The original IBM PC used memory with parity-checking. I cannot remember ever seeing it detect an error. But I recall having this conversation with an engineer from a company making "PC clones": Me: memtest shows that there's a bad memory chip in this machine: how come the memory parity checking did not pick it up Him: well, the motherboard support chips for calculating the parity bit cost money. So we save a bit of money by not including them. We still advertise that our PCs use 9-pit "parity checked" memory, but the parity bit never actually gets checked.
We know for sure one thing that the UK tried to censor: the album cover image on Wikipedia. We only found out about that one by chance. Presumably they censor many more things like that, that we haven't found out about. And since the item in question had been openly on sale for many years, we know that it is certainly not illegal.
The way this works with the IWF is that they say "we don't censor anything: we just supply a list of web sites to ISPs; if the ISPs choose to censor what is on that list, that is up to them".
The government says "we don't censor anything; if the ISPs choose to get a list of web sites from the IWF and then block them, that is nothing to do with us".
And the ISPs say "it's not our fault: the IWF gives a list of web sites to block: we've got no control over that list, and if we didn't block them, the government would make a law forcing us to do so".
So nobody has any responsibility for anything that happens.
If you value your children, don't go to live in Cambridge.
The whole premiss of the IWF is that looking at this stuff makes you into a child-molesting pervert. The offices of the IWF (according to their website) are in Cambridge. So Cambridge must be full of child-molesting perverts working for the IWF.
If I'm wrong and it is not, I'm sorry for the accusation. But in that case, the whole basis of what the IWF is doing is wrong, and so the organization is pointless and should be disbanded.
We know the sort of stuff they are blocking, from the recent Wikipedia case, and it's plainly got nothing to do with child abuse. My guess would be that the people behind this are just prudes on a power trip.
But they have to refer to it as chld abuse, in order to justify blocking it. If they said "this is harmless but we want to block it anyway", then who would take any notice of them?
Of course it must be harmless: otherwise Cambridge (which is where the IWF offices are situated, according to their web site) would be a hotbed of child abuse, due to the number of people working for the IWF who look at this stuff for a living.
No, this *is* the government stepping in. The ISPs would have done nothing were it not for threats from the government. And the IWF say they work "in partnership with" the Ministry of Justice. It is government in every respect except that there is no democratic control over it.
I don't think I deserve the IWF. But I can't vote against it. Nobody can.
The government forced the ISPs to set up a censorship body by the thread of legislation, but the government doesn't formally control that body, so there is no public overview of what it does.
I predict that within, say, 30 years, most government in the UK will be done like this.
The present UK government is mostly driven by doing "favours" to their friends in business. So this report will have been created by splicing together two different documents: one (originally written by the ISPs) describing a scheme for the government to give tax money to the ISPs under the pretext of "broadband for all", and the other (originally written by the record companies) describing a scheme for the government to give tax money to the record companies under the pretext of "doing something about copyright infringement". That would explain the sudden change of tone in the middle of the document.
So: you were forced by law to pay 100 pounds to someone who knew nothing about the matter, and who judged you on how good a blagger you were. And you think that's not idiotic?
Indeed, it seems that more or less anyone in the US who is involved in any way with the transport industry can set up their own private police force. For an example, see here
I've got lots of sympathy for him. He bought a voice mail machine, that is supposed to receive incoming calls, and the machine made outgoing calls without his knowledge or permission. If I were him, I would be suing the manufacturer of the machine for everything they have got. Oh, and publicizing the make of the machine, so that nobody else will buy one.
Well, whois shows that donotreply.com is now registered to "Portal of Evil Inc". We can only guess what they are doing with all the Capital One passwords that they harvest.
Isn't it standard police procedure, when they suspect someone of something but haven't got any evidence, to arrest them for some other trivial thing, and use that as an excuse for a search? What else are all the laws forbidding ordinary everyday behaviour for, if not to allow the police to do that?
Assuming you are in the UK, then yes, you would go to jail for doing that. Even forgetting the key is illegal, so deliberately destroying it would probably get you an increased sentence.
The re-voicing by actors didn't make interviews impossible: it was the workaround for a law that was supposed to make them impossible, but just make the government look stupid.
Someone spread the rumour that Gerry Adams (the leader of Sinn Fein) had a silly squeaky voice, and that his interviews actually sounded better when dubbed by a professional actor. Not true, of course, but it made the attempt at censorship look even more foolish.
Lots of people also reported google to them, because the images were (of course) also in the google cache. Proxying google would have been a good test of their hardware.
Well, if you are a pervert and want unfettered access to the worst images the internet can provide, what better plan than to set yourself up as a censor. You don't even have to search for the dirt: people will come and tell you the URLs to look at!
Back in the 70s, everyone had a much more relaxed attitude to this sort of thing. According to wikipedia, there was even a spread of a naked 11-year-old girl in the Italian edition of Playboy in 1976. It is only in the last few years that activists have spread the idea that it is bad to look at pictures of naked children.
So, the picture was legal when it was first released, but may well be illegal now, at least in the UK.
According to their statement, they have decided to never take any future action against the same image if it is hosted outside the UK, but if they find it hosted in the UK, it will be "assessed in line with IWF procedures", which means they will threaten the web site with prosecution.
Which of course means that those of us in the UK we will have to be content with seeing it on Wikipedia, Amazon and so on, or with buying it in record shops, or with reading books containing the picture, and so on, and so on.
That's the way the blocking system works. It's ingeniously designed to allow blocking individual URLs without requiring every network packet to be inspected. Google "cleanfeed" for the details.
A less fine-grained system that (for example) blocked whole IP ranges would have been noticed by Joe Public, and caused outrage; a system that inspeced every packet, like the Great Firewall of Chine, would have been expensive. This system has the advantage (for the censors) that it is cheap and almost unnoticeable - until now, that is.
Yes, it has. Internet access in the UK is censored by a "voluntary" body set up by the ISPs themselves (the government threatened that if they didn't do this, they would be censored by the government). The whole idea is to block content that could never come to trial in the UK, as the publisher is outside the reach of the courts.
The Australian government has proposed a similar system recently and had received a lot of flak for it; the UK system has been running for some time, and nobody seems to have noticed until now.
Slashdot Mirror
The original IBM PC used memory with parity-checking. I cannot remember ever seeing it detect an error. But I recall having this conversation with an engineer from a company making "PC clones":
Me: memtest shows that there's a bad memory chip in this machine: how come the memory parity checking did not pick it up
Him: well, the motherboard support chips for calculating the parity bit cost money. So we save a bit of money by not including them. We still advertise that our PCs use 9-pit "parity checked" memory, but the parity bit never actually gets checked.
So at the end of all this investment, we'll have an "internet" that's simply a new version of cable TV?
We know for sure one thing that the UK tried to censor: the album cover image on Wikipedia. We only found out about that one by chance. Presumably they censor many more things like that, that we haven't found out about. And since the item in question had been openly on sale for many years, we know that it is certainly not illegal.
The way this works with the IWF is that they say "we don't censor anything: we just supply a list of web sites to ISPs; if the ISPs choose to censor what is on that list, that is up to them".
The government says "we don't censor anything; if the ISPs choose to get a list of web sites from the IWF and then block them, that is nothing to do with us".
And the ISPs say "it's not our fault: the IWF gives a list of web sites to block: we've got no control over that list, and if we didn't block them, the government would make a law forcing us to do so".
So nobody has any responsibility for anything that happens.
If you value your children, don't go to live in Cambridge.
The whole premiss of the IWF is that looking at this stuff makes you into a child-molesting pervert. The offices of the IWF (according to their website) are in Cambridge. So Cambridge must be full of child-molesting perverts working for the IWF.
If I'm wrong and it is not, I'm sorry for the accusation. But in that case, the whole basis of what the IWF is doing is wrong, and so the organization is pointless and should be disbanded.
We know the sort of stuff they are blocking, from the recent Wikipedia case, and it's plainly got nothing to do with child abuse. My guess would be that the people behind this are just prudes on a power trip.
But they have to refer to it as chld abuse, in order to justify blocking it. If they said "this is harmless but we want to block it anyway", then who would take any notice of them?
Of course it must be harmless: otherwise Cambridge (which is where the IWF offices are situated, according to their web site) would be a hotbed of child abuse, due to the number of people working for the IWF who look at this stuff for a living.
No, this *is* the government stepping in. The ISPs would have done nothing were it not for threats from the government. And the IWF say they work "in partnership with" the Ministry of Justice. It is government in every respect except that there is no democratic control over it.
I don't think I deserve the IWF. But I can't vote against it. Nobody can.
The government forced the ISPs to set up a censorship body by the thread of legislation, but the government doesn't formally control that body, so there is no public overview of what it does.
I predict that within, say, 30 years, most government in the UK will be done like this.
And isn't a site named after the "slashdot effect" just encouraging people to DDOS other people's servers? Which is terrorism: much worse than piracy.
The present UK government is mostly driven by doing "favours" to their friends in business. So this report will have been created by splicing together two different documents: one (originally written by the ISPs) describing a scheme for the government to give tax money to the ISPs under the pretext of "broadband for all", and the other (originally written by the record companies) describing a scheme for the government to give tax money to the record companies under the pretext of "doing something about copyright infringement". That would explain the sudden change of tone in the middle of the document.
So: you were forced by law to pay 100 pounds to someone who knew nothing about the matter, and who judged you on how good a blagger you were. And you think that's not idiotic?
Indeed, it seems that more or less anyone in the US who is involved in any way with the transport industry can set up their own private police force. For an example, see here
I've got lots of sympathy for him. He bought a voice mail machine, that is supposed to receive incoming calls, and the machine made outgoing calls without his knowledge or permission. If I were him, I would be suing the manufacturer of the machine for everything they have got. Oh, and publicizing the make of the machine, so that nobody else will buy one.
Well, whois shows that donotreply.com is now registered to "Portal of Evil Inc". We can only guess what they are doing with all the Capital One passwords that they harvest.
Isn't it standard police procedure, when they suspect someone of something but haven't got any evidence, to arrest them for some other trivial thing, and use that as an excuse for a search?
What else are all the laws forbidding ordinary everyday behaviour for, if not to allow the police to do that?
Assuming you are in the UK, then yes, you would go to jail for doing that. Even forgetting the key is illegal, so deliberately destroying it would probably get you an increased sentence.
The re-voicing by actors didn't make interviews impossible: it was the workaround for a law that was supposed to make them impossible, but just make the government look stupid.
Someone spread the rumour that Gerry Adams (the leader of Sinn Fein) had a silly squeaky voice, and that his interviews actually sounded better when dubbed by a professional actor. Not true, of course, but it made the attempt at censorship look even more foolish.
Lots of people also reported google to them, because the images were (of course) also in the google cache. Proxying google would have been a good test of their hardware.
Well, if you are a pervert and want unfettered access to the worst images the internet can provide, what better plan than to set yourself up as a censor. You don't even have to search for the dirt: people will come and tell you the URLs to look at!
Back in the 70s, everyone had a much more relaxed attitude to this sort of thing. According to wikipedia, there was even a spread of a naked 11-year-old girl in the Italian edition of Playboy in 1976. It is only in the last few years that activists have spread the idea that it is bad to look at pictures of naked children.
So, the picture was legal when it was first released, but may well be illegal now, at least in the UK.
According to their statement, they have decided to never take any future action against the same image if it is hosted outside the UK, but if they find it hosted in the UK, it will be "assessed in line with IWF procedures", which means they will threaten the web site with prosecution.
Which of course means that those of us in the UK we will have to be content with seeing it on Wikipedia, Amazon and so on, or with buying it in record shops, or with reading books containing the picture, and so on, and so on.
That's the way the blocking system works. It's ingeniously designed to allow blocking individual URLs without requiring every network packet to be inspected. Google "cleanfeed" for the details. A less fine-grained system that (for example) blocked whole IP ranges would have been noticed by Joe Public, and caused outrage; a system that inspeced every packet, like the Great Firewall of Chine, would have been expensive. This system has the advantage (for the censors) that it is cheap and almost unnoticeable - until now, that is.
If you want to see it, go down to your local record shop. The image is a CD cover, and is openly on sale.
Yes, it has. Internet access in the UK is censored by a "voluntary" body set up by the ISPs themselves (the government threatened that if they didn't do this, they would be censored by the government). The whole idea is to block content that could never come to trial in the UK, as the publisher is outside the reach of the courts.
The Australian government has proposed a similar system recently and had received a lot of flak for it; the UK system has been running for some time, and nobody seems to have noticed until now.