{"id":2120,"date":"2012-05-05T12:25:25","date_gmt":"2012-05-05T11:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/?p=2120"},"modified":"2012-05-07T11:31:23","modified_gmt":"2012-05-07T10:31:23","slug":"internet-censorship-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/?p=2120","title":{"rendered":"Internet Censorship, again."},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve touched on this<\/a> before, and it seems worth a revisit: in a week where The Pirate Bay<\/a> has been blocked by Virgin Media, and discussion of an opt-in for Internet porn<\/a> has resurfaced, and people who don’t understand have made themselves look uncharacteristically foolish<\/a> (via The Register<\/a>), it seems worthwhile to explore a few things.<\/p>\n

This is going to be a mix of my opinions, and technical facts. The tech I know about: I’m sysadmin for a medium-sized business: I know how web filters, DNS, and routing works. I know about tunnelling, VPNs, and proxies, but I rpomise not too go too deep into the tech.<\/p>\n

To set out my opinions: the Internet should not be censored by ISPs or the goverment for two reasons: first of all, it’s wrong. It might be porn or copyrighted material today, but it could be your political beliefs or anything else deemed unnacceptable tomorrow. <\/p>\n

Secondly, it doesn’t work. Technically, it doesn’t work, because techies will find a way round it<\/a> by use of a VPN, SSH tunnel, or anonymous proxy. Once the techies do it, they’ll distribute knowledge or tools on how to.<\/p>\n

It also doesn’t work on another level. How do you define porn, for example? As The Register points out, is this site<\/a> porn, or is it OK because it’s educational and produced by Channel 4? If we’re talking about electronic distribution, is this little lot<\/a> OK, because there’s no pictures?<\/p>\n

What level of nudity and\/or sexual activity is OK?<\/p>\n

Children have always had access to porn: stashes of magazines, their dad’s videos, etc. People need to get a grip and do some parenting, instead of devolving things to their ISP or the government.<\/p>\n

Moving away from porn, The Pirate Bay, it should be noted, didn’t actually host any copyrighted material, just links to filesharing of that material, which also makes it a dodgy target.<\/p>\n

I guess what really annoys me is this: this is blaming a transport medium. I have one expectation of my ISP: I don’t want “value added content” or crappy customised search pages. I want them to route packets of data, correctly, and unfiltered, without having to opt-in. Let us not forget that in the 1950s ‘saucy postcards’ were banned (and their creator found guilty under the Obscene Publications Act…<\/a>, so can we really trust a government to be our moral guardian, or perhaps we should start burning books now.<\/p>\n

Will someone please think of the children<\/a>?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve touched on this before, and it seems worth a revisit: in a week where The Pirate Bay has been blocked by Virgin Media, and discussion of an opt-in for Internet porn has resurfaced, and people who don’t understand have made themselves look uncharacteristically foolish (via The Register), it seems worthwhile to explore a few … Continue reading Internet Censorship, again.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,20,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-politics","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.piglet-net.net\/pigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}