War on porn - another bright idea of politicians not knowing what they are talking of

[Skybird]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2013...orn-censorship

Indeed, the whole notion of an opt-in pornography register is in itself alarming. Would a list of households requesting an unfiltered internet remain secure and private – or could governments refrain from cross-referencing it with other potential indices of suspicion? How should citizens undertaking perfectly legal browsing of explicit materials feel about being listed on such a database – or about wanting to be free of arbitrary restrictions across countless sites and resources?
(...)
While it’s all very well to pour scorn on censorship, I have every sympathy for those who say that granting young people unrestricted access to the world’s most depraved outpourings demands action. It does. What it demands, though, is the same kind of preparedness that living among others has always required: the pursuit and prosecution of abusers; and the imperfect but steady effort to educate a next generation able to live within their era’s complexities. There are worse things out there than porn – and delegating your children’s safety, freedom and education to algorithms is one of them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...porn-starbucks

Consider a hypothetical internet of a mere 20bn documents that is comprised one half "adult" content, and one half "child-safe" content. A 1% misclassification rate applied to 20bn documents means 200m documents will be misclassified. That's 100m legitimate documents that would be blocked by the government because of human error, and 100m adult documents that the filter does not touch and that any schoolkid can find.

In practice, the misclassification rate is much, much worse. It's hard to get a sense of the total scale of misclassification by censorware because these companies treat their blacklists as trade secrets, so it's impossible to scrutinise their work and discover whether they're exercising due care.

Some weeks ago, Germany's Super-Angie, Merkel, stunned experts and young people and middle-agers alike by refering to the internet as something being so very new and young so that almost nobody could have grabbed an understanding of this new technology yet.



For the record: the internet was invented and its technology demonstrated in the 60s, the academical use separated form the military use in the 80s, and the commercial boom began in the very early 90s.

It's all one quarter and even half a century ago, Angie. Two generations. Are we talking of our royal majesty in plural these days, your incompetent Highness?

Or are you just judging some hundred million people by your own failing example?

The last word should be given to the Ministry of Truth blog:

http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/201...s-online-porn/

[AVGWarhawk]

I want to know Dowly's take on the internet and porn.

[the_tyrant]

I love it when this happens. I run a hobby VPN business, and this will make my sales jump through the roof!

[CaptainHaplo]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

I want to know Dowly's take on the internet and porn.

My sources say that he is all for it...

The Internet and porn, that is....

[nikimcbee]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

I want to know Dowly's take on the internet and porn.

Beat me to it.

I think he's enlisted in the porn militia to fight this war of moralist aggression.

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

It's all one quarter and even half a century ago, Angie. Two generations. Are we talking of our royal majesty in plural these days, your incompetent Highness?

It's not incompetent to imply that today's amount of easily accessible pornographic internet content is the same as it was half a century ago, just dishonest.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by August

It's not incompetent to imply that today's amount of easily accessible pornographic internet content is the same as it was half a century ago, just dishonest.

No-no-no, totally different context, she was not referring to Cameron or pornography at all, she was generally talking about the web and implied that still nobody knows nothing about nothing, so to speak. I think it was in context of the NSA affair, and that poor politicians could have had no idea at all about what was going on because the internet and hightech is so very new (and you have to know here that in Germany the secret service BND is an "integrated" service, different than in the UK or the US with their many sub-offices or rivaling organisations on the same level of the hierarchy - and the BND is directly lead and monitored and reports directly to the chancellors very own office, not to anyone else - Merkel was, in other words, trying to find excuses to escape accusations that she and her predecessors know every well what was and is going on and that the NSA acted with knowledge and allowance from the chancellor'S office, since all beginning). In essence, she said nothing worth to be noted, but it made it into our major news due to this idiotic implication, this manouvering, this lame excuse, however you want to call it.

It made it into our national main news due to this implication.

I referred to her only to illustrate that politicians so often get overtaken and left behind in the dust by technology and reality. Sometimes the appear to live in a bubble universe of minimal proportions that our caravan has left behind long time ago. Their attempts to address certain issues and consequences of of things that went on and developments unfolding so often come too late, are so often so little only, and illustrate so often an alarming naivety in understanding the matter - not because it is all so new that "nobody can know", but because all others already have moved ahead and them, politicians, just haven't realised it.

[Mittelwaechter]

I guess our ancestors must have been very distraught, spoiled, rotten, horny and naughty kids, watching the cattle in the fields, the dogs in the backyard and their own parents in the family small sleeping chamber having sex. Live - in 3D! All of them must have had a totally malformed personality.

I had no internet in my youth and I found other ways to watch what I was interested in.

This is the same emotional club like the 'war on terror' club to make the people submissive to any censorship.

Censorship is necessary to control the flow of information. Uncontrolled information is dangerous, because free information supports the truth. Another truth but the proclaimed one, spread by the controlled media to control the perception of the people to govern their motivation. The information and its interpretation has to stay with the mighty ones.

The internet is like the bookprint a tool for the masses to educate and to doubt finally the superiority of the rulers. They have to gain control over it or they will lose their status.

It's all about control. They control us - in our so called democracy.
I guess it is a dictatorship where the state controls the people, right?

[TarJak]

Catch up Europe. Our bunch of incompetents proposed similar filtering for the same reasons a few years ago. It got stalled once the technical details of it were starting to be understood and a 13 year old kid showed that it took him 5 minutes to get around the filter and get full access to the Web. Not long after that the "secret" black list was posted on the Internet for all to see.

If your incompetents are as incompetent as ours you have little to fear.

[Wolferz]

All the good wars are taken so, they come up with this kind of garbage.

How about the politicians start a war on their own stupidity?

[vienna]

Here in the US, almost every post WWII GOP administration has launched either a commission on porn or some sort of anti-porn campaign. They produce a large amount of publicity for the GOP, but, in the end, achieve nothing. I think the UK movement will be yet another failed attempt and only serves to make it look like a particular group of politicians are "on the side of decency"...

Speaking of decency, I recall when I was attending Catholic school in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a Catholic organization called the "Legion of Decency" who passed ratings on books, magazines, movies, TV, etc., in some cases 'condemning' any media it felt was 'obscene'. Here is a link to some of the films they 'condemned':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ion_of_Decency

Any of your favorites on there?...

In our parish church, there was a weekly posting on the bulletin board from the Legion of its latest listing. I and many other boys would carefully study the list to see if we had missed anything in our pusuit of salacious material...

We once had someone come in to explain the Legion and its rating system to the kids. He warned us even looking at anything 'condemned' would be sinful and would certainly adversely affect our minds. I could not resist asking how the list was compiled: did the members of the Legion's board sit and go through all the material themselves, personally? Yes, they did was the response. Then, I asked, would they not be adversly affected by viewing the material, irrevocably altering their minds and morals , rendering their judgement suspect?

I'll never forget the glares I got from the nuns sitting at the front of the classroom...

<O>