For them what could be illegal is irrefutably evil
With their legal advice apparently coming from the Metropolitan Police. A police force which has has been previously condemed for not knowing the law. It might help the IWF's credibility if in future they were instead consult actual lawyers.
and any material that falls foul of the UK's absurdly broad and vague law on indecent photographs or pseudophotographs [photoshops] of children [anyone under 18 or who might appears to be without evidence to the contrary] is by its very existence an act of child abuse, and so is viewing it (unless you are special licenced child-protection expert).
Wonder if the people at the IWF actually have this qualification...
None of which is likely to save a single child from being raped.
Like all child rapists take pictures and videos. There's also some utterly horrific (non sexual) child abuse going on, like "baby p". In the UK (and other places) it's perfectly possible for someone to be "old enough" to consent to sex yet "too young" to be a porn model/actor. Consider also that the IWF restricts it's interest in "obscene content" and "racial hatred content" to that actually hosted within the UK whilst wanting to know about "child sexual abuse images" worldwide. Even though definitions of who is and isn't a "child" could well vary widely.
...that an internet organisation that's been around since 1996 would understand the internet and would've realised the storm that censoring Wikipedia would cause and the resultant effect.
Or that they (or their "partner" ISPs) would have some idea how to do this without such "collateral damage".
There have been various conspiracy theories as to whether the IWF was testing the water in light of Britain's new extreme porn law which makes BDSM and such illegal and hence whether the IWF was seeing what the response would be if they were to start filtering this out-
Or for the ISPs in question to test Phorm without it being too obvious...
particularly as scenes that could be deemed to be extreme porn exist in many common and publicly accesible places. To filter extreme porn as they do child porn they'd most certainly have to go after a lot more mainstream sites, it would no longer be a case of simply filtering out underground sites that only a small minority of people who are already classed as criminals visit.
Also will cause all sorts of problems if the methods used are as ham fisted as happened here.
IWF is organization set up by ISPs. I believe their remit is to flag and block anything possibly illegal.
Actually the IWF is quite selective about "illegal content". All they are interested in is "Child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK". They specifically state that fraud and scams are outside their remit.
If it was required to know actual age, then it would be impossible to prosecute for child porn found on someone's computer if you don't know the victims name. Therefore the laws usually refer to apparent age or physical maturity when the real age is unknown.
The real problem here is that drawn porn does not have a victim.
Actually the real problem is that the whole point of a trial is to protect the accused.
So, I'm guessing that movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High are now illegal to watch in AU? I mean, this has pictures of REAL people having sex and portrayed as under age.
Even worst would be the movie "The Fly 2" which involves a sex scene with a pre-teen... How about every episode of Star Trek Voyager which has the character Kes in it?
I think the point a lot of people around here have been making, maybe including yourself, is that there isn't really a way to do a technical investigation that would point definitively to a specific human being.
Then the answer is for them to do something else with their lives. What's next, people who want to build FTL starships demanding government handouts?
I think the basis for this problem is the fact that file sharers (I'm talking about actual file sharers here, not network printers and people without computers that the RIAA decides to sue) are generally downloading the files for personal use and redistributing them for free. This absolutely destroys traditional means of copyright enforcement. It's hard to find people that aren't out on a street corner selling bootlegs, you can't follow a non-existent trail of money, and it's not even close to clear how many, if any, of the downloads even represent lost sales. To me, the ubiquity of file sharing represents the obsolescence of media companies' role as distributors.
It wouldn't be the first time that technology has made an industry obsolete.
And my belief is that the only thing that will get rid of these kinds of problems is a total overhaul of what I prefer to think of as TAIM (Temporary Artificial Idea Monopoly) law, and taking it back in many ways to how it was originally envisioned, including limiting its enforcement to for-profit distribution.
Even more radically to look at it's intended purpose and critically examine what fulfils that purpose best.
I can't find any information about anything remotely nasty happening to her so I'd bet she's just a loon.
Except apparently "Wacky Jacki" isn't considered mad enough to be "sectioned", at least not yet. Personally I'd love to see her arrested and held as a "terrorist suspect". Considering the creativness which has been shown when it comes to this there should be no problem keeping the entire Cabinet out of everyone's way until the end of January.
Problem is, in cases like the one you describe, if they can't demonstrate a good alibi there's precious little incentive for the police to investigate further even if they have got the wrong man and they really want his brother. DNA evidence is largely perceived as being foolproof.
Or the result could be an innocent person dragged through the courts possibly even convicted. Just because they had a criminal relative who made sure to have a good alibi.
As a society we have to decide what's more important: Catching as many criminals as possible, or providing a system that is as fair as possible. The two are mutually exclusive -- you either bias towards letting the guilty get away so the innocent are not needlessly punished, or you sacrifice some innocents to "protect the greater good".
Or you may do one with certain types of crime and the other with different types of crime. The other issues are that what is and isn't a "crime" is political and the priorities of law enforcement are also highly political. Left to their own devices "cops" will tend towards what is easy for them, rather than what the public are most concerned about...
Even if you just happen to be travelling to the US (or passing through, iirc) they get to take your fingerprints and "digitally photograph" you - no need to even be arrested (at least, according to the FCO). Call me a stubborn fool, but I'd rather live in the UK and hope I don't get arrested than travel to the US.
Note that "passing through" includes being on a flight making a "technical stop" such as Air New Zealand's Auckland to London via Los Angeles route. However much trouble this is for passengers imagine what the crews have to put up with.
Unlike fingerprints your DNA can also be used to partially identify relatives as well. Law enforcement could use this to make partial dna matches to a person that would otherwise not be in the system if a relative already was.
It would also have interesting effects considering that there are a sizable proportion of people who don't have the parentage they think they do. Most often it's the wrong father, but where hospital births are common getting the wrong mother is quite possible.
Allow households to opt in to blocking sites and at a number of different levels
[ ] Pornography
[ ] Hate literature
At least with pornography it is possible to come up with some objective metrics.
However when it comes to "hate speach" all too often definitions equate to how much the person (or group) making the decision agrees with what's being said or even who the "speaker" is.
Eh, if the government didn't classify movies and such, we'd have a hodgepodge of private organizations doing it; with wildly varying results. One family's NC-17 rating is another family's PG.
This might not be such a bad thing, if people could choose to follow the ratings of whatever groups they trusted to represent their own POV.
I do not believe any government should censor speech. This sort of technology is ripe for abuse.
In practice it's likely to be a provate company under government contract. Which is if anything worst. Government is in theory answerable to the public. Also the political views of a private company can be considerably less transparent (and even more extreme) compared with the vast majority of political parties.
All utilities use statistical averaging. It's not possible to allow for all users to be using 100% of what is available at the same time. Well, perhaps if the infrastruture of all utilities were completely redone it might be possible. For even 1000 people in close proximity to coordinate use of electricity, they could cause massive damage to the system from nothing other than just using what they had paid for.
However it really isn't the customer's fault if the supplier gets their sums wrong. Anyway electricity supply is rather different from telecommunications, generating capacity can be turned on and off using both predictive models and monitoring of actual demand.
Phones everywhere in the US were useless on 9/11/2001. Where I worked, they had 2 T-1s for a little over 100 people. The T-1s were full. That's the first time that has ever happened.
Has this happened since?
To have over 50% of people picking up the phone at the same time is unheard of. Sure, we could have bought a dedicated line for each person, but that's not what companies do. I live in Alaska. You have less than a 50% chance of getting a long distance line on Mother's Day.
So long as this dosn't happen that frequently then customers won't be too upset. Especially if there's an obvious reason why this is happening. However if people experienced this every few days, especially at random, they'd be demanding their money back.
That wasn't true until quite recently when most ISPs dropped most of UseNet. Traffic to and from one of your ISPs servers puts far less load on the Internet than throwing traffic around the world on BT. So what did the ISPs do? Dropped most of Usenet under political pressure. So screw em.
It's probably rather more complex than that since it's likely to depend on a lot of factors, including the actual structure of the networks and exactly where Bit Torrent is able to find peers.
Basically, I have no problem with them limiting and throttling bandwidth at peak times when their hardware is actually limited and can't handle everyone's downloading at once.
Often it appears that such throttling is applied depending on what time a clock says it is, rather than actually network capacity issues. If it was applied to network capacity issues it could be applied at any time, but would be unapplied as soon as there was no longer a problem.
*do* have a problem with arbitrary caps on data transfers. It costs them no more money whatsoever for you to continue downloading for that month after you hit the cap,
It actually costs them money to measure data transfer on a per customer basis. Especially if there is any additional complexity such that only some traffic is counted.
so long as you do it off-peak.
Unless the ISP is themselves being charged depending on the time of day the whole on/off "peak" idea isn't that meaningful in the first place.
So adding up the numbers, that's 4.8kWh of electicty to produce about 6L of water. Or 800kwh/m^3. This is a ridiculously, hideously energy intensive way to make water, even desalination, which is seen as ecologically unfreindly, uses about 3kwh/m^3, or is about 250 times more efficient.
I'm sure that desalination would be considerably less efficient if performed by a "gadget". Similarly water extraction by dehumidification is likely to be rather more efficient using an industrial scale machine.
My dehumidifier in my basement also uses "the electricity of about three light bulbs". The article claimed "$0.3 per litre". Lets run the numbers.
"Three light bulbs" is journalistic code for 300 watts.
In practice it could mean anything between My electricity costs about 8 cents per kWh. $0.3 per liter implies it uses 3.75 kWh per liter. At 300 watts, it takes 12.5 hours to generate a liter of water. Or rephrased, it could fill a 2 liter soda bottle in about a day.
Thus you'd need several of these machines to produce drinking water at anything like a useful rate.
However, my $200 Chinese dehumidifier purchased at home depot, using the same electricity, easily fills its multigallon bucket in a day, at least during summer months. To help any NASA scientists here, multiple gallons is quite a bit more than two liters.
It probably isn't going to cost you a thousand dollers to add a UV lamp and a pump to it either.
So, why does this greenwashing gadget cost five times as much as my dehumidifier but only produces about half the output? Surely it can't be continuously dumping 150 watts of UV sterilization light.
At the rate it would be producing water you'd probably need more like 1.5 watts of UV.
There is a certain perfection in a device that only works where you don't need it and can't work where you would otherwise need it the most.
Also the only people who can afford this device are likely to live in parts of the world which already have drinking water delivered through pipes...
And to echo a lot of other people's comments, yeah, seriously. 15-30 minutes for BOOTING? I don't care if they "start programs". 15-30 minutes?! First off if they're "starting programs" that is DEFINITELY being productive. But if it's seriously taking 15-30 minutes for an individual to wait for a computer to start up or shut down, they have MUCH worse problems on their hands.
The default setting with MS Windows is to use "Roaming Profiles" which involves copying files back and forth between workstation and server. By default this includes things like temp files and broswer cache. Changing this requires administrators who know what they are doing. As does configuring workstations for optimal performance by removing unneeded junk.
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For them what could be illegal is irrefutably evil
With their legal advice apparently coming from the Metropolitan Police. A police force which has has been previously condemed for not knowing the law. It might help the IWF's credibility if in future they were instead consult actual lawyers.
and any material that falls foul of the UK's absurdly broad and vague law on indecent photographs or pseudophotographs [photoshops] of children [anyone under 18 or who might appears to be without evidence to the contrary] is by its very existence an act of child abuse, and so is viewing it (unless you are special licenced child-protection expert).
Wonder if the people at the IWF actually have this qualification...
None of which is likely to save a single child from being raped.
Like all child rapists take pictures and videos. There's also some utterly horrific (non sexual) child abuse going on, like "baby p". In the UK (and other places) it's perfectly possible for someone to be "old enough" to consent to sex yet "too young" to be a porn model/actor. Consider also that the IWF restricts it's interest in "obscene content" and "racial hatred content" to that actually hosted within the UK whilst wanting to know about "child sexual abuse images" worldwide. Even though definitions of who is and isn't a "child" could well vary widely.
...that an internet organisation that's been around since 1996 would understand the internet and would've realised the storm that censoring Wikipedia would cause and the resultant effect.
Or that they (or their "partner" ISPs) would have some idea how to do this without such "collateral damage".
There have been various conspiracy theories as to whether the IWF was testing the water in light of Britain's new extreme porn law which makes BDSM and such illegal and hence whether the IWF was seeing what the response would be if they were to start filtering this out-
Or for the ISPs in question to test Phorm without it being too obvious...
particularly as scenes that could be deemed to be extreme porn exist in many common and publicly accesible places. To filter extreme porn as they do child porn they'd most certainly have to go after a lot more mainstream sites, it would no longer be a case of simply filtering out underground sites that only a small minority of people who are already classed as criminals visit.
Also will cause all sorts of problems if the methods used are as ham fisted as happened here.
IWF is organization set up by ISPs. I believe their remit is to flag and block anything possibly illegal.
Actually the IWF is quite selective about "illegal content". All they are interested in is "Child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK". They specifically state that fraud and scams are outside their remit.
If it was required to know actual age, then it would be impossible to prosecute for child porn found on someone's computer if you don't know the victims name. Therefore the laws usually refer to apparent age or physical maturity when the real age is unknown.
The real problem here is that drawn porn does not have a victim.
Actually the real problem is that the whole point of a trial is to protect the accused.
That's the first thing I thought of when I read this. Isn't there supposed to be a victim somewhere in order to convict someone of this type of crime?
There is however case law allowing the "victim" and the person being convicted to be one and the same person.
Corporations have been granted the rights of living people for ages.
:)
I've yet to see a corporation being arrested though
The problem with this argument is that you assume those 20 minutes are consecutive. In a single show many days if not weeks can pass.
Though the only way some things can possibly make sense would be if each show depicts an alternate relatity...
So, I'm guessing that movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High are now illegal to watch in AU? I mean, this has pictures of REAL people having sex and portrayed as under age.
Even worst would be the movie "The Fly 2" which involves a sex scene with a pre-teen... How about every episode of Star Trek Voyager which has the character Kes in it?
I didn't realise I was helping to fund this sort of thing with my broadband subscription.
It's interesting that they have a big button to "Report Illegal Content". But then, in their FAQ, state that fraud and scams are outside their remit.
I think the point a lot of people around here have been making, maybe including yourself, is that there isn't really a way to do a technical investigation that would point definitively to a specific human being.
Then the answer is for them to do something else with their lives. What's next, people who want to build FTL starships demanding government handouts?
I think the basis for this problem is the fact that file sharers (I'm talking about actual file sharers here, not network printers and people without computers that the RIAA decides to sue) are generally downloading the files for personal use and redistributing them for free. This absolutely destroys traditional means of copyright enforcement. It's hard to find people that aren't out on a street corner selling bootlegs, you can't follow a non-existent trail of money, and it's not even close to clear how many, if any, of the downloads even represent lost sales. To me, the ubiquity of file sharing represents the obsolescence of media companies' role as distributors.
It wouldn't be the first time that technology has made an industry obsolete.
And my belief is that the only thing that will get rid of these kinds of problems is a total overhaul of what I prefer to think of as TAIM (Temporary Artificial Idea Monopoly) law, and taking it back in many ways to how it was originally envisioned, including limiting its enforcement to for-profit distribution.
Even more radically to look at it's intended purpose and critically examine what fulfils that purpose best.
I can't find any information about anything remotely nasty happening to her so I'd bet she's just a loon.
Except apparently "Wacky Jacki" isn't considered mad enough to be "sectioned", at least not yet. Personally I'd love to see her arrested and held as a "terrorist suspect". Considering the creativness which has been shown when it comes to this there should be no problem keeping the entire Cabinet out of everyone's way until the end of January.
Problem is, in cases like the one you describe, if they can't demonstrate a good alibi there's precious little incentive for the police to investigate further even if they have got the wrong man and they really want his brother. DNA evidence is largely perceived as being foolproof.
Or the result could be an innocent person dragged through the courts possibly even convicted. Just because they had a criminal relative who made sure to have a good alibi.
As a society we have to decide what's more important: Catching as many criminals as possible, or providing a system that is as fair as possible. The two are mutually exclusive -- you either bias towards letting the guilty get away so the innocent are not needlessly punished, or you sacrifice some innocents to "protect the greater good".
Or you may do one with certain types of crime and the other with different types of crime. The other issues are that what is and isn't a "crime" is political and the priorities of law enforcement are also highly political. Left to their own devices "cops" will tend towards what is easy for them, rather than what the public are most concerned about...
Even if you just happen to be travelling to the US (or passing through, iirc) they get to take your fingerprints and "digitally photograph" you - no need to even be arrested (at least, according to the FCO). Call me a stubborn fool, but I'd rather live in the UK and hope I don't get arrested than travel to the US.
Note that "passing through" includes being on a flight making a "technical stop" such as Air New Zealand's Auckland to London via Los Angeles route. However much trouble this is for passengers imagine what the crews have to put up with.
Unlike fingerprints your DNA can also be used to partially identify relatives as well. Law enforcement could use this to make partial dna matches to a person that would otherwise not be in the system if a relative already was.
It would also have interesting effects considering that there are a sizable proportion of people who don't have the parentage they think they do. Most often it's the wrong father, but where hospital births are common getting the wrong mother is quite possible.
Allow households to opt in to blocking sites and at a number of different levels
[ ] Pornography
[ ] Hate literature
At least with pornography it is possible to come up with some objective metrics. However when it comes to "hate speach" all too often definitions equate to how much the person (or group) making the decision agrees with what's being said or even who the "speaker" is.
Eh, if the government didn't classify movies and such, we'd have a hodgepodge of private organizations doing it; with wildly varying results. One family's NC-17 rating is another family's PG.
This might not be such a bad thing, if people could choose to follow the ratings of whatever groups they trusted to represent their own POV.
I do not believe any government should censor speech. This sort of technology is ripe for abuse.
In practice it's likely to be a provate company under government contract. Which is if anything worst. Government is in theory answerable to the public. Also the political views of a private company can be considerably less transparent (and even more extreme) compared with the vast majority of political parties.
But do the Aussies want encryption more than they want filtering?
Considering how many governments appear to want to be able to spy on Internet traffic why wouldn't they want encryption?
The upstream block against hard-core porn is an easy sell to most parents.
If you ask N people on what should be blocked you will get at least N different answers.
All utilities use statistical averaging. It's not possible to allow for all users to be using 100% of what is available at the same time. Well, perhaps if the infrastruture of all utilities were completely redone it might be possible. For even 1000 people in close proximity to coordinate use of electricity, they could cause massive damage to the system from nothing other than just using what they had paid for.
However it really isn't the customer's fault if the supplier gets their sums wrong. Anyway electricity supply is rather different from telecommunications, generating capacity can be turned on and off using both predictive models and monitoring of actual demand.
Phones everywhere in the US were useless on 9/11/2001. Where I worked, they had 2 T-1s for a little over 100 people. The T-1s were full. That's the first time that has ever happened.
Has this happened since?
To have over 50% of people picking up the phone at the same time is unheard of. Sure, we could have bought a dedicated line for each person, but that's not what companies do. I live in Alaska. You have less than a 50% chance of getting a long distance line on Mother's Day.
So long as this dosn't happen that frequently then customers won't be too upset. Especially if there's an obvious reason why this is happening. However if people experienced this every few days, especially at random, they'd be demanding their money back.
That wasn't true until quite recently when most ISPs dropped most of UseNet. Traffic to and from one of your ISPs servers puts far less load on the Internet than throwing traffic around the world on BT. So what did the ISPs do? Dropped most of Usenet under political pressure. So screw em.
It's probably rather more complex than that since it's likely to depend on a lot of factors, including the actual structure of the networks and exactly where Bit Torrent is able to find peers.
Basically, I have no problem with them limiting and throttling bandwidth at peak times when their hardware is actually limited and can't handle everyone's downloading at once.
Often it appears that such throttling is applied depending on what time a clock says it is, rather than actually network capacity issues. If it was applied to network capacity issues it could be applied at any time, but would be unapplied as soon as there was no longer a problem.
*do* have a problem with arbitrary caps on data transfers. It costs them no more money whatsoever for you to continue downloading for that month after you hit the cap,
It actually costs them money to measure data transfer on a per customer basis. Especially if there is any additional complexity such that only some traffic is counted.
so long as you do it off-peak.
Unless the ISP is themselves being charged depending on the time of day the whole on/off "peak" idea isn't that meaningful in the first place.
So adding up the numbers, that's 4.8kWh of electicty to produce about 6L of water. Or 800kwh/m^3. This is a ridiculously, hideously energy intensive way to make water, even desalination, which is seen as ecologically unfreindly, uses about 3kwh/m^3, or is about 250 times more efficient.
I'm sure that desalination would be considerably less efficient if performed by a "gadget". Similarly water extraction by dehumidification is likely to be rather more efficient using an industrial scale machine.
My dehumidifier in my basement also uses "the electricity of about three light bulbs". The article claimed "$0.3 per litre". Lets run the numbers.
"Three light bulbs" is journalistic code for 300 watts.
In practice it could mean anything between
My electricity costs about 8 cents per kWh. $0.3 per liter implies it uses 3.75 kWh per liter. At 300 watts, it takes 12.5 hours to generate a liter of water. Or rephrased, it could fill a 2 liter soda bottle in about a day.
Thus you'd need several of these machines to produce drinking water at anything like a useful rate.
However, my $200 Chinese dehumidifier purchased at home depot, using the same electricity, easily fills its multigallon bucket in a day, at least during summer months. To help any NASA scientists here, multiple gallons is quite a bit more than two liters.
It probably isn't going to cost you a thousand dollers to add a UV lamp and a pump to it either.
So, why does this greenwashing gadget cost five times as much as my dehumidifier but only produces about half the output? Surely it can't be continuously dumping 150 watts of UV sterilization light.
At the rate it would be producing water you'd probably need more like 1.5 watts of UV.
There is a certain perfection in a device that only works where you don't need it and can't work where you would otherwise need it the most.
Also the only people who can afford this device are likely to live in parts of the world which already have drinking water delivered through pipes...
And to echo a lot of other people's comments, yeah, seriously. 15-30 minutes for BOOTING? I don't care if they "start programs". 15-30 minutes?! First off if they're "starting programs" that is DEFINITELY being productive. But if it's seriously taking 15-30 minutes for an individual to wait for a computer to start up or shut down, they have MUCH worse problems on their hands.
The default setting with MS Windows is to use "Roaming Profiles" which involves copying files back and forth between workstation and server. By default this includes things like temp files and broswer cache. Changing this requires administrators who know what they are doing. As does configuring workstations for optimal performance by removing unneeded junk.