitter. Nuff said.) How would they actually like to see "suitable for 13 and up" vs. "suitable for 18 and up" defined? I don't think I want the answer. Again, godhatesfags.com would probably be 13+, while godlovesfags.com would probably be 18+. *sigh*
I wish I could think of some way to cover all the bases here, but there just isn't one. Any possible system (including no system) is open to abuse. Having no system makes it really easy to mis-inform the public or at least the search engines about your content (see above KKK example). OTOH, even a purely voluntary system is likely to cause problems for, say, the gay 15-year-old son of fundie parents, or the sexual abuse victim. (I've talked to plenty of these kids online, and it's not pretty.)
The problem I've always had with ratings meant to protect children is that the parents who have decent relationships with their kids don't need the standards -- they can just say that they'd rather their kids wait to see the movie, read the book, or check out certain kids of Web pages. It's generally the fundie, abusive, or otherwise scary parents who want to keep their kids from accessing certain content. And those tend to be the kids who need the alleged pornography or Satanic sites the most. (Gay teen support groups, Pagan info, sexual abuse survivor sites, you get the idea.)
*sigh* I wish I had a good answer. Unfortunately, I don't. But the questions are important to ask on *both* sides of the issue, rather than just making knee-jerk anti-censorship statements -- tempting as I know that is.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
The brightest minds in the world can't stop a determined spammer from spewing unwanted garbage into the net, so how are these folk going to stop someone who has a need to say "FUCK MY LEADERS" to the government, from doing so?
Ever hang out in news.admin.net-abuse.email before? UUnet can take several months to hunt down a spammer and get their account nuked, and somehow they are going to stop me from posting dirty words?
Look at it from another perspective. When was the last time all the world's government's could agree on anything? I can't think of a single thing. Something like this won't work unless there is 100% cooperation from all who are connected to the Internet.
Actually, I'm going to concede the "Datenschutz" part to you, since I've already gotten some emails that Germany has good privacy laws.
I base my anonymity guidelines on whether I can buy a pre-paid telephone for cash and walk out the store without once ever giving my name. You can't do that in France or England, but you can do it in all the Nordic countries. I tried to get a pre-paid phone in Germany, and was told I could only buy one with proof of residence and a recent telephone bill. I was told by the salesman they send all that information to a collection center, so the police know who has bought which phones, and if the phone is used in a crime they know who bought it.
My German co-workers here are also following the Bertelsmann expansion into the internet, since it is getting quite agressive. But I base my criticisms of them on reports in the print media documenting where the ex-SS and other convicted war criminals ended up after serving their prison sentences. Bertelsmann was at the top of the list, although I suppose you could chalk that up to a company with a good civic conscience.
I belive what Bertelsmann is trying to do goes beyond trying to squeeze more money out of the market. The tactics used are strikingly similar to the arguments used when the SS was set up to enforce a strict moral code wherever the Nazis ruled. They had their own judicial branch, and documented many of their prosecutions of people for "thought crimes" and "anti-aryan attitudes". There is a strong outcry here on slashdot, and hopefully there will be a similar outrage in the real world press to stop this before it gets turned into law. But this time they are using the panic buttons of "protecting the children" instead of "eugenics".
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
So long as I have the individual option of receiving unfiltered data
You have to go and read some of the proposals. They are aimed squarely at NOT allowing any individual the option of unfiltered data.
All the data flowing around the tier 1 and tier 2 data carriers will be filtered based on content rating. Unrated content, or content from a site on a blacklist for mis-rating, will be dropped before it gets to any ISP customer.
This will force all web site and other content sources to provide content tags in thier data flows, outside of any encryption or proprietary format. This proposal looks to the Internet Standards and Open Source models to provide an idea of how to implement censorship. Just like every web page has HTML tags in it, and IP packets have a destination and source address and packet type, they want every packet processed have a "content rating" tag. That tag will have to be present in order for a router to process it, just like every packet hitting a router today has a specific format.
The timescale proposed by the EC is a bit optimistic, but that is just a timescale to implement some laws. The technology will lag until they start arresting the CEOs of some large ISPs and throwing them in jail for "contributing to the distribution of child pr0n". Then all of a sudden they will all start to filter your internet for you (for your protection, of course).
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
A lot of what I know about Bertelsmann has been documented in several magazines in Europe. The one I can think of is a 20+ page article in the French "L'Express" (a slightly left leaning right wing weekly that prides itself on long researched articles with plenty of detail and facts) [as I write this, I realise they are owned by Hachette, a direct competitor in both print and internet].
/. for a day :-) ]
They are also punted about by the conspiracy theorists, who study any connection with Bavaria and powerful groups based there. Tends to generate a lot of material, most of which I discount.
I also know of them since they are a competitor in the internet world, especially picking up consulting jobs advising large scale communication projects, which is where I make all my money. So I tend to read what I can about them. They are considered "conservative" by my Bavarian friends, who I consider to be the most conservative people I know. Their views on "self-censorship" are widely known in Bavaria, and stir up old memories and a lot of discussion. They also employ more people there than BMW and the beer industry combined.
the AC
[As I read back over what I've posted, I'm beginning to get the idea I should go find my flame retardant undies, or perhaps not read
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Various things in Michael and Jamie's well written article need some clarification for our American audience.
Anonymity. This is one of my regular problems working in Europe. France has codified into law outlawing all anonymity, and has even criminalized attempting to hide your identity from any governmental organisation. This is one of the remnants of the Vichy government, and was kept by the domestic surveillance DST and SCSSI services. Other countries with a history of terrorist acts on their soil have also outlawed anonymity (England and Germany), but Italy and Norway allow it.
Bertelsmann. The European Commission (DG13) created a budget of 10 Million Euros to study "the threat to national laws by the internet, and methods to enforce national laws within European borders" (paraphrased from memory). Bertelsmann picked up the entire E10million (no euro symbol in ISO8859, yet) through their contacts with an "old boys network" controlling DG XIII [*disclaimer*, this could be sour grapes, I helped a client bid on the project, and there were 12 shortlisted big companies all locked out]. They have created a draft proposal designed to protect all their interests as the largest publisher in Europe, as well as a major shareholder in dozens of ISPs including AOL. Bertelsmann also controls several of the largest publishing houses in the U.S., and is the largest single owner of copyright material in the U.S.
If other posters start using inflammatory terms like "Hitler", "Nazism", and "Censorship", it could be justified in this slashdot thread.
Bertelsmann made its fortune during the Nazi's rise to power in the 1930s, as the publisher of the Nazi manifests. They gained the favor of the Nazi party by being the first publisher to openly embrace "self-censorship" when the Nazi party wasn't yet powerful enough to create laws. They purged their entire publishing line of questionable materials (what we might call free-thinking), then taunted other publishing houses to do the same.
When the Nazis came to power, all the publishers defending "free press" or "freedom of speech" were put out of business, and their facilities were given to Bertelsmann. This gave Bertelsmann 90% of the publishing market during the war.
After WWII, the Bertelsmann empire came through mostly intact, and used Marshall plan reconstruction funds to rebuild its antiquated facilities into a modern (for the 1950s) business. There was only a few prosecutions of Bertelsmann upper management for war crimes (but only in conjunction for military activities), and Bertelsmann became a major haven for ex-Nazis looking for a new life after the war.
Back to the problem at hand.
There is a realisation that the internet can route around most problems related to network connectivity. But by crafting restrictive laws tied into the licensing of tier 1 & 2 internet carriers (all in europe are considered telcos, and licensed accordingly), then effective censorship can be imposed. There are a few technical work arounds, but for every hackish proposal of IPSec tunnels, there is an easier government response of pressure on the license holders.
So, all you slashdotters should be afraid, if you want to continue to have free (as in liberty) and unlimited access to the internet. Once the EU gets a handful of workable laws on the books, the U.S. and Australia will follow suit. I would also expect every militaristic/fascist/religious government to take notice as well.
Expect within 10-15 years you will look back on the '90s as the golden years before the big evil governments woke up and took back control. Not only do we have to fight this at the law making level, we also have to create bigger and better protocols and workarounds to make it impossible for tier 1 & 2 providers to filter content.
Ok, go back to sleep now.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Web content self regulation by the hosting ISP is a much more threatening form of censorship than government regulation.
/could/ make it all the way to the top.
A user could sue the government claiming Civil Rights and Freedom of Speech violations if the government were to start censoring content causing a huge lawsuit that
On the other hand, if a user is forced to sign an agreement with the ISP regarding acceptable web content, the user has no avenue for complaining if the agreement is breached. They have no choice but to follow the private regulations set by the ISP. Additionally, ISPs have a much smaller contingency allowing them a better opportunity to really scrutinize their user's content.
Because of the nature of democratic due process, the private sector can always put more stringent controls on industry than the public sector.
I noticed the first post asked what can we do about this.. and I saw a few responces.. but nothing specific enough. Here are my specific versions of what can we do about this:
What can we do to stop the legislation associated to this? I am an American and don't vote for the people who are imposing this law, but if there are phone calls to make or letters to write I would be happy to help. Who do I harass?
How much of this will be non-legislative cowaperation from the other companies at the conferance? And what can we do to fight that?
Linux/Apache may own the server world (as in NT gone) before this is implemented.. could we make support for the protocoll modificatios a highly non-standard, difficult to install patch? (Linus/Apache Team save us! )
Can will hurt Bertelsmann (boycotts?). How can I make shure I don't buy anyhting that comes thourgh them? Would someone like to set up a FAQ or site on how to avoid givng them any money. Could we watch them very closly and gradually make the net anti-Bertelsmann? I notices a link to there holdings here.
Analysis?
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It would seem that the Internet community needs an appropriate channel for its hate; therefore, I introduce to it an idea I'd, uh, "heard somewhere":
Distributed contract assassinations (and other malicious acts) through the Internet - it'd be called "eBounty."
Take, for example, Jens Bertelsmann. There are a significant number of people who love the Internet, who love freedom, and who wouldn't mind seeing this evil man die horribly, if only to delay Ze Master Plan by a decade or two.
Through the eBounty distributed contract assassination system, each of us would be able to anonymously contribute $.02, three-fitty, or a euro or two, whatever one felt necessary, to the acceleration of UberSturmFuhrer Bertelsmann's demise.
Persons of noted evil would have their own sections, so that acts short of a complete whacking could be subsidized on eBounty as well. For example, Bill Gates|Pieing|Lemon Custard would be its own topic.
Following the system popularized on eBay, when a significant collection had been taken up to make it worth the time and notoriety involved with the hit, an anonymous er, "buyer" would accept the contract, and perform the hit. Upon significant evidence that the person in question had been hit, the buyer would tap his collection fund from the anonymous eBounty Hong Kong chop account, and go on his/her merry way.
eBounty would, bien sur, run on the latest Red Hat distro, on a Beowulf cluster formed from PCjrs and XTs networked together in Peace Corp countries.
_____
The antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech.
Really. Someone needs to jsut kick the peg out from under our little inverse pyramid here. Organizations like that can get in line to lick my nether-regions, right behind the banking system, waking up before noon, and the Republican party.
Simply put: idiot proofed broswers. Use net-nanny, etcetera (which locked out Hotmail on my high school computers, BTW), and just have the software scan by keyword or what have you. Our world does NOT need t o be regualted: if you force that stuff on people, they are going to get resentful. THe only reason no one has put these conservative freaks out of their misery is they're not worth the bullet, and they do have a point from time to time. THe point isn't kids finding porn online, folks. The point is that THE PARENTS ARE LETTING THEM GET TO IT> The responsibility, the same as Columbine, lies with the parents. Not Manson, not anrachists, not opinionated MFs like myself. We live in an era of zero-responsibility, and those who don't want it are trying to burn the most visible targets. Sites like mine that say "f#ck" a lot.
So the real quesiton here is this:
Why aren't they putting the blame where it belongs?
Seems like the real goal is cordon off the wierdos so that more business gets done on the Net. More e-commerce sales.
.com and .net open for anything. That way, we are only censoring those who want to be censored, and there's still plenty of room for freedom.
But we have a different paradigm that we could use instead of censorship - zoning. Instead of filters and what not, use zones. And instead of cordoning off porn and other controversial content, cordon off the stuff you want to protect:
Use www.XXX.bus for business purposes
www.xxx.chd for children's net.
www.xxx.lib for libraries,
etc.
But leave
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/net/easy/fn/
You can still visit the system and see what has been (until September 30, 1999):
telnet://freenet-in-c.cwru.edu
Why not just require all porn sites to register .xxx domains? I know .xxx doesn't exist yet, but wouldn't that be a much easier way for adults to do their business without worrying about the kids? Hell it would probably take only a few dozen lines of C++ code to parse the domain name for .xxx and to put a popup that says hey kid, you aren't old enough yet! That isn't censorship since an adult can just type in a password in the browser and access the site without any trouble.
---Got Coffee?---
Try this... This is actually a step in a conspiracy. The first step was to use Australia as a testing site. And hell! They pull it off in DownUnder! Now the EU and next USA. After that, they can force everyone else on the world to fall in line or they pressure them... just a thought, and dont send the goons after me... and when is the last time a government really listen to the ppl? we complained in Australia, but to what purpose? the law still got through. Is the democratic system really democratic? i dont think so...
What is the point of providing commentary like this if the readers demand no anonymity from the writer? Not very ironic that an AC would ask.
Michael, stay in the background!
I KNEW IT!!!! Yanni IS the Anti-Christ!!!
Bite My Ziff, Davis!
======
"Cyberspace scared me so bad I downloaded in my pants." --- Buddy Jellison
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Once again I feel the urge to post the link to 1984 and let those who may not have been interested before have a chance at it again. Mr. Orwell has it right it seems he only got the dates wrong. Wannabe members of the "Inner-Party" need not bother as they already know whats coming. To them I say bite me. To all others I say good luck and I'll see ya in the Ministry of love. Long live Goldstein.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
Add to this the more robust tracking that the DOJ/DOD are pressing the FCC into, allowing the would'be O'Brians of the world to keep an eye on "thought-crimes". Maybe it sounds paranoid people but that doesnt mean that "THEY" aren't out to get us.
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
I feel the same as you I think for the most part, gov. has been sticking its nose in the wrong business.
Here is a thought to chew on....
Many of the arguments made by this or that political party is "yadda yadda is bad because it's un-natural". Well, in nature when a nest is disturbed by an outside entity said nest is often abandoned by the parent and the offspring die as a result. Is that different from what we are seeing in our human world?
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."
Your Rights Online could become a Internet Freedom of Speech resource, with a repository for contact details for people involved in Internet Content Regulation. Perhaps such details could be included as part of the course in the headers of YRO stories. There would of course have to be some guidelines, for example:
b) Merely posting several emails repeatedly will reduce the idea of overwhelming objection to such content policies.
Again, AI has extensive guidelines for this and I'm sure we can modify these for the Internet.
anthonyclark is right that with Big Business Big Money the odds are against us, but if we can demonstrate that this is a hugely unpopular move from the point of view of the online community (and I don't just mean slashdot) then we hit them where it hurts the most: popularity polls.
There are a couple of solutions to this. One is to say fuck DNS, privately distribute IPs around via email, usenet, and links on webpages so that we're impossible to keep track of.
Another is to go back to the older ways: local dialup BBSes, which link up with each other and not the rest of the internet, sidestepping all of this because they're not using the backbones.
The third is to build some strong encryption into webservers and browsers. Send the get command in the clear. The server checks your browser, and if it's good, sends you the real info, otherwise puts out a little fake page or just a 404 error.
We don't need to be richer than them, we're the ones that make the technologies they're trying to use.
Communication is only possible between equals
Here are a few thoughts on this conference...
A couple of points to be noticed:
1. This entire thing has been organized by a private "foundation". That probably means we are safe from ultra-stupid and clueless laws and regulations, since the proceedings of this conference will not have the same weight as if it was, say, organized by the EU Parliament of Strasbourg. So far, this is one good point.
2. On the other hand... the foundation in question is the *Bertelsmann* Foundation. For those of you who are not in Europe, Bertelsmann is one of the largest publisher in Germany (and also in Europe, and in the world). Think Rupert Murdoch with a German accent, and you have a pretty good idea of what Bertelsmann is. Now, this a certified Very Bad Thing (tm), since German publishers are notoriously conservative and stuck-up. And, AFAIK,
Bertelsmann is no exception to the rule, unfortunately.
That does not mean German people (in general) are
conservative and stuck-up -- just that their press is. (If you are German, don't flame me, I have very good German friends that I respect and care about -- thank you very much).
3. Another Very, Very, Very BAD Thing (tm) is the roster of "experts" that are on board. We have a *huge* bunch of politicos, law "experts" (read: clueless lawyers) and, worse than this, "law-enforcement experts" -- with a huge contingent of German people. Again, I don't want to appear critical of Germany, but we have to remember it was Bavarian police officers who prosecuted CompuServe for "porn" and also tried to block German users from the XS4LL Dutch web site and access provider because of some leftist/anarchist web site there.
Oh, and we also have a representative from... Microsoft Corporation Europe (Shock! Horror! The Number of the Beast!!) =)
On the plus side, we also have one (count them, people, "one" !) representative from the ACLU. and Esther Dyson, which, I suspect, is more interested in pushing ICANN than really defending free speech. Ouch. Click here for a complete list of experts.
In summary, we have a probably conservative foundation, putting a panel of "experts", made up of "law-enforcement officers" (policemen, to remain polite). That panel of expert is going to convene in a city and a state of Germany known for its heavy-handed tactics against the 'net and its conservative Catholicism. Draw your own conclusions (DYOC).
That does not smell good people. Not by a long shot. I'll keep an eye on this.
Just my US$ 0.02...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
In away this alternative already exists, https. If everyone starts serving their content from https servers how does filtering work? Since any rating information within the page is encrypted you have to decrypt the packets to see what is being sent. This is bad news for e-commerce, if packets are thrown away because they aren't understood or the encryption used is trivial, who is going to be happy about sending private info across the net?
... to transmit what ever information I want? Designing a reliable transmission protocol on top of UDP is really rather trivial.
.sig here.
What happens if sites are rated according to IP address, this then fails for virtual servers, multi user services etc.
Finally, in the event that they do this, what is to stop me designing and implementing my own protocol on top of TCP, UDP,
No matter what it looks like, there isn't a
No matter what it looks like, there isn't a
IANAL, but according to annotations to the Constitution available at FindLaw, in 1st amendment annotations (under Government and Power of the Purse)
This means that no public service can be limited by the use of the first amendment if the reason for the cutoff was the exercise of the rights. So the US government cannot cut off MCI, etc. from government services (the internet) by forcing them to use these rating standards. So it seems we may be safe here in the US. At least we can't be forced into it by the gov. ISPs, however, may have a different view of that.
why should adults be restricted to playing chutes and ladders(what ever the game is) if as an adult i want to go see a movie where everyone dies thats my choice if i want to go to a website(rotten) that has pictures of dead people on it that is also my choice so are watching skin flix and pornography sites. I say parents should regulate their offspring of DOOM and let us (adults?) do what we want.
THATS RIGHT!!
BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) owns Windham Hill Group which in turn supplies us with Yanni. The entire rating system is a secret ploy to support their evil elevator music empire. (insert maniacal laughing here).
More disturbingly (and seriously) though, take a look at exactly who this company is via their descriptive (but less complete) Company Profile or their 97/98 annual report. They have a major (~50%) stake in everything from barnesandnoble.com to AOL and CompuServe in Western Europe (the scoundrels even own The Science Fiction Book Club). I'm guessing that this ownership of almost every type of media outlet will give them some significant sway in their bid to play thought police and may be why they can make everyone jump.
Perhaps the European Union will come up with categories like "Aryan Self-defence" or "Christian Truth -- Homosexuality" that people would actually use, but I rather suspect that political correctness will interfere with effective lawmaking here.
One of the arguments in the article was:
1. Self-Rating schemes will cause controversal speech to be censored
I think what you're talking about fits this category.
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
This isnt direct to the topic, but close. Please try to keep an open mind.
Something like this shouldn't be possible. A confrence like this shouldn't have been able to get past the random neuron connection in someone's mind stage. The problem here it seems is the eurpoean unification.
When you unify, you also promote a centralization of power. This is a Bad Thing(tm). I see it here in the US, and now in europe. The federal government is taking more and more power, a centralized power, where that power should be left most entirely to the individual states.
Now the world has taken it a step further: The EU. We now have a trend of entire countries themselves unifying under a common flag, of sorts. And whether the EU has a great amount of power or not is not the point. The point is that the power is centralized. It's taken father away from the individual. The more people you have to rule, the less the individual matters. This inevitably leads to assaults on civil liberties, because what do civil liberties matter but to the individual?
It seems rather unavoidable anymore, though. With greater internationalization, there's always going to be an inevitable push toward commonality between nations This can be achieved through unification.
Perhaps the age of empires is at hand once again.
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
>So what can we do? Hassle them! Hassle them to death! Make sure that every Euro politician knows that >he'll have to face election as "The guy who's trying to censor the Internet". Or even better "The guy who's >trying to let Brussels censor the Internet for us". Politicians hate that stuff -- anything which appears to be >"complicated" or "unpopular" tends to be avoided.
>Start creating the impression that it is technically impossible to censor the Internet. If I were really >Machiavellian, I would suggest "extending" the META tag formats into a million and one incompatible >versions, so that the keyword approach wouldn't work. But just suggesting to non-techie bureaucrats that >it's a technological nightmare will suffice to raise millions of "issues" which slow the whole thing down.
Ok, sounds fair enough, but let me introduce some problems.. I watched what happened when the Australia ISP's and the EFA (Electronic Frontier of Australia) attempted stop the Australia Government from blocking porn. Here are some things i think you should take into note before taking any action like this.
1. Politians know as much about the internet as the typical user of it... that being squat. Does that effect the way they handle the situation... No. When you tell a politian that if he votes for this, that you will attempt to make his re-election impossible, he wont really care.. the reason for this is that he knows that most people dont have a clue about what goes into blocking porn. Thus he knows that if he is seen to be doing the right thing by voting for this legislation, then he will. The Australian politians did, hell most of them didnt even look at the legislation when they passed it, they where told it was a good thing, thus they passed it. Australian ISP's tryed to educate these politians but failed.
2. When you go out to make someone thing that something is really technical and almost impossible to do, they aint gonna care. They dont have to do it... the service providers do... the content providers do.. they dont.
3. Politians will do anything that makes them look as if they are caring for the community. Thus like in the case of the Australian content legislation, they will ignore all research into the matter and pass the legislation anyways.
I think what we need to come up with, more than anything else, is publicity, if any of those above tactics are going to work, you need to world to know about them, that is the thing that was missing with the Australia legislation, there was too little publicity, and because of that i feel that the legislation got through.
Nothing will be achieved without we worlds media paying carefull attention to this, this needs to be given serious air time.
On the technical side of things... people call the internet the World Wide Wait at the moment, i dont want to see what there calling it when everything there viewing has to go through proxy servers/"content protection servers" on the major backbones. I dont thing there is a computer in the world you could stick on a OC12 and get it to check every page that went through that lovely biyt of fiber.
The Reality in which we choose to live in really sucks
Anyway...
<RANT>
The more that stuff like this is posted on
For me, as an individual, to effect change in the government (state, local, or world) I have to be responsible for my actions and my thoughts. I choose how I will be treated. It's like the Rush song says, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice".
</RANT>
I know. What does this have to do with anything, you ask?
Everything.
The way I see things, we are deluding ourselves by thinking that firing off a letter to our Legally Authorized Representative(tm) will solve the problem. We, as a community, need to do more than that. The problem here is one of focus.
Let's use a programming example. I'll use Java because It's what I (sort of) know.
Let's say that you have one window who is in charge of several other windows. When the controlling window does something, it notifies the other wondows through the observable interface. These other windows are then free to act however they see fit (within the constraints of the program, of course). These windoes then can return focus to the parent window and forget what's going on - IOW, there is a contract between all of the windows to Do The Right Thing. Since that contract is there, one can be reasonably sure that no harm will befall the system (crosses fingers)
Politics is similar. Kind of.
Let's replace the parent window with the Politician of Your Choice(POYC). Replace the child windows with you, the POYC's constituancy. Now, it should hold true that the POYC takes a stance on an issue or drafts a bill or whatever, then notifies you via the media interface. You then take whatever actions are necessary (in this case firing off a letter of signing a petition) and return focus to the POYC. One would hope that the POYC would, with whatever checks and balances are in place(replace contract in the previous example with this) Do The Right Thing. Sadly, this is not the case.
When we put the ball in the POYC's court, the correct thing for him[1] to do would be to act on your behalf; after all that's why he is there in the first place. Problem is, he can choose to act on behalf of whoever has the most money.
This is most assuredly a Bad Thing(tm).
We, as a community, can no longer rely on the POYC, or our own Special Interest Group(SIG) to get the job done. Time and again, they have prooven that they respond to whichever entity has the most hard currency to throw into a debate. Therefore, I say that we should act in a manner consistent with our hackish nature. IOW, ignore the politicos.
Huh? Am i mad? Maybe. Read on.
Why does Slashdot exist? "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."(tm) We read news, we read about funny things, we read about articles that now fall into the Your Rights Online catagory.
But that's not where the power is.
We read about the NSAkey fiasco. We read about the CDA. We read about UCITA. We get mad, we get fired up, we're gonna Do Something(tm)! We fire of letters, we send mail, we flame.
But that's not where the real power is.
A story is published. Let's say it's the Window's 2000 test site. We check out the link. Thousands of us over the course of a few minutes. Hundreds of thousands of us in a day. The site dies. Repeatedly.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the real power of the internet is. That is where our power as a community lay.
If we are going to effect a change in this Brave New World (tired tm), then we have to do just that. Just do it. Forget the POYC, forget the SIGs, forget the government. Just do it. Play by their rules. If they want to take you freedom, then take it back. Start the fscking revolution, already! There will be millions supporting you. I am one of them. I am very afraid of any government, but I also know that the beat way to defeat ones fear is to face it, challenge it head on, and crush it.
Just my $1.50.
This post is rated as 'safe for all ages and mindsets'
Apologies for being so long.
[1]he or she in theory, he in practice
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
I'd like to think that I'll get some feedback on this one, yall help me out a little here:
1) Lets suppose for second, that I have a web page, completely clean, except that I also have a small collection of tabulature for bass guitar, some of which happens to contain explicit lyrics (the likes of Korn). Will I be forced to rate my whole page based on the content of one song?
2) On a somewhat wider view, do all these "protect the children" organizations not realize that the only reason any of this is an issue is because the net, today, is as overused as a babysitter as TV was 5 years ago? When are these people going to wake up and realize that todays youth are all going to go to hell in a handbag because the PARENTS aren't PARENTS anymore, they scew, they pro?create (is this still a good word for that?) they let some form or other of machine raise the child, and then everyone wonders why the hell things like the shooting in CO happened. Its because children can leave the barrels of a shotgun they've sawed off on thier bed without them being noticed. Lets put the blame where it belongs. Am I out of line here?
3) Back to the adults: If governments don't believe that thier adult subjects can look at a page, and decide if they find it offensive or not, and handle the situation in a mature fashion, then maybe we are in more trouble than we think. Soon we will all be forced to sit in little metal tanks and consume only input that the governments deem acceptable. This has to end right here, does it not?
So lets put the blame where it belongs. Parents don't raise children anymore (my apologies to those of you who do, I know there are still a few of you out there, my neighbor is one of them, God bless you for believing in disciplen an reponceablity), they leave it up to other people, and other things. Parents *should* stick thier heads in the door and smile and say good night, or go to bed to thier children, even when they are in hichschool. Parents should read to young children, not put them in front of the computer unsupervised. I'll ask one more time: Am I out of line? Protect the Children Groups: Do you jobs, and go after the parents, not the public. The world can't raise children, thats a parents job!
The different reports on the Munich Conference have generated an enormous number of comments. Most of the individuals posting have expressed their strong displeasure with the system being suggested. Many other people are expressing their desire to protest the implementation that has been described.
From my perspective, the wedding cake model that is being proposed does not seem particularly onerous. So long as I have the individual option of receiving unfiltered data, I am not overly concerned with the implementation of this type of system. If this type of system is put in place, I will still have the option of customizing a filter routine to suit my own personal preferences.
There are two separate cases in which the adoption of this type of system might start having real effects on the information that I am able to view. The first would be when an upstream provider such as my local ISP or a local school board chose to implement a filter using a templating system different from the one that I would normally chose. My expectation is that unless a local government chose to legislate the mandatory adoption of a restrictive filter, most ISP's would not have any interest in implementing this type of system. The only exception might be an ISP that was attempting to brand itself based on a specific ideological bent such as a "Baptist Net", or something similar. The case of a school board or a library council is more difficult to second guess. My belief, however, is that having these issues out in the open where they can attract frank and open debate is probably for the best.
A second potential problem would be that of self censorship. I can not say with certainty whether content providers would chose to "tone down" the information that they present in order to reach a wider potential audience. However, if they do chose to do so, then that is their choice to make.
The important thing to note is that the system that has been proposed so far is completely voluntary. The choice of whether or not to use a filter or whether or not to rate a site is left completely to the discretion of individuals. What we are seeing on slashdot is a backlash from so called libertarians computer geeks who are opposing the development of an open standard for ratings technologies. This seems somewhat incongruous to me. YMMV
In any case, launching a massive protest against this type of project isn't going to go anywhere. I consider myself pretty liberal on issues such as privacy, ratings, and the like. However, I fail to see the danger in the system that is being suggested. My guess is that any dramatic protests are only likely to get the participants dismissed as cranks and tarring more moderate supporters by association. The time to protest is if/when the government chooses to mandate a nationwide filtering system to clamp down on unacceptable ideas.
Here in the US, thankfully, we don't have to worry too much about this. Subscribers in other parts of the world have a lot more pressing concerns in this area. I apologize for a somewhat US centric bias to this posting.
richard
>Start creatng the impression that it is technically impossible to censor the Internet.
Seems to me,this will in all likelihood become true. Someone will embed crypto in IP packets, and you'll not be able to read the resulting datastream unless you have the key. Or one of a million other subtle ways. What about dual-use data? Sure it happens to be a porn picture if you process if as a GIF, but I am using the byte stream as a randomizer. That's what my clients use it for too? So sorry those bytes happen to align that way...
On the other hand, if authors are to self-regulate, the first time one of the authors labels his content in a way which disagrees with the "social experts" ("it's not porn, it's art"). then we go merrily skipping off to the Supreme Court.
-- "Vote Democrat. Because the current crop of conservatives are just bugnut crazy."
If the governments of the world decide to regulate website content, why not invent a new transport type that conventional browsers can't access.
Maybe call it httpe for hypertext transport protocol explicit. Require browser authors who implement the transport to include and EULA that keep kids away.
I've seriously considered putting up a naked jpeg on my homepage, just to keep kids away. I don't think unsupervised kids belong on the internet.
At first the web was accessible to college students. Eventually it'll be dumbed down for the common populace. Its sad.
Realities are created. They are active, not passive. They are dynamic not static.
So what will probably happen? Yeah, you're right. Megacorps and mental slavery. I am not blind to reality.
But as Voltaire said (big ol' paraphrase here):
"I despise what you have to say, but I will fight to my last breath your right to say it."
Or, for a more recent quote from (the very cool) Babylon 5:
Torturer: You know, I will just keep torturing you until I get what I want. Face reality. I will beat you. You can't win.
Sheridan: Yes I can. Every time I say 'no'.
So I say fight.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center has released "Filters & Freedom: Free Speech Perspectives on Internet Content Controls". The report is a collection of articles from anti-censorship organizations such as Peacefire, the ACLU, and the Internet Free Expression Alliance. The report is available from Amazon.
Don't forget that what is created, especially by committee, will be incredibly full of bugs and holes. An hour after the censorship is in place, hackers will have had their fun and the new system would be in flaming ruin. Of course, that doesn't mean I want to see this kind of draconian thought police BS go on. The internet is one of the greatest things for the free exchange of ideas ever, and I would hate to see it "consumerized".
How could anyone vote for someone who's wife can't grasp the concepts behind the first amendment?
I'm noth saying that there aren't more evil than Tipper. But i don't care why she ignored the first amendment.
It seems that the point here is to set up a censorship at the ISP level, that is, making the ISP 100% responsible for the contents it hosts.
:o) ) photograph of you (or your girlfirend) on a website, won't you be happy to have a way to stop it ??
:o)
Fortunately, this is exactly what has been deemed as impossible recently by French legislation.
There was quite a gossip in Frogland about this case : a free web-hoster (Valentin Lacambre, founder of the great altern.org, an anti-commercial web-hosting service) had been sued by top model Estelle Halliday because a website on his server featured intimate photographs of her.
This trial was taken very seriously by french internauts, and made its way through media coverage and government intervention (as usual in France). Premier Lionel Jospin and Minister of Justice (=~ Attorney General) Elisabeth Guigou expressed concern over the case.
Finally, a new law was voted by the parliament, wich carries more or less the following statement:
"All in all, the one who is accountable for an on-line publication is the one who authored it. The ISP is only held responsible if he deliberately refused to shut down access to this document, even after being told to do so by justice."
Now all of you Anglo-saxon libertarians will frown upon this : "This still gives censorship power to government, after justice decision." It may be so, but tell me : if someone ever puts a very private (
Moreover, the necessity of justice intervention for closing down a web site/page is much better than the Munich conference project, where "censorship" is decided from what the ISP sees as "dangerous" for his audience (ie his profits), and where any ISP that does not filter sexual/violence contents by default is exposed to serious trouble.
Freedom of expression is well-established in the EU. Most european countries (Britain and southern countries put aside, maybe) have well-balanced laws on the subject. The French jurisprudence over this case provides a much better model for law enforcement over the web than Bertelsmann & Co.'s project.
Oh, BTW... maybe I didn't read well, but I did not see France Telecom anywhere in the paper... I think wee little froggies may be reasonably optimistic over the Munich draft.
Thomas Miconi
Karma Police - enforcing peace of mind by all possible means.
6. Self-Rating Schemes will be used only at each extreme of the spectrum, by those who have something to gain by being at that end of the spectrum.
Run a XXX site? Damn right I'm going to rate my site an 11 out 10 - people search for the baddest of the bad. Or if click-through advertisers start limiting their ads to host pages with acceptable ratings, you can bet every page will suddenly be rated "suitable for a 2 year old". Like it or not, the inherent decency of mankind (or what little does exist) will by and large go straight out the window once the almighty dollar makes an appearance.It's easy to fall into this trap. It's not so easy to get out.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
All they have to do is convince one or two of the major backbones (MCI Worldcom, Sprint...) to require in their contract that any ISP signing on with them must enforce the rating system or risk being cut off from the internet.
Then the ISP requires in their contract with you terms that would, if the government tried to foist them off on us, be found unconstitutional (Which is why the CDA and CDAII were unceremoniously shot down.)
Then they twist the arms of the major search engines, so that they will not index any page that does not conform to the rating system. Compromising the entire internet would be as simple as this.
Of course, the government thinks "The Internet" equals "The World Wide Web" at least at the moment. They haven't yet made transmitting encrypted content illegal (Check your local laws and regulations if you're outside the states, may differ for you, if so, please post and let us know.)
I think there will be a division in the Internet of the future. You'll have the current structure, which will consist of homogenized "Appropriate for viewers of all ages" tripe and dominated by commercial entities. Then you'll have an underground Internet which will be built by people who have left all that behind in disgust. This Internet will either run on top of the current internet in the form of an invitation-only VPN (Quite feasible with the higher speed lines becoming available) or done with dial-up hardware of various sorts (Possibly even store-and-forward only.) Being effectively a private entity, it will be beyond regulation of the ISP's.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Wouldn't this be a good idea? An internet in the internet so to speak. Protected from clueless people and governments. One could put encrypted files at ones ISP and label it with something harmless. Everyone who is a member of this undergroutnd internet could DL it and decrypt...
Just a wild idea...
"A friend and I were talking this past week about a "parallel net" whereby all the same protocols would be used, but this net would be private - ie, not connected to the "World Wide Web" as such."
Aren't these called Intranets? Laugh. I am funny.
One a dead serious note, it has been proven time and again that if you concede any freedom, more are sure to follow. Censorship, for instance, is highly scalable. Say a lot of people are bothered by you burning your national flag. Various groups who belong to the extreme right lobby for laws that forbid your burning the flag. However, flag burning is covered under the First Amendment. Part of your Freedom of "Speech" (or, more specifically, expression in general), as it were. Now.. unless the judicial branch declares this to be unconstitutional, you have set a legal precedent which renders the First Amendment meaningless. So then a few people decide that they're sick of seeing naked babies' asses on TV commercials (I damn sure know I am). So they ban that as child pornography. After that it's your hate speech, and other controversial forms of expression. Pretty soon, after every group has contributed to the big boiling pot of things that need to be censored because they offend someone, you probably can't talk anymore for fear of offending someone and thereby having charges pressed on you by said someone.. and off to jail you go. After all, if you consider what everyone combined deems to be "offensive", there isn't a whole lot left, is there? That's because we're all very diverse. "In for a penny, in for a pound". Personally, I'm not stupid enough to stick my foot into the pool. It looks like pirahna (sp.?) are in there.
~ Kish
"First of all, porn sites don't charge money because of "restrictions" -- they charge money a) because they can and they know people will pay, and b) because porn is very popular, and eats lots of bandwith."
Let's analyze the above statement from the post I am replying to, and the statement below, from the post it was replying to:
"It already costs like crazy to access most porn, either because the sites just charge a lot, or because they are free sites implementing a form of self-rating that involves you paying money to have an "Adult Check ID" or something equally ridiculous."
You notice that "or" statement? You must have a lot of trouble coding in, well, just about any language, or even using certain search engines (much less comprehending English) if you can't figure out what I meant. I said, quite explicity, that EITHER the sites already charge a lot a la "they know people will pay" OR that accessing the site costs you money because of something like "Adult Check ID".. the latter of which was the primary focus of that paragraph or so.
~ Kish
Sorry, I just get aggravated when people misinterpret what I say. It happens too often, for no particular reason. Heee..
As far as free porn sites not staying in "business" goes.. The entire reason why they exist is because they are sponsored by more costly commercial porn sites. The commercial big boys all contribute to keeping the little guys around because a) free sites are so damn popular, as you pointed out and b) a lot of people "wanting more" will visit the commercial links that are, well, all over the place. This is a perfectly fine set-up for me. If porn sites want to charge, good for them. If free sites want to have a couple dozen sponsors, yippee. If any of them want to have an "Adult Check ID", @#$! them!
I think everyone is missing the point: Instead of banning pornography on the Internet, we should ban Java/JavaScript on porn sites. All those popups and Applets really piss me off. Ha!
~ Kish
I just wish that parents would take the responsibility upon themselves for once. It's not like the Internet is the only way to find porn. If some kid wants some porn, how likely do you think it is that he will be unable to acquire it, even without a computer? I don't think I've ever met a kid who over "severely deranged and warped" by being exposed to pornography, much less transformed into a "maniacal blood-thirsting psycho-killer". Most kids would rather watch violent horror movies, anyway (not that they don't include some porn a lot of the time). I've watched some of the sickest things imaginable, and the worst thing I've ever done is sit in front of my computer all day. I'm surely a "bad element". People should realize that things that supposedly "warp your fragile mind" only "warp" people who were f!cked up to begin with. They didn't need any inspiration, or even an excuse. It happens.
I think the world starting to turn to sh!t about the time people began asserting that sexuality was inherently evil. How can anyone think such repulsive thoughts of a clearly natural act? Just because it causes pleasure doesn't mean its wrong. Where are all of these Puritan parents and law-makers coming from?
~ Kish
Although it is a good and feasable concept, the fact is that once any sort of regulation starts on the internet, it is only a short jump to stricter regulation. Already the Internet has exemplified the sort of unburdened learning and experimentation that has never been seen before. As soon as this sort of regulation is put in place, this capacity is diminished, and will eventually be lost.
It is my oppinion that although the Internet provides a vast educational tool, it is not now, nor will it ever be, a place suitable for children to roam unsupervised. Just like it is a bad idea to use television to "babysit" your children, you cannot also use the Internet as a babysitter. Parents who leave their children in potentially harmful situations unsupervised are not doing their parental duty. Whether that situation be watching television, surfing the Internet, or wandering around a construction yard, all are potentially harmful and damaging experiences, and children should not be allowed that unsupervised.
Now whether this supervision be the parents actually looking over the shoulder of their children as the children watch, or more usefully, a program that logs the sites the children have been visiting, and flags sites that contain certain words. If it is explained to the children that they are being monitored, and that if they abuse their internet usage, they will lose it or have it restricted to times when the parent can watch over their shoulder, then they will be motivated to regulate themselves.
It would seem, by reading the coments posted by each of the sumit's panel members, that the panel is composed of advocates of this project, and not balanced with opponents at all. That leaves only one certainty to the outcome of the summit, the complete unanimous suggestion for internet censorship, or whatever you may wish to call it. Either way it amounts to the same thing.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
That just won't work, if we do that, then the government says, "Ok, so voluntary rating doesn't work, we'll have to have a division of the government whose job it is to censor content, and then we'll tax everyone out the wazoo to support it." Each page you hit is going to cost you a penny or two. Just reading the articles on slashdot, and a couple of the replies will cost a buck. Going through the like 20 registration pages on Microsoft when you're trying to download some eval software is going to cost more than the software itself (well, not really, THAT'd be kind of expensive)
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Many parents are concerned that the kiddie gets exposed to way too much commercial solicitation. Allowing companies a free reign to expressly target children (to make them whine to parents to buy product) with no regulation could get many parents rights groups just as worried as the thought that junior might cop a screenful of the Venus de Milo (at least it might in the UK, can't say about the US). Broaden the campaign to include filters on corporate sites and advertising. This will at least serve to make the corporations pushing this agenda have to work harder in any attempt to hold the moral high ground should they go against this suggestion, thereby bringing the enemy out into the open. If successful, what would the chance be of any legislation ever getting through? I don't see them letting go of this until it can be made to burn their hands. CC
Weird how this almost backs up George Orwells "1984". If this really does go through a parallel net will almost definetly ensue, at least IMHO. Websites being whizzed around secretly, as if they are on some type of techno-black market. THe thing that really bothers me is the possibility for National Filters. Think of it this way; A war ensues between the USA and some foreign nation, and we are getting out butts kicked. Thousands of US soldiers dying on the frontlines everyday. Remember vietnam and the mass of people fighting to pull our boys out? Now, imagine, we go to cnn.com and see US Pushes Back XXX Nation . Essentially lies from our own government to pacify us and make us believe everything is doing great. And thats just a small example. Imagine how these national filters could do everything from misinform us to inflate the price of jellybeans, all from some "dictator-like" group of people in the Government, controlling what we think. Oh yes, Big Brother is watching....
*******
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
I envision something in the leiu of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand when the movers just got fed up with the way things were being run and dealing with the system, so they went off to live amongst themselves.
Maybe the "cognitive elite" of the world will decide to do just that!
Bags me not cleaning out the toilets if we do.
jsm
Sadly this is a European Commission (!=European Parliament) initiative, so your MEP will be about as much use as a pair of chocolate socks. The EP is, IMO, one of the most useless bodies ever created and pretty much powerless in the face of the Commission. (Political scientists politely call this the "democratic deficit" at the heart of Europe -- how charming).
/. community could do would be to (communally?) write their own newspaper articles and submit them as free-lance journalists. It's not too difficult to do this if you've been blessed with a "Pushy" personality. If I get a bit of time today, I'll put up a few selections from my "mugs' list" of publications which have often in the past seemed receptive to articles.
The strategy has to be to work on the national governments. As a rule of thumb, if two out of UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are opposed to a European measure, it's dead. The best way to achieve this is to generate negative publicity -- I doubt that there is any real enthusiasm among politicians to be seen as a) censoring the Net and b) bowing to Brussels. The MEPs are dead letters. So, if you have a local newspaper (and it isn't owned by the Bertelsmann group), get friendly with a journalist, and feed him this as a story. I know that's what I'm going to do.
Actually, what the
Remember, the only thing that politicians care about these days is bad media publicity. Sad, but that's the facts. Let's hold their feet to the fire. It's worked for the anti-GMO crowd, so it can work for us.
jsm
Oh gawd ... revealing my true colours as a terrible political hack.
AC above is right that Blair and his bunch are frightening, paternalistic weasels. But:
1. This particular measure isn't likely to even reach the government. It's being put together by the "foundation", under the aegis of the European Commission (The Commission != the European Parliament -- it's kind of like a Civil Service sort of thing, but more powerful).
2. Because of this, it will be sorted out by civil servants. If the relevant UK minister (not sure who that would be -- prob Jack Straw?) ever sees it, it will be just to tick up the civil servants' decision to keep stalling. Unless it becomes a cause celebre, in which case his mind will be on damage limitation.
3. Why am I so sure that the UK civil servants will want to stall it forever? Well:
First, because they don't want to transfer any power to Brussels. They hate Brussels.
Second, if they allow the Commission to have jurisdiction on this one, they will be in a weak position to resist when the EC says that it should have jurisdiction in the matter of taxing the Internet when that comes up for negotiation. For a UK civil servant, the very Worst Thing You Can Possibly Do is to allow any tax power to go to Brussels.
Third, they will look at it and fear bad publicity. Civil service departments are more and more coming to be ruled by their Press Offices.
That's the reasoning behind my attack strategy. We can't do anything about the first and second points, but the third depends on how much of a media sh*tstorm can be generated. The rule of thumb is always that if two out of UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are against something, it's dead. I think that this is achievable.
jsm
(who, in a past life, was one of these bloodsucking drones)
This from the article:
... having had some experience of the European Commission, I'd say that it won't be as simple as this. Getting a quorum behind a draft Directive on anything controversial (particularly when there are differing national cultures) is a difficult, time-consuming and painful business. I would imagine that the Brits will hold this one up in process for years.
The European Commission's plan runs from January 1999 to December 2002, four years. 1999 is scheduled for development and meetings. 2000 is scheduled for rollout and beta testing. 2001 and 2002 are allocated for the encouragement process and tweaking - making sure everyone is toeing the line.
Well
US$11million doesn't really sound like that much of a budget, when you consider how fantastically overpaid and over-expensed EC personnel are. It's important not to see this as an inevitability.
So what can we do? Hassle them! Hassle them to death! Make sure that every Euro politician knows that he'll have to face election as "The guy who's trying to censor the Internet". Or even better "The guy who's trying to let Brussels censor the Internet for us". Politicians hate that stuff -- anything which appears to be "complicated" or "unpopular" tends to be avoided.
Start creating the impression that it is technically impossible to censor the Internet. If I were really Machiavellian, I would suggest "extending" the META tag formats into a million and one incompatible versions, so that the keyword approach wouldn't work. But just suggesting to non-techie bureaucrats that it's a technological nightmare will suffice to raise millions of "issues" which slow the whole thing down.
It seems like unsatisfactory, but to my certain knowledge the Takeover Directive has been held up in this fashion by vested interests for 20 years. Let's all be a vested interest.
jsm
Self rating for "Extreme Hate Speech" has to be the dumbest idea I've ever heard. If someone thinks that the Holocaust never happened, he[1] doesn't consider that to be hate speech, he thinks that it's the correct version of history. Even the Reverend Fred Phelps thinks that "God Hates Fags" is an expression of love.
... which side am I on again? I'm confused and I can't remember what my name is ...
Perhaps the European Union will come up with categories like "Aryan Self-defence" or "Christian Truth -- Homosexuality" that people would actually use, but I rather suspect that political correctness will interfere with effective lawmaking here.
Not that I actually want to see effective lawmaking
jsm
[1] in principle, "he or she", in practice, "he".
but it doesn't matter because the internet transcends national boundaries.