Cameron ‘Porn’ Advisor’s website ‘hacked’ – Threatens/Libels Blogger

http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/2013/07/24/cameron-porn-advisors-website-hacked-threatenslibels-blogger/

by anu_gupta • 13 years ago

195 150 13 years ago

ministryoftruth.me.uk

MarcScott2• 13 years ago

I find the technological incompetence of our political leaders and advisers very worrying. I doubt any of them could describe the difference between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a web browser and a search engine.

user24• 13 years ago

Indeed. Let alone the difference between hosting porn, distributing porn, and linking to porn, which this MP seems to be confused about:

"That well known responsible campaigner @guidofawkes has been hosting a link that distributed porn via my website"[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/claire4devizes/status/359718721138343936

ishansharma• 13 years ago

It's not only your leaders. Things are same everywhere. In India, one can say anything about government openly but say something on social media site and fool leaders will try to censor you.

There have been multiple instances displaying how bad situation is. A movie company was able to get court orders to stop piracy of their movie and this ended in ban over 70+ sites. Not specific pages, blanket ban on whole sites. [1]

Then we have had a girl arrested over liking a Facebook post criticizing a leader[2]

I had high hopes with our generation but looks like most of the people in early twenties are not much better.

[1] http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/singham-effect-file-sharin... [2]: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/19/indian-woman-arrested-ov...

johnchristopher• 13 years ago

I had high hopes with our generation but looks like most of the people in early twenties are not much better.

I know a 12 years old who can't watch photos on a usb stick or a cd-rom if the windows dialog "what do you want to do ?" doesn't show up when inserting the disc or the stick on the computer. But he has mean fingers to send a gazillion sms per minute.

I know adults who seem unable to grasp the concept of resolution as they keep adding 4000x4000 pixels images in their powerpoint. And they seem to forget as soon as I tell them where the "shrink images" function is.

My outlook on this is that things haven't changed since the 90's (when I was a teen): some people want to know how computers work or make them work "better" and some just want stuff done. The first are more technologically literate (more like jack-of-all-trades) than the second but I am not convinced they are automatically better set for life as a result or that what they do with the computer is more appreciated.

piqufoh• 13 years ago

There's only one actual scientist in the house of commons (Julian Huppert, LibDem, Cambridge) and he is regularly heckled whenever he gets up to speak about anything. Shameful..

nakedrobot2• 13 years ago

There is pretty substancial technological gulf opening up between the "ruling class" and the "reasonably well educated folks" out there. This could be as disruptive and problematic as the widening gap between the wealthy and the poor.

Porn filters will be of no concern whatsoever to anyone under 40 with the most rudimentary technical chops (and appetite for porn). What else will be banned? It is getting to the point where fearmongering and shameless populism and shilling for votes by politicians result in useless laws being enacted only to incriminate anyone at all, when the opportunity presents itself to make an example of somebody.

I suspect this technological gap is going to get much worse before it gets better, if it does get better at all. The types of people who participate in the game of politics have very little in common with the types of people who have an understanding of the technical world. But can that last forever? Kids now live online with few exceptions, and a technical understanding of the world will hopefully become second nature to most people, eventually.

arethuza• 13 years ago

I suspect that this has nothing do to with filtering content, protecting the vulnerable or anything else in the "real world" - it's all about politicians who have no fundamental convictions or principles desperately casting about for any subject that might increase their visibility to earn them a promotion up the slippery pole.

boothead• 13 years ago

Although in this case they've pegged the problem as too much access to other kinds of slippery poles :-)

dspillett• 13 years ago

It is more specific than that. Mr Cameron has recently upset quite a few very influential bigots over the gay marriage thing (something to be applauded IMO) and is now trying to sweeten them back up ready for the next time he needs their vote or party donation by tackling an issue that they care about but which won't overly irritate too many other people. The porn access issue is a gift to him in this respect.

I'm sure he knows the measures are going to be ineffective, if he doesn't he needs to sack a few advisers, but it is important for him to be seen to be "thinking of the children" on this issue.

MarcScott2• 13 years ago

"What else will be banned?" This is what worries me the most. If there is going to be a government approved 'blacklist' it suddenly becomes very easy to block content that the politicians decide is unsuitable. It's a very slippery slope, and Cameron is standing at the top and lacing up his ice-skates.

mcintyre1994• 13 years ago

And given that the role of the filter is likely impossible for them to get fundamentally 'right', the cynic in me wonders how quickly acceptance of temporary blocks of non-pornographic content will happen, and how long before somebody might take advantage of that.

wfn• 13 years ago

Indeed - and this is not even a hypothecial (i.e. it is more than that): this is what happened in Denmark, m. ore or less, afaik. [references may appear later.] This mode of thought cannot be construed as a hyperbole.

draugadrotten• 13 years ago

"What else will be banned?" This is what worries me the most. If there is going to be a government approved 'blacklist' it suddenly becomes very easy to block content that the politicians decide is unsuitable.

This will happen.

In 2008, The Finnish police have added Finnish hacker Matti Nikki's website criticizing Internet censorship to Finland’s new national child porn filter.The scan also found that the top three results of a Google search for "gay porn" are blacklisted. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Finnish_internet_censorship_crit...

In Sweden in 2007, the child porn filter also blocked the Korean Bonsai Association. Far worse than Bonsai trees, the porn filter was also used to block a political web site over a Mohammad cartoon that enraged muslims. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4700414.stm

What political web sites are blocked the child porn filter today? We have no way to tell.

Slippery slope, indeed.

Teapot• 13 years ago

Most likely the filesharing is next to be censored. I can smell it a mile away. This has nothing whatsoever to do with bad porn at all. Porn is the excuse to get the censorship framework firmly in place.

retube• 13 years ago

well a huge number of things are already banned/illegal: CP being one of them. do you have a problem with that? Note sure why making hardcore porn opt-in is such a big deal.

gahahaha• 13 years ago

the most rudimentary technical chops

Working as a high school teacher, I can tell you that it is far less common among kids to have those chops than you imagine...

eksith• 13 years ago

It's a subconscious equation between "Internet" and Facebook et al. When your first click or URL is to check these, the information you retrieve is effectively white-washed by the like/retweet cycle.

I feel there might have been a gap since the introduction of Social Media which may have robbed a generation of its ability to work out the "Web" or the "Internet" for that matter. I mean, I grew up in the 90's in the days of Geocities (even before Wikipedia) and library computer access was most interesting when I couldn't reach a site.

So how do I get around that? "Proxies" says an even geekier friend and now I'm scouring forums for info on configuring Netscape to use a proxy with the included IPs. At home, I got to use IRC and that turned out to be a fountain of knowledge (still before Wikipedia).

I feel sorry for kids who never got to experience driving stick shift.

frost_knight• 13 years ago

Having just worked as a system administrator for a college for the past 5 years, I completely agree with gahahaha. I'd say less than 5% of the student body had any computer skill beyond "turn it on and fire up a web browser".

ZeroGravitas• 13 years ago

I'd imagine they'll learn fast when properly motivated.

(Though to be honest, no-one has ever explained how this is all supposed to work. My UK 3G connection randomly stopped showing me some web sites, that were entirely non-porny, and I had to confirm my age via a credit card or something to remove this block. If you have to do the same thing on home internet then everyone will opt out eventually as the uselessness of it is pretty quickly apparent.)

vidarh3• 13 years ago

Only one of them needs to know how, and before you know it it will be packaged up nicely in a script or written up on web pages everyone will know about.

wisty• 13 years ago

When I was in school, only one of my friends knew how to install Quake in the PC lab (I think he used a keylogger, to get the admin password - it was back in the days when kids weren't treated like criminals for minor stunts like this). But he wasn't the only one who got to play it.

tomjen34• 13 years ago

Maybe, but as long as one kid knows how to get around it the rest will ask him.

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

Like most techies, you're focusing on the effectiveness. This is both missing the point and dangerously underestimating the intelligence of the people behind such measures.

Just like most of the anti-terror security theater, it's not about being effective in any way, it's about slowly getting the general population to accept increasingly repressive measures and a tighter grip of the "ruling class" on society in general.

Once filtering has been generally accepted, they can gradually start figuring out how to censor the things they really don't want us to see (and guess what, it isn't porn) without having to worry about further social or legislative hurdles.

There is no technological gap between "us" and "them". There's a gap in political savvy between "them" and "us", and we're on the wrong side of that gap.

marcuspovey• 13 years ago

Exactly this.

tossawayopinion• 13 years ago

Idea 1: ignorant politicking; Idea 2: mass conspiracy. Is there evidence for either side?

netcan10• 13 years ago

I think you're looking at this as too much of a conspiracy.

This is just attempting to gain the control they had before and have now over every other media. They can prevent hard porn on TV or in the window displays of high street video rental shops. Why not the internet?

From their perspective the internet is a loophole they are trying to shut down.

Internet freedom happened incidentally as a side effect of how the technology worked. It wasn't brought around by ideology like traditional "free press" was.

rmc2• 13 years ago

As well as creeping scope from non-porn people, there are pleanty of anti-porn and anti-sex campaigners out there. They want to ban all porn. They'll talk about extreme porn and simulated rape porn and child porn now. Then they'll talk about default-on filters, then people/polticians/etc. will be pressured into always having it on, etc etc.

Remember there have been court cases about whether contraceptives, pornography or abortion was legal. There are people who want to go back to the "good old days" when condoms, porn and sex outside marriage was illegal.

anonymous• 13 years ago

I doubt there's a directed conspiracy on this. But I don't doubt this is how the technology will end up being used.

w_t_payne• 13 years ago

Yes, it is all about power and control -- but porn is very much part of what the authorities do not want people to see.

Your sexuality is the most personal, most intimate part of your life. By enforcing "morality" - the state exerts control over your sexuality; it exerts control over the most intimate part of your life; for those in authority, it is the most potent symbol of their power possible - and the most intoxicating validation of their status.

Those in power are there because they are pathologically inclined to seek it. They cannot help but expand that power, to intrude and control others to the maximum extent possible.

chiph• 13 years ago

So, this is ... "porn theater"?

Gosh, can't understand how an MP and member of his community could possibly be in favor of that.

ancarda2• 13 years ago

Kids now live online with few exceptions, and a technical understanding of the world will hopefully become second nature to most people, eventually.

No. I've been enough debates with peers my age (17-18) who practically live online but their world consists of Facebook and YouTube. They assume content can be taken offline simply by hitting "delete". Their ignorance will shock you.

What we need is better education of how the internet works, but of course, you only learn if your interested.

Lewton• 13 years ago

You don't have to learn or understand anything to circumvent these filters

All the skills you need is to be able to mindlessly follow a guide

Just like with the blocking of the pirate bay, most people will know someone who can help them circumvent it

tomjen34• 13 years ago

Well I am sure there will be a youtube tutorial about how to disable the porn filters in a couple of days after this goes into effect.

DanBC4• 13 years ago

Porn filters will be of no concern whatsoever to anyone under 40 with the most rudimentary technical chops (and appetite for porn). What else will be banned?

Nothing is banned.

The filters are voluntary for the end user.

The filters are stupid, but please argue against what they actually are.

Bosence• 13 years ago

The filters are voluntary OPT OUT for the end user*.

I know it seems insignificant, but it makes a big difference.

Also, I am right in thinking, this hasn't been proposed as a bill yet to the house of commons/lords? I feel as Cameron has a long history of broken promises.

pnathan• 13 years ago

There is pretty substancial technological gulf opening up between the "ruling class" and the "reasonably well educated folks" out there.

Pretty sure it's been there from the start. Read up on the EFF's founding.

moocowduckquack8• 13 years ago

A Paul Staines vs Claire Perry smutocalypse, oh boy this should be fun. I may need to stock up on beer and popcorn.

oracuk• 13 years ago

He is (apparently) considering sueing her: http://order-order.com/2013/07/24/should-guido-sue-claire-pe...

I am conflicted. I never really liked Paul Staines' style but I am somewhat afraid of the impact of Claire Perry on the UK Internet regulations. I have to admit I would love to see him publicise the lack of understanding she has in the Internet that she is working so hard to regulate..

shdon• 13 years ago

She deserves to have some sense sued into her. It is frightening how such thoroughly ignorant people seem utterly powercrazed, trying to control that which they don't understand, effectively becoming for more evil than the thing they want to fight. Her stupidity is staggering. Bring on the Streisand effect indeed...

everyone• 13 years ago

Immature. Pointless. Counter-productive. But Goatse'd! hahahahaa! How wonderfully appropriate :)

_b8r0• 13 years ago

There's several issues that are worth raising here, but I struggle to understand why the Parliamentary Private Secretary for the Secretary of State for Defence needs to attend a meeting with ISPs about unrelated civilian matters.

ealexhudson• 13 years ago

If it was a committee or some other 'public' meeting, then pretty much any MP or Lord can attend if they so wish. Her role as PPS is separate to her constituency role. From the sounds of the meeting, it wasn't a meeting with Government but with Parliamentarians.

nicholassmith3• 13 years ago

It worries me that people that have absolutely no understanding of even the basics of how a system works have any ability to regulate it. The worst part is, there are MPs who do have a good technical understanding, but for the most part they're drown out by the shrill cries of 'save us from ourselves!'.

I cannot imagine how much torture it must have been to try and explain the concepts to someone who just does not care. It's wilful stupidity.

netcan10• 13 years ago

Yeah. Me too.

The cookie legislation, with all its pompous righteous "debates" in EU & UK parliament is the perfect example. They basically legislated a nag screen that you need to 'X' on every site you visit.

It gives shoddy "web consultants" a hook to bait clients with (you are required by law to have a cookie compliant website.). It creates extra nonsense work for developers. Stupid bikeshed meeting all around the country. And a very tiny annoyance occurring 10000 time per second to someone user somewhere. Lots of website owners that know they are breaking some law someplace and decide not to bother about it which is corrosive to rule of law.

Naturally, it does absolutely nothing to achieve the goals it set out to achieve (tracking?). Nothing. It's pure incompetence.

alan_cx3• 13 years ago

Its not just technical, is all over government. Education ministers usually have no grounding in education, health ministers usually have no grounding in health, armed forces ministers usually have never serves, home secretaries usually have no grounding in law enforcement, and so on. All they know is what their supporters think and they apply that to garner votes. At best, such people only know how to manipulate parliament.

This is democracy......

Luc2• 13 years ago

Government ministers don't even need to be elected MPs. For a UK example: Peter Mandelson in 2008. It's the parties who decide who becomes minister, and as such they _could_ pick and choose domain experts, if they wished.

ancarda2• 13 years ago

This is mentioned a lot in this great talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc

The thing is, politicians are able to reasonably regulate almost anything with zero knowledge. The example given is you can reasonably ban the use of mobile phones inside cars without causing cars to become less useful.

"Make me an internet that doesn't run BitTorrent".

Well, that's not possible. But, it should be, right? Politicians don't understand general purpose computers and general purpose networks (the Internet) are so flexible they can do anything and trying to limit a particular activity does more harm than good.

netcan10• 13 years ago

I've mentioned this before on one of these threads: I think any focus on the sexual morality of politicians, political point scoring and such is superfluous.

Porn and other "offensive content" has been restricted or banned in pretty much every time and place by various means. Even if an outright ban does not exist in blanket legislation, there are restrictions, codes of practice, industry bodies, laws applying narrowly to certain media channels or something like that.

Basically, porn gets regulated/restricted/banned always by whatever authority has the means to do so. Always. And some authority always has jurisdiction in some way over every mainstream media source. The difference on the internet is that no one could regulate it. There was no authority or industry body. No power that could be appealed to. Now the internet can be regulated, seemingly.

That is the story here. Not "Cameron is a prude" or "Cameron is pro-censorship."

The internet is regulatable now. That's the story. This probably means that the same restrictions that apply elsewhere (TV, radio, print) will apply online.

belorn2• 13 years ago

That is false from a global perspective.

Sex and nudity as "offensive content" is mostly an US-centric concept. Maybe they learned it from the UK, or UK from the US, but many European countries during the 1950-2000 did not share it. Sweden as an example, showed many movies on national paid TV that was deemed too sexual for movie theaters in the US. They had a teen age show called "bullen", broadcasting during family prime time, which included everything from nudity to instructions around masturbation. The movie Showgirls was shown not once but twice and both times the uncensored version. Nudity and sex was not discussed in censorship discussions as it was just not an issue in peoples mind.

However, in contrast to US culture, Sweden had a heavy ban on violence. The cartoon show Darkwing Duck was deemed as "video nasty", and banned mid season. The move theaters had a state censure policy which got only as recent as 2001 got abolished.

kolektiv2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure this is true. Oh, I don't argue with your point about the historical facts of restriction, but I do think that the internet is still far from regulatable. The story is still really that politicians believe it is - it isn't, but they don't have the expertise to comprehend why that's the case. The internet is a mass publishing medium, not just a mass consumption one.

Legislation has historically successfully targeted only publishers, and you can do this when the number is fairly small, but not when that target is "everyone" because of the work required in monitoring (which is still not amenable to automation, despite what politicians may believe - it's still just too hard for the software technology we have).

Cakez0r• 13 years ago

And the collateral damage of an automated filtering system is huge.

netcan10• 13 years ago

I'm not 100% sure I agree with me either. :)

I agree with your point. Being a mass publishing medium is what has kept the internet in anarchy thus far. In some cases, I think it will be possible to regulate publishers with some success. If you can get 10-20 companies to comply, you're covering most of the web.

For porn, that's not going to work. But, a filter probably will.

Censorship and contend restrictions don't need to be airtight. They never are. It's enough to just move things from mainstream to marginal. Seeing breasts, arses & fleeting (preferably comical) glimpses of balls is normal and OK, but unadvisable for young children. Genitalia in non sexual contexts is new, but now OK too (thank you embarrassing bodies). You can watch that with your friends or teenage kids. Genitalia in a sexual context is not OK. You look at that alone with a laptop in shame. You have to buy it from licensed sex shops with darkened windows.

Regulations & mainstream public opinion cross influence each other but actual line is more or less defined by TV standards and practices.

All internet porn (or political opinion or any subject of cencorship) filtering has to do is reclaim the control of that line. If you have to call up and ask for porn access or use tor to get it, it might let them do that.

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

Not participating in the state religion was banned in pretty much every time and every place, and here we are no longer buying in that mythology.

Change happens. It is for good.

jwilliams• 13 years ago

Sure. And it was once illegal to own an English version of the Bible. (Greatly paraphrasing) Gutenberg's technology rendered that position untenable.

Ok. Got a handle on the books. What do you do about pirate radio?

The law is the law. The restrictions, codes-of-practice, whatever - they are medium specific. What's invalid is the idea that you can regulate the Internet like you can a "curtained off" section of your local VHS video library.

netcan10• 13 years ago

AFAIK the Gutenberg Bible was in Latin.

The protestant reformation put that technology to use to disseminate laymen readable translations 80 years later. The new technology (presses), the new theology (Martin Luther) and social change (literacy) cross-pollinated and together changed the world. Most of the positive changes seemed pretty incidental. I'm not sure Lutheranism in itself was much of an improvement, but that's besides the point.

Not sure if the analogy here holds, but I think what we have is the technology. It has changed culture. I'm pretty sure public attitudes towards sex are different now because of the internet. We don't have the ideology though.

IMO, the american right hog the "freedom" banner and give it all sorts of connotations that most of us want to keep at arms length. It would be good if they'd put it down and let someone new have a go at it.

cromulent• 13 years ago

Interesting point. In the U.K. it seems they are talking about regulating the WWW, rather than the Internet, but yes.

At the same time we have PRISM awareness, so it seems the internet is 1) "monitorable" and 2) "regulatable", if those terms can be used.

You would think that if PRISM is effective, it would be a much better way of catching child pornographers than implementing any sort of filter, and then perhaps people might calm down about the legal pornography.

netcan10• 13 years ago

I don't think they see WWW as a thing apart from the internet. I don't really either.

IMO, there will be attempts to regulate the media-ish parts of the internet like they do other media and the 1-1 communication-ish part of the internet as they do communication mediums (eg phone).

jacklockyeruk• 13 years ago

Except the people who apparently now have the jurisdiction to 'regulate' the internet seem to wholly lack the working knowledge to do so effectively.

vidarh3• 13 years ago

Customs can stop (or try anyway) to stop importation of illegal porn in physical form. Police can try to stop it from being sold on the high street (but they can't even stop me from being hassled by people selling poor quality pirated DVD's), but the big difference here is that while they can do that for physical objects, ever attempt at stopping this online is trivially easy to circumvent.

They can't regulate it. The cost of setting up a HTTP proxy for personal use is the cost of a tiny VPS - I can get one for a month for about the cost of one of those pirated DVD's, and for a quarter for the cost of a takeaway. Heck, if I was a teenager today, and had parents that signed up for even the optional filter, I'd spring for a VPN/VPS - it's a fraction of what most kids around here pay for smartphones already anyway.

If this filtering stops peoples access, it'll create a market for VPN accounts targeted for that type of use, or "just" encrypted http proxying.

They can try to stop the VPNs - good luck; IP hopping by spinning up cloud instances all over the place as needed and providing a browser extension to keep the list of proxies up to date will be trivial. They can try to stop people paying for these VPN's, but even if they manage to stop card payments, that'll only drive up the demand for things like Bitcoins.

In other words: The same restrictions will not apply. The restrictions will apply for those who do not care enough to sign up to (trivially simple, once more people decides to try to make money off it) ways to circumvent them. But the barrier is so much lower. And it will keep lowering, rather than rising, as each new attempt at blocking gives more of us incentives to prepare countermeasures.

DanBC4• 13 years ago

I mostly agree.

The scary thing is the incompetence. Politicians think that paedophiles use Google Search to find images of child sexual abuse, and that all Google hasn't got "filter explicit images" working for these images.

It's idiotic - I don't know what Google do, but I'm pretty sure they aggressively detect, remove, and report to law enforcement such images.

tomjen34• 13 years ago

The morality of politicians are extremely relevant because it is another stick we can use against this. It might not have been relevant in an Oxbrige debate club but politics is war by other means and in war you shouldn't give a hoot about the truth.

belorn2• 13 years ago

So now that we can see in real time the ways government tries to censure, control, and surveil the Internet. The speed in which they try to incorporate the Internet under their domain of control is one where we don't need to guess anymore about their intent. Its obvious, clear and show no sign of slowing down. Rather, they are increasing the speed in which censure, control, and surveillance are added.

We can't even claim that this is the initial battle. That fight has already been fought. We had the discussion around common carrier principles when peoples talked about net neutrality. We had the discussion when people discussed piracy. We had them also when wikileaks and SOPA was in the news. Even some of our allies has turned. ICANN is now days dictating under what purpose people are to be privileged to do the simply act of buying a name.

Allowing government to censure, control, and surveillance the Internet produce news article as this one. Expect to see more. Its that, or invent around it in such a way that the censure, control, and surveillance can't be used by the government from an technical standpoint.

girvo• 13 years ago

Call me naive, but I do feel that this is a significant subset of the government, but not all that feel this way. The person in question obviously has an agenda (and has posted blatantly incorrect statistics... I wish there was some way of punishing officials who publish lies. Any ideas, legally?) but to play devils advocate, does that mean everyone in office feels this way?

alan_cx3• 13 years ago

To play devil's advocate....Why would government not seek to control the internet? They control everything else, and if something goes wrong the public slaughter government for it, saying they should have done something. In the end, doesn't an ignorant frightened government just represent an ignorant frightened electorate?

Surely it has to be up to the tech savvy to educate the wider population, so that we end up with politicians who understand. Forget the politicians and focus on the general public.

Achshar• 13 years ago

I am not usually the one who laughs at technologically illiterate, but this is hilarious, not because she is blaming the blogger for hacking, but because her people are the ones who are deciding how the internet behaves, and yet they have no understanding of even basic stuff. So I find the idea of them making the decisions about something they are literally illiterate about amusing, and haunting.

scholia2• 13 years ago

It's funny if a top politician is clueless about the web.

Unfortunately, this particularly clueless politician is the UK's Secretary of State for Defence. She has nuclear submarines....

kolektiv2• 13 years ago

Thankfully she's only the PPS to the Secretary of State for Defense. The actual SSD is the far more capable Philip Hammond... (Hmmm.)

turbojerry• 13 years ago

Libel and blackmail from an MP, why am I not surprised. Does anyone know if Kickstarter allows funding of legal actions? I would be willing to donate some money into putting her in the dock for this.

Heliosmaster• 13 years ago

IIRC kickstarted doesn't, but there is plenty of places that do.

Stubbs• 13 years ago

Carl Sagan once famously said "We live in a society dependent on science & technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science & technology" Nowhere is this more true than in Parliament!

artumi-richard3• 13 years ago

As a father of a young child I'm quite keen on being able to provide him with a clean connection to the internet. I want him to be able to explore without having to watch over him.

We should have solutions to this problem, at the router level, where we can be in charge of the blacklist, and the times various items on it are ok or not ok.

Politicians cannot be blamed for trying to do what is popular, and because we as a community have failed to solve the problem for less technical parents than I, an imperfect solution has been proposed. We should not be surprised.

We are the ones best suited to find the optimal solutions to such problems, and carping on about politicians doing something when we have done far too little is pointless.

anu_gupta• 13 years ago

So, why not install one of the many filtering / blocking solutions that exist?

A simple Google search will show you that this is a well explored space, with many different options.

artumi-richard3• 13 years ago

There is relatively easy

https://www.opendns.com/home-solutions/parental-controls#fam...

But I don't have an easy way to say "No - that site is fine" - I am not in control.

But actually it's easy only because I know what DNS is and can imagine how to setup my router to use their dns servers.

moocowduckquack8• 13 years ago

"We should have solutions to this problem, at the router level, where we can be in charge of the blacklist."

We do have blacklists available at the router level. Blacklists at the router level compiled by parents don't work though, for the obvious reason that there are well over 4 billion pages to check. Is a bit like trying to guard what books your children read when they work out about the inter-library lending agreement. I used to cause havoc with that.

The best thing to do is to go on the internet with your kids until you think they have reached a reasonable level of understanding about the world, rather than putting a machine in their bedroom and trusting a filter to work.

artumi-richard3• 13 years ago

The first job is to try and make sure that there is no accidental viewing of stuff. Once a click on a shock site has been made the damage is done.

I could trust a filter based on a whitelist

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ or nothing.

gadders2• 13 years ago

Using OpenDNS as your DNS provider lets you block questionable content.

cstross• 13 years ago

Aaaaand ... the other shoe has just dropped:

http://order-order.com/2013/07/24/poll-result-86-of-readers-...

Guido Fawkes is talking to his lawyers about Libel. (Which under English law -- the reforms haven't gone through yet -- places the burden of proving that she didn't damage his reputation squarely on Claire Petty's shoulders.)

I'm just astonished that an MP appears to have been so ignorant of the law of her own land (and how it applies to twitter) that she left herself wide open to this.

terabytest• 13 years ago

I think this was the right thing to do on his part. Things like this are unacceptable.

beseku• 13 years ago

"I'm just astonished that an MP appears to have been so ignorant of the law of her own land ..."

You don't know our MPs very well do you ...? I'd say this is pretty much par for the course. The only laws they know anything about are loopholes.

nicholassmith3• 13 years ago

Excellent, after the whole furore with Bercow it'll be interesting to see whether the defamation laws will be used to the same effect. That High Court ruling set a very clear precedent about what can and can't be classed as libel, and given that there was less actual libel in her tweet compared to this then it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel.

I still think the libel laws need gutting, but it'll be interesting to see them used to spectacular effect against someone who should know exactly how much trouble they'll get in.

Nursie2• 13 years ago

> I still think the libel laws need gutting, but it'll be interesting to see them used to spectacular effect against someone who should know exactly how much trouble they'll get in.

We can only hope that by actions like these people can scare the lawmakers into actually doing something about our stupid laws....

Or if not, at least we can watch and laugh as they're on the receiving end.

yesimahuman• 13 years ago

Isn't this the same libel that that has been used to punish journalists who write about inconvenient truths? It seems hypocritical to stoop to that level.

jlgreco5• 13 years ago

What she said could be grounds for a libel suit in the US as well. The real difference is in the defense that she could mount.

Why should journalists abstain from defending themselves from libel in the UK just because others abuse those laws to attack journalists? Suggesting that journalists should not defend themselves from libel just because others abuse libel laws to shut down journalists is damn near concern trolling.

Tyrannosaurs• 13 years ago

Exactly, bad law is bad law and if you like free speech you should like it regardless who is speaking.

Personally I don't see this going anywhere near court. Guido may have some fun here but he's a political journalist with a Conservative leaning, he isn't going to start seriously threatening an Conservative MP. He'll milk the publicity, wring a minor apology out of her and it'll go no further than that.

rmc2• 13 years ago

Sure that particular law has been used that, since it's England's Libel law. However what she did was libel, and would be considered libel in basically every country with a libel law.

pbhjpbhj3• 13 years ago

WRT the libel claim, I think he did promote the website defacement. Ergo he was a "sponsor" to it.

Her tweet to that effect appears to be true [a partial defence], and as he is happy to have promoted it based on his blog I'd warrant it to be impossible to prove that it defamed him to say that he promoted the crack. Indeed he revelled in the promotion of said defacement.

Case dismissed.

glomph• 13 years ago

Reporting that something happened is not sponsoring it.

ryan14• 13 years ago

The porn filter could be debated in the House of Commons if this petition got 100,000 signatures > http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746

Eva_Peron• 13 years ago

Stating the obvious, but there are MAJOR first amendment problems with trying to get ISP's to block porn sites by default. I don't see how something like this could come to a vote without major controversy. There is still such a thing as freedom of expression, last time I checked.

spiek• 13 years ago

Well, the main thing here is that this is happening in England...

thirdsun• 13 years ago

Even if we ignore all the technical things she seems to be confused about, how can a government official think it is ok to publicly and childishly accuse and threaten this man on a social network. I'm not surprised by her technical ignorance at all, but the lack of professionalism and , well, manners is very worrying.