Depressing

There is something about this time of year that just causes the news to be bleak, this year instead of the headlines being taken up with a natural disaster, it is mostly about both sides in the middle east being utterly, depressingly stupid. Hamas has played the part of the small child in the lion enclosure perfectly, despite having been told to stop poking the lion with the stick it carried on and true to for the lion has decided to gouge the child, even though it knows full well that it will get admonished for doing so. Everyone out there who is shouting at/about one side or the other being to blame is being terribly naïve about the huge amounts of anger both sides have after thousands of years of various flavours of oppression. Unfortunately there is no-one about who can bash their heads together and send them both to bed early without any supper.

Closer to home the truly saddening part of Andy Burnham's proposals for the internet isn't age ratings, they aren't oppressive so much as completely unworkable, but that the Government is considering changing libel laws to give people access to cheap low-cost legal recourse if they are defamed online. This country is world renowned for so called 'libel tourism' and how easy it is to bring actions for defamation in our courts even when there is the scantiest connection between the materials and people concerned and this jurisdiction. This reputation is so poorly regarded in places like the US as an anathema to free speech that there are even attempts to legislate to deal with the issue.

That Wikipedia/IWF thing.

I am not going to comment on the politics of this, there is a lot of that going on already but on some of the technical issues. If you don't know what I am talking about Rory Cellan-Jones has a blog post on the subject.

1. For a significant period of time, the block was on the page but not the image.
   They seem to have fixed this now, but when the story first broke and for most of the weekend if you looked at the page in a popular internet search engine's cache, which doesn't store images just links to them, there was the "offending" image in the RHS info box.
2. The competence of some ISP network teams is in doubt.
   In much about this story the use of the term "transparent proxy" has been used but there has also been reports that due to the use of the IWF blocker all traffic to Wikipedia was coming from limited IP addresses per affected ISP. Now this could all be a fault with the reporting of what was going on, but such proxies should be dealing with the traffic in such a way as not to provide such issues, hence transparent.
3. The IWF suffers epic fail in understanding how Wikipedia and the internet works.
   All they have really succeeded in doing is making more people look at this image, it doesn't even need any great skills to find, you just need to look at the page in the other languages it exists in until you find an unblocked one. They are in no way stopping cracked glass fetishists from getting their rocks off.

Child sexual abuse is not a nice thing, and this would be a better world if no child ever got harmed. However censorship is also not a nice thing and this would be a better world if it never happened either.