Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and ye all surf at her Majesty’s pleasure;
But the [porn filters] have led to internet users being denied access to a wide range of organisations including child protection charities, women’s charities and gay rights groups. Among institutions that have found themselves subject to the blocks are the British Library and the National Library of Scotland.
The opt-in filters also deny access to the Parliament and Government websites and the sites of politicians, including Claire Perry, the MP who has campaigned prominently for the introduction of filters.
h/t AK
Britain: old Cree word for ‘land where warriors squat’.
I wonder if people in the UK will start to make the connection here between trying to “filter the interwebs” and trying to “filter the airline passengers for contraband”. Probably not.
It has been said many times here, and reaffirmed with each new link Kate provides, that the cradle of western democracy, the nation founded upon Magna Carta, is dead. This is most obvious in the way the politically neutered Monarchy panders to the sullen EU commissars who have usurped the Monarch’s social contract with the British people. Foreign interests now rule Britain through a subordinate parliament, not the Monarchy, not the people.
What is not so obvious is that these petty regulating endozoa which constantly offend us with these displays of overbearing regulatory tyranny, are simply the bottom-dwelling scavengers, who feed on the last remaining scraps of liberty from the corpse of a breached social contract.
Brits would be justified in forcing the crown to re-assert royal prerogative and dissolve the current government at all levels and convene a common congress-in-council to re-establish true representative government in line with Blackstone’s constitution, the Magna Carta and sovereign rule of law.
British middle class affluence/influence was hollowed out by Fabian socialists, but Britain’s democratic institutions and her free society was hollowed out by the internationalist scum who sold out her rule of law to a prehensile, authoritarian EU cabal which consistently tightens its grip on the remaining liquidity and freedoms of Britons. Governments who pander to EU edicts and politically correct tyranny are, as Nigel Farage says, treasonous to the interests of the free peoples of Britain.
If you want to find the source of all this authoritarian regulating in Britain look no further than an administrative functionary who is a common cause EU lackey. Brits should be at the stage of revolt against this anti-constitutional regulating and governing but it seems too many years of, subservient martinet socialism has sucked the passion for liberty from the British heart.
I presume that none of these guardians of purity has ever heard if Tor or anonymizer sites. When one websurfs through Tor, then all packets are encrypted and the encryption is currently unbreakable. The Tor network also allows people to become an anonymous part of the network to help people get around internet censorship. The nice thing about Tor is that the greater the amount of traffic it carries, the better the security and hence the spooks are one of the biggest users of Tor. Every so often I let one of my machines become a Tor node and, even though I have a very fast internet connection, I’m in the low end of bandwidth for Tor nodes. Tor will never be taken down as it’s just too useful to everyone.
As far as corruption of young people’s morals, I consider statist governments to be far more corrupting through their increasingly oppressive legislation, dumbed down education whose primary goal appears to be creating a nation of sheeple and their baseless belief that they know the best for people. In comparison, the pervert asking a kid to help him look for a lost dog in the bushes is very very minor league in the corruption and obscenity ratings. When the word “politician” elicits the same emotional response in the majority of people as the word “p e d o f i l e”, then we might have a chance of turning around the steady descent into tyranny. Unfortunately, I believe the the battle for western values of freedom and individual rights has been lost in Britain.
The solution to the problem is to have parents a lot more involved in what their kids view over the internet. This is probably an insolvable problem now given that every kid old enough to type a url into a mobile phone web browser can access anything they want over the internet. I view the increasing dependence of people on an external data source rather than keeping stuff in their wetware very concerning. Right now, whenever I ask a high school student a question about something, their immediate response appears to be to google the question. Presumably the empty memory space between their ears is being filled with some form of information but not likely information which is going to prove useful to them in the long run.
It was only a couple of months ago that I found out that an iPhone could stream HDMI video to a large screen monitor when I watched a movie with a friend. This was quite disturbing on a number of levels as I didn’t realize until then that many people watched movies on their iPhone screens and also, because the popularity of iPhones, will result in people assuming they don’t need a desktop or laptop because the processing power of the ARM CPU’s on the newer iPhones exceeds that of 1970’s era supercomputers. The iPhone is a closed source system and thus unable to be programmed by the average user. We’ve gone from the early 1980’s when the Commodore 64 was going to make everyone who bought it a programmer to vastly more capable machines where people are prohibited from programming their phones. To me that is a far greater obscenity than the widespread presence of videos of human copulatory activities on the internet.
One of the options is to not allow kids to have internet access via a cell phone until they reach the age of 18. They can have telephones to make calls, send and recieve text messages and take photographs. If they find a way around these restrictions, great, it means they’ve started to learn more about the system. By making controlling access to the internet a purely parental function, one would deal with a large part of the problem. Also, one would have a generation which would have to learn a lot more than google.com which seems to be the url of their long term storage at present.
“The iPhone is a closed source system and thus unable to be programmed by the average user. We’ve gone from the early 1980’s when the Commodore 64 was going to make everyone who bought it a programmer to vastly more capable machines where people are prohibited from programming their phones. To me that is a far greater obscenity than the widespread presence of videos of human copulatory activities on the internet.”
If only there were a commonly available, widely commercially supported open source smartphone OS OH WAIT.