SRoC: Slightly Right of Centre

The point is the blocks don't work to stop the...

2012-05-04T11:36:14.743+01:00

The point is the blocks don't work to stop the pr0n so parents have to get clued up regardless. The blocks are worse than useless and give parents a false sense of security.

Hi Sean, the problem with the underwear block come...

2012-05-04T11:32:54.536+01:00

Hi Sean, the problem with the underwear block comes when filters are on by default, affecting adults who want to do normal stuff. Some of these adults have to ask for the block lifting, something they might find uncomfortable, asking for porn.

Also many won't ask for the block to be lifted and then some businesses are unfairly affected. Bravissimo and Figleaf blocked whilst eg. John Lewis, Debenhams and M&S are unblocked.

You say its up to the parents, but the problem is ...

2012-05-04T11:24:04.700+01:00

You say its up to the parents, but the problem is most parents (unlike you and I) are absolutely clueless with technology and have no idea of the risk. The alternative is to fund a direct mail campaign to every household in the country, accompanied by widespread multimedia advertising.

Also, what sort of child needs to go underwear shopping online?

It wouldn't be different at all. Almost none o...

2012-05-01T10:13:05.320+01:00

It wouldn't be different at all. Almost none of the huge numbers of pornographic web sites are based in the UK, so even with draconian antiporn laws, almost all of it would still be available to anyone in Britain who chose to look it up.

Even if you're advocating Iranian-style internet censorship, it is still trivial to access nearly anything. But you wouldn't be advocating that, now, would you? You wouldn't be daring to tell me what to read, or how to live my life, would you?

The legalizing of hardcore porn in the UK around 1...

2012-04-28T17:14:58.786+01:00

The legalizing of hardcore porn in the UK around 1999/2000 has not been discussed enough I think. The impact of that and the now easy and free supply of such material in every home has repurcussions to British society which are only just being detected. How would Internet life in 2012 be different if ownership and supply of hardcore material was still illegal and had criminal repurcussions?

I really get this, and the privacy implications. B...

2012-04-27T10:53:57.259+01:00

I really get this, and the privacy implications. Before the internet we had publishers and publishers had the power to keep things in the public's short term memory. Now the "short term memory" is distributed accross all people who choose to connect and is effectively uncrontrollable.

Which makes a mockery of any notion that this can or should be controlled. It's inherently democratic.

As far as privacy it means things which are privacy invasive but in the "long term memory" are less of a worry as they're not being rammed down people's throats. And this is scalable right down to communities and right up to a globalized view.

I search for my friend - something is privacy invasive if it comes at the top of the search results for her. It's less invasive if it sits on some internet backwater.

Thanks for the post!

When the DEA was at bill stage, the issue was rais...

2012-04-25T21:41:04.692+01:00

When the DEA was at bill stage, the issue was raised about shared usages etc. (i.e. to the effect that an IP address is mainly akin to a Postcode rather than to a National Insurance number), and the response of the Government was that they had been assured that solutions were readily available that would facilitate the party "responsible" for the IP address filtering out infringing traffic without affecting anything else.

Surely the time has come for OFCOM to go back and ask the Government to spell out what those solutions actually are, as without them, there are problems that are insoluble.

And pending those on whose assurances the legislation relied actually coming up with the goods, deferring proceeding any further.

Actually, we wanted neither an iPod nor an Amstrad...

2012-04-24T23:22:04.456+01:00

Actually, we wanted neither an iPod nor an Amstrad, we wanted freedom to choose our own device. An ability to think past specific products and about wider market conditions (as you intimate) would seem to be sine qua non for any politician dealing with regulatory matters.

Absolutely devastated, your site was my first stop...

2012-04-17T11:15:06.493+01:00

Absolutely devastated, your site was my first stop to catch up every now and again with all the pernicious threats to net freedom in the UK, and get a clear view of the latest machinations, a great loss - but hopefully you'll continue this role somehow, somewhere.

Very sad to hear this, but it sounds as though you...

2012-04-10T19:54:11.914+01:00

Very sad to hear this, but it sounds as though your hand was forced.

All the very best for the future - whatever it brings! :-)

James, well done and I do hope you reappear in the...

2012-04-10T13:06:49.296+01:00

James, well done and I do hope you reappear in the blogosphere sooner rather than later!

Like Ian Grant at br0kent3l3ph0n3.wordpress.com you have provided a genuine service and will be sorely missed.

G

Sorry to hear that, yours has been a really great ...

2012-04-10T12:20:42.303+01:00

Sorry to hear that, yours has been a really great blog on the subject. Thanks for all the articles, and best of luck finding a paying job.

"Confusion over warrants for access to traffi...

2012-04-04T15:40:25.890+01:00

"Confusion over warrants for access to traffic data arises perhaps because of the coalition's much-vaunted Protection of Freedoms Bill, which will require a judicial warrant for many requests for traffic data"

Perhaps that's the cause, though the confused I've seen have made no reference to it. But it ain't *that* many. The bill would subject only local authorities to an independent warrant procedure, and ALL Local authority RIPA requests covered by the Surveillance Commissioner (so including bugging, secret filming, and following people around for example, as well as comms data requests) amount to about 12,000 a year. No more than 6% of the total.

With whom have the Home Office officials responsib...

2012-04-02T23:09:36.445+01:00

With whom have the Home Office officials responsible for/involved in this bill exchanged communications, at what times and in what numbers?

No _content_ involved there, but I suspect they would claim that this information must be kept secret, as part of the war against %_BADTHING.

It's always worth remembering that the securit...

2012-04-02T15:23:29.736+01:00

It's always worth remembering that the security risk caused by "lawful intercept" interfaces (which the CCDP will effectively demand) is not just theoretical - it has been used.

See http://spectrum.ieee.org//telecom/security/the-athens-affair

Unfortunately the people who still manage to trust...

2012-04-02T13:24:23.544+01:00

Unfortunately the people who still manage to trust the government and police will say that if you have nothing to hide why hide it. The answer is plain and simple to most normal people - who you send xmas cards to, what you twitter about Strictly Come Dancing, the colour of your boxers, or opinions about train timetables, to take a few example,s are all private and should only be available to who you choose even though they are of no real consequence.
The up-side is that the government and police will end up with data overload and won't be able to see the wood for the trees and as Alex, the previous poster said, security will inevitably deteriorate.
Britain is getting overloaded with snooping; from excessive CCTV to street mounted car registration, and even face recognition, cameras.
It's time the government, police and local authorities understood that they are our servants and what we do 'upstairs' whilst they are 'downstairs' is none of their business.

The government have had these plans for a long, lo...

2012-04-02T11:15:53.417+01:00

The government have had these plans for a long, long time now, and you can't blame the current administration entirely for their strange eagerness to pursue this insane proposal - they only voiced opposition to the plans so as to draw voters away from Labour while Labour held the reins of power; a move in a political game of chess, nothing more. Since we've discovered that both parties basically eat at the same trough, it's become clear that the Ministers had no real plans to shelve this project at all, did they?

We all now need to get tech savvy here, upgrading our internet connections, anonymising our access to the web and avoiding posting sensitive data to Google and Facebook. Also, if you have access to a service which provides secure emails outside of the ISP services and the public email accounts such as Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail etc., sign up for those accounts.

All legitimate users of the internet, myself included, have a right to privacy and to enjoy conversations free from snooping by a judgmental, paranoid, terrified government that knows it has pushed too far and that expects a backlash any day now.

The industry should develop a technology to contro...

2012-04-01T07:48:49.382+01:00

The industry should develop a technology to control what their children access on the Internet? Wrong tense, that problem has been taken care of. Functional porn-type filters are over a decade old; now we have developed a solution to controlling access to content suitable for the age of the child browsing the web. And compared to tracking web user behaviour? No, it wasn't easy...

The problem has been, as James rightly points out, that the political focus has remained pornography, whereas it should be about suitable content for a given age and child.

The next, big and ongoing, problem to overcome is public awareness of the available solutions...

This is not a civil liberties issue. There is no c...

2012-03-31T10:04:32.216+01:00

This is not a civil liberties issue. There is no chance that parliament would pass a law that would make it compulsory for anyone to make a choice about porn access.
But it is important that parents have the ability to control what content is delivered into their home. The ISPs and others that profit from selling internet access, and the technology industry as a whole, has a duty to develop technology to empower parents.
It is not too hard to do this. Compared to the ingenuity and sophistication of the technology directed at tracking citizens (and their children)without their knowledge by the behavioural advertising industry this is easy stuff.
Of course there would be leaks but parents have the common sense to realise that no technology solution can completely be relied on. But it is naive to think that parents can monitor their children's use of the internet without support from the industry.
Baroness Howe is simply raising an issue that concerns many parents. It would better to direct your ridicule at those in the technology industries that have refused, or do not have the competance, to deal with it.

"Content OK for older children won't be s...

2012-03-30T16:41:22.136+01:00

"Content OK for older children won't be suitable for younger children. It's a sliding scale and again parental judgement is key."

I couldn't put it better myself. In fact my version was much longer and I just can't bring myself to cut it down:

http://twoten.is/adifferentphilosophy

The vast majority of us do not have a recording st...

2012-03-28T00:03:36.695+01:00

The vast majority of us do not have a recording studio and do not create their own music. Therefore, we must assume that people like Mark Mulligan are not actually producing user generated content but, at best, remixing copyrighted material and claiming it is user generated content. A simple check on You Tube can find loads of remixes which backs this claim. We should, therefore, conclude that Mulligan isn't an artist at all and assume that all his content is poorly remixed copyrighted material until and unless he can prove to our satisfaction that he did actually create the content and that it is not illegal.

After all, the vast majority of us aren't artists.

Hi Richard, You're spon on - this is very muc...

2012-03-26T16:03:08.461+01:00

Hi Richard,

You're spon on - this is very much llike Creative Commons in approach, however I'd say that the graphics still have a role to play in user recognition, which is why we included them in our proposal paper.

The open source GPL/BSD analogy is very useful, I hadn't thought of that but I have spent the last week arguing with mainly lawyers who cannot accept that there will be any demand for standardised licenses because users and businesses like customisation.

In this case I argue that clarity is the single most important driver for adoption, and this driver will outweigh the business (and lawyers') temptation to tweak. I hadn't actually thought until I read your post that some businesses will atually welcome an off-the-shelf policy as it makes things simpler for them too.

Thanks very much for your contribution,
James

For the past decade or so everybody's been sin...

2012-03-26T15:38:13.791+01:00

For the past decade or so everybody's been singing in favor of localism. No one could get enough of the grassroots and how could you be against the grassroots? But in reality Secretary of States handed out their gold stars to councils doing a really good job at jumping through bureaucratic hoops.

Sounds a bit like Creative Commons, then? I know ...

2012-03-26T15:04:41.376+01:00

Sounds a bit like Creative Commons, then?

I know what CC-BY-SA means, and it's much easier for me to just see a CC-BY-SA logo and know what that means than to have to read a license.

CC works so much better than Open Source licences, where the vast majority seem to be basically GPL, basically BSD, a halfway house like MPL/LGPL, or an "only one company can sell this commercially" licence (like the old QPL), but there are a dozen variants of each, with subtle differences.

Can I suggest that you concentrate on the standard licences, rather than the pretty pictures, though - if I'm setting up a new web service and I can pick up a standard privacy policy off the shelf, then I'll probably do that, rather than making one up and then going to a lawyer later if I'm making enough money to justify one.

Look at how many websites licence UGC under a CC licence - because "everyone" understands CC and it saves a lot of paying lawyers. If you're going to produce some standard privacy policies then that's great.

James, This blog post is the best exposition I ha...

2012-03-25T15:31:36.922+01:00

James,

This blog post is the best exposition I have yet read on how, as Dr Richard Hull identified, elite clientelism permeates Digital decision-making.

The question "why" is cynically answered as the profit motive and perhaps there is a better alternative cause at work, like community interest, however means misplaced?