UK Government Wants Google To Police Copyright 144
judgecorp writes "the UK's culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will this week ask Google to stifle sites deemed to be pirates, pushing them down the listing and cutting off their advertising revenues. The UK government has already outlined plans to make ISPs police copyright breaches by users."
You have to follow laws (Score:2)
Re:You have to follow laws (Score:5, Insightful)
The arguments for decreasing freedom in order to protect human rights are MUCH more compelling than the arguments for slashing freedom in order to protect corporate interests.
Re:You have to follow laws (Score:5, Informative)
Not when you're Jeremy Hunt. Jeremy Hunt makes Peter Mandelson look like an independent thinker with no influence from corporate interests.
This is the same guy who was going to go ahead and just let Murdoch take full control of BSkyB (the UK's largest broadcast) without question even though OFCOM, responsible for oversight of media in the UK recommended it be further looked into before any go ahead was considered.
Jeremy Hunt is the most corrupt politician in UK politics since Mandelson left the stage. It's not much of a suprise to see him getting involved in this sort of thing. He's one of those types who might as well just come out and admit that he'll do whatever the highest bidder pays him too, because everyone else already knows it to be true anyway.
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Since 1997 there have been three parties with a more than negligible proportion of votes: the Tories (who are even less interested in freedom of trade than Thatcher was), the New Tories (who are distinguished by paying lip service to some of the larger, more corrupt unions), and the Tory Lapdogs (who are distinguished by having something to say about civil liberties, as long as what they say is inconsequential).
The public is thus getting, by and large, exactly what it has asked for.
And complaints about gove
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The public is thus getting, by and large, exactly what it has asked for.
I don't know about the last election, but only about 25% of the public voted for Labour over the previous decade and yet they got them anyway.
I don't remember the last time a British government got more than 50% of the votes of people who could be bothered to get up and go to the voting stations, let alone 50% of the available votes.
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If all three major parties are essentially the same then it becomes that anyone who votes for any one of the major parties is voting for, well, any the major parties.
Similarly, in the US if you vote Democrat then you might as well be voting Republican, or vice versa.
The determining factor in whether democracy has been achieved (in the majoritarian sense) is whether 50% of the people have voted for one of the major parties.
They have. [ukpolitical.info]
People suck.
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Copyright violating sites are just as illegal, so what's the problem?
Criminal law vs civil law? Believe it or not you can't have your neighbor arrested for putting up a fence that encroaches on your property without your permission. Not every country in the world has criminalized copyright infringement.
Re:You have to follow laws (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but anybody who does any meaningful amount of trade with the US is having ACTA [wikipedia.org] crammed down their throat as a condition of continuing to do to so.
Sadly, any country which hasn't begun to criminalize it isn't being given a whole lot of options. The world is now so beholden to copyright, it isn't even funny any more.
It's a treaty they won't make public, which makes it all about what they want, and you and I can go get stuffed.
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No, but anybody who does any meaningful amount of trade with the US is having ACTA [wikipedia.org] crammed down their throat as a condition of continuing to do to so.
This is true. Fortunately other countries are emerging (China) that are proving to be even better partners than the bankrupt US, and they don't attach so many strings to their trade agreements. I can't help but shake my head as the US truly is regulating itself into oblivion. Too bad, I used to like the US. Now I have to watch what I say because there is a small but real chance I can be placed on an arbitrary "no fly list" or even be bombed by a drone in violation of any national and international laws. Th
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It's not so much that they're passing regulations.
It's that they're entrenching into criminal law that it is the job of the government to police commercial interests. America has become completely beholden to companies, and the government is now more or less doing their bidding. They're also exporting this as a treaty.
You only have to look at the fact that ICE and DHS are doing raids of domain names on the basis that they mi
Re:You have to follow laws (Score:4, Insightful)
The last decade has been deeply disturbing and embarrassing. Not since the Sedition Act has there been such unconstitutional nonsense as 'free speech zones', 'warrantless wiretapping', etc. and such heinous SCotUS rulings as Kelo v. New London. And in every legislative session the 'PATRIOT' Act as is rubber stamped, and somebody finds some new way of arbitrarily removing freedoms from persons by creating new secret 'lists' with no appeal and no oversight. It has the feel of the 'enemies' lists of dictators or Roman emperors.
Neither party has a contrary position. Until people wake up and free themselves from the duopoly (which will take a political crisis the nature of which I can't honestly imagine) we're due for more of the same.
All I know is I'm not part of the problem. Where there is any option I vote for a 3rd party candidate.
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You forget Joseph McCarthy. He quite happily undermined the constitution and basic freedoms by hunting people down who weren't "ideologically pure"
There's always some bastard waiting in the wings who will happily cram his world view down every body else's collective
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You forget Joseph McCarthy. He quite happily undermined the constitution and basic freedoms by hunting people down who weren't "ideologically pure"
Except treason is actually a crime and from what we've discovered since the USSR collapsed, McCarthy appears to have underestimated the number of Soviet agents in America.
He may have been a loon, but his biggest problem appears to have been that he wasn't paranoid enough.
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His biggest problem appears to be completely wrong about the kind of people posing an actual threat to the U.S.
If you are start cutting down trees because you fear lightning might set your house on fire, your are still a loon.
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Re:You have to follow laws (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not Google's (or any other search engine's) responsibility to enforce all laws of all countries. They're a search engine, not cops. Let the police do their own dirty work.
WAT! (Score:2)
Google already does this. There are country specific warning messages, which appear at the bottom of the page when search results were ommited.
So nice sentiment, but you're too late.
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Yes, because everything that flows across these so called "illegal sites" is copyrighted material and is illegal in every use. I'm not kidding myself that there's also a lot of copyright infringement going on but there's perfectly legitimate courses of actions those companies can take to get restitution. Their problem is that it's expensive, time consuming, and hard to prove in court so they want freedoms curtailed instead. I don't know how many times I could have taken various companies/corporations to
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Their problem is that it's expensive, time consuming, and hard to prove in court so they want freedoms curtailed instead.
From the article:
But you are, of course, right that there's a large disparity between smaller companies and individuals and large ones that would be difficult to change without a lighter-weight procedure than the one 'reports' suggest, and that's where things get diff
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What, what?
You think that child porn is equivalent to downloading a Hollywood movie for free?
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Downloading a Hollywood movie for free is like constantly stealing all of the money and food from the creators of said movie and then watching them suffer and die. File sharers are murderers who kill artists from the comfort of their own homes.
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+5 funny.
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And this sort of reasoning is why the slippery slope was officially stricken from the list of fallacies by the American Rhetorical Association.
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
Police wants UK Government To Google Copyright.
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In Soviet Russia, Copyright polices Google!
Oh, nevermind...
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You fucked up the sequence!
Google Police Wants UK to Copyright Government
Let's just... (Score:1)
Re:Let's just... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's just get rid of copyright and replace it with something sane.
Maybe it's a sign of my age, but when someone comes out with a sentence like that, I feel I've got to ask "such as?"
Sure, you'll get plenty of "stick it to the man" positive moderation, but you haven't really made the world a better place, have you? Nor have I, so I'll shut up and crawl back to my coding.
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Such as NOTHING
Let's face it, Copyright didn't exist in Mozart's days did it?
and his more famous than most of the crap that gets put out on the radio these days....
Go Figure.
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Such as NOTHING
Let's face it, Copyright didn't exist in Mozart's days did it?
and his more famous than most of the crap that gets put out on the radio these days....
Go Figure.
Fame didn't put bread on his table - the commissions of wealthy patrons did and occasional teaching gigs. And still it seems he died in a parlous financial position.
So there's one idea of how creative people could afford (struggle?) to survive in the absence of copyright, by attracting commissions. Shall we consider how tenable a position that would be for more "niche" artists than Mozart? Or whether the world would be a better or worse place if some of these recent artists couldn't find a way to earn a rel
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Let's face it, Copyright didn't exist in Mozart's days did it?
First British copyright law: 1709
The British Statute of Anne 1709, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned".
Mozart: 27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791
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Copyright isn't the answer, Copyright is an artificial limitation that seeks to create a scarcity vaccuum where one doesn't exist anymore, in an era of perfect copying, it needs to be abolished, it has no place in today's society full stop.
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So what's the answer to ratbag's question, then? What system do you propose instead of copyright to encourage the creation and distribution of new works?
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Several options:
* The patron system: a rich guy pays for some artists to make art. It worked for a few thousand years.
* Artist pitches idea. Some people put money in escrow for it. If enough money shows up, artist gets to work. A couple of services are starting to facilitate this.
* Compulsory licensing. Already in place for cover-bands. No good reason why it shouldn't apply to other forms of performance.
* None of the above. Some people will create for the sake of creat
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when someone comes out with a sentence like that, I feel I've got to ask "such as?"
I'm not sure how rhetorical that was... but numerous alternatives to the current copyright scheme have been proposed. Obviously there is considerable debate and disagreement, but there are actually some (reasonably independent) studies which show that copyright terms of 7-12 years maximize social good (lower and the incentive isn't enough, higher and the returns are insufficient to justify protection, etc.). My point is that there are, certainly, alternatives. "No copyright" is also an alternative, though n
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An excellent list, Justin. I think I've always favoured "reasonable-term". Certainly my heart sank when our esteemed legislators here in the UK were persuaded to extend some copyright to 70 years.
.
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No it really isn't. Copyright makes a fundamental error in thinking, and that is thinking that ideas are equivalent to property.
No, it doesn't. Property is a legal concept. Copyright is a legal concept. Copyright laws can define something which behaves like property without any 'fundamental error in thinking'. The question isn't 'can I find a silly argument that claims a conceptual flaw in the concept of copyright' but 'does the existence of copyright law improve the welfare of individuals'. The non-rival nature of things subject to copyright (plus others, like streetlighting) is significant in how it must be analyzed, but doesn't c
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Currency can also be copied with no loss to the original -- when Kim Jong-il runs his printing presses, he doesn't physically take dollar bills away from the US Treasury, yet when counterfeits hit the market, be they physical- or information-based, they hurt the original creators by devaluing their product. Unauthorized replication therefore hurts the original creators by dis-empowering them in the market while empowering the counterfeiters. It is by this dependent, some may call parasitic, relationship tha
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However, this common "replication doesn't hurt anyone" argument is not convincing when examined under a critical light.
That would depend on who you ask. I don't really think a potential loss of potential profit is harmful since they never had it to begin with. I see copyright as just a means to maximize potential future gain (profit) for artists.
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Consider this, the act of piracy decreases the value of the legitimate product by significantly lowering the price at which that product can be had, while at the same time increases the value of the torrent/ddl/usenet/whatever portal by boosting its visitor/download stats which are critical to ad revenue. While it would be a long stretch to consider this stealing, it is a process through which value is siphoned from the original creators to the operators of those sites.
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I still don't consider the (potential) loss of potential gain to be harm. Whether or not it 'should' be illegal is another matter to me.
As for ad revenue, I've always felt that that is irrelevant. They're making money on ads, not on the content. The reasons people are visiting their website is another matter and is completely up to them. I see it as no different than any other website making money off of ads.
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Consider this, the act of piracy decreases the value of the legitimate product by significantly lowering the price at which that product can be had
The price is exactly the one the buyers are willing to pay for it. As a pirate has no intention to buy it, the legitimate price of the product is zero.
The purpose of the above to put into evidence the artificiality of the current embodiment of the intellectual property principles - unlike a tangible good, an IP product can be obtained (nowadays) without having the original no longer being available.
I don't deny the rights of the authors/inventors to be rewarded for their creation - I just point out that t
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Who's in charge? (Score:2)
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Re:Who's in charge? (Score:4, Insightful)
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To make a point if things got really bad? Sure they would. More so now than ever.
They only partially bent to China not long ago, but they weren't wanting them to police as much, just censor some crap which is what Google already does right now to an extent, particularly with real nasty stuff like child abuse.
People seriously don't realize how useful Google is. People will inevitably go "yeah but Bing", Bing nothing, it has nothing on Google as a whole. (well, the maps were better, up until Street View c
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You are effectively arguing that Google is Too Big To Fail and has become above the law. If this is true, the correct response to such a situation in a civil society is to destroy it, swiftly and decisively. We are all familiar with the results of not doing so and kowtowing to big business for too long instead.
Of course, the situation isn't really that extreme, and therefore such extreme countermeasures are not required either. It is far more beneficial for both sides to co-operate in some reasonable way on
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Do you honestly think that Google would just abandon their second largest market area?
If the cost of doing business there exceeds the revenue generated, they will drop it like a hot potato. So the answer is: YES.
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I can imagine Google saying we can't or won't do that because it's our policy not to game the rankings
This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
Due to the extensive illegal use of their product, police have asked Remington to stop the Mexican drug trade.
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Not "military-looking" like the AR-15 which is just another semiautomatic rifle that just "looks scary,"
The AR-15 fires the exact same ammunition as the M-16 assault rifle. There are kits that can be bought on the internet to make it a full automatic weapon. And while the accuracy *may* be slightly less than the M-16, the bullets fired from an AR-15 are just as deadly as those from an M-16. And it will absolutely fire as fast as you can squeeze that trigger.
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This is true for my shotgun as well. Except that my shotgun is NOT considered an "evil assault weapon" and is FAR more deadly than any AR-15.
Note th
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However, firing .30-06 in 3 or 10 round bursts all day will be a bit hard on the infantry compared to the lighter rounds.
In a war, casualties requiring evac and precluding or long delaying a return to duty are a much bigger drain on enemy resources than a quick kill.
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Three words: Browning Automatic Rifle.
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The Browning was not an individual combat weapon. One or two were issued per squad and they were used in teams. The M1 was the individual combet weapon.
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The BAR was fired by one man. From the shoulder or hip, if needed. The other half of the team just carried ammo, since the BAR was a heavy mother.
Note that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker both used the BAR. You may remember them as Bonnie and Clyde (yes, a girl can do full-auto with a BAR).
Note also that the M1, which does NOT meet the definition of "ass
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Right, and the need for a second man to support that one man with the gun is why it is not an individual weapon like an M1.
Bonnie and Clyde were not likely to be firing the guns all day in combat, just in brief running firefights. I never said a woman couldn't fire one, just that all day every day would be too much for anyone regardless of gender.
You'll note I said bursts, not single shots, which is a lot less likely to beat you up and doesn't burn through ammo (that has to be carried) as fast.
The AR15 is s
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The AR-15 fires the exact same ammunition as the M-16 assault rifle
Not true. The .223 round and 5.56 NATO, while very similar in appearance, aren't the same internally. Putting a .223 in an M16 will be fine, if liable to be slightly underperforming due to the Leade being different and maybe not cycling properly (often an issue with the M16 family, mainly due to people monkeying around with the gas tube length). Putting a 5.56 NATO round in a cheap AR-15, however, could result in Bad Things happening. At the very least, you'd have cycling issues, chambering issues, and grea
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The significant part is not the designation of the weapon or the usefulness of the AR-15, it's that the cartels are using the actual military issue M16, meaning their weapons are not going to be cut off by stricter controls on civilian guns, but only by the governments of the U.S. and Mexico getting their acts together.
In other words, the actual significance of the make of the guns is that it tells us what channels they moved through.
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It's already been long-established that most of the weapons that are being used by the cartels are actually real military weapons. Not "military-looking" like the AR-15 which is just another semiautomatic rifle that just "looks scary," but the sort of automatic weapons that the only efficient American channel for getting them is the US Government funneling them to Mexico where they "just so happen" to fall out of the Mexican government's hands only to reappear in some enterprising criminal's hands.
Actually, the ATF has been happily providing the Mexican cartels weapons for a while now. Haven't heard about Operation Gunrunner yet?
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Sure, but Google, like Remington just makes the service available to all comers with no human review. Much like Remington blades are not kept behind the counter where you have to convince the pharmacist that you will only use them for their intended purpose before he will sell them to you. You just take them off the shelf and go to the checkout (which might be self serve).
Remington has no duty to check IDs or to help protect the once lucrative utility blade industry from people splitting a razor blade in ha
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"If Remington knowingly supplied continuing shipments of razor blades" /me blinks eyes at misunderstanding.
Heh, I must admit, my first thought on reading the GGP post was "what do electric shavers have to do with drugs? Is this some new underground thing I haven't heard about?"
Perhaps GGP should have used Smith & Wesson instead... ;)
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Due to the extensive illegal use of their product, police have asked Remington to stop the Mexican drug trade.
I like your analogy and I don't support the UK government but if you have knowledge of a crime and do nothing you are an accessory. In this case I think the government will need to prove Google "knows" about a crime.
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For some reason the UK government seems to make this mistake over and over again. Doesn't matter which party happens to be in. For example a lot of kids were stabbing each other with knives, so they had a crack down on shops selling knives to people under 18. Presumably they thought that none of the parents had any need to prepare food and keep knives in the house, or that anyone would think of buying a screwdriver instead.
They're already trying (Score:2)
Newzbin2 is an example. The MPA is trying to get the Govt to expand the use of the super secret child porn filter to include "copyright violations" too.
Probably inevitable, regardless of who's in power (Score:3)
The reason for this is that, as a nation, we really can't afford to stop. We have next to no natural resources that can profitably be sold, our labour is too expensive to compete as a manufacturing base and the days of sailing around exploiting our colonies are long behind us. The only two things we have left that we're good at are financial services (for which London was a powerful centre due to historical reasons as much as anything else), and developing new technologies that we can sell or license to others (e.g. the arms fair currently going on in SE London). A world in which IP rights are not strongly protected is one in which British companies have nothing to sell.
Now, I know that patent and copyright are very different things. However, as many of the big Western economies slide further from having economies that rely on selling physical objects into having economies that rely on selling or licensing information (patented designs, copyrighted films, etc), I can see them becoming strongly linked. For increasingly information-based economies, the fight to establish all forms of IP as sacrosanct is really the fight to still have a place in the world economy in a couple of decades' time.
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Revolt is also inevitable if you push too hard (Score:1)
One of the reasons UK (and the other colonial powers) couldn't exploit her colonies any more is because they tried to exploit too much, and the colonies finally said "enough is enough"
If the governments try to clamp down too hard on copyright, it may just backfire and they end up losing it all. People may stop caring about some far away copyright owner (read: not necessarily the content creator) like the colonists stopped respecting some far away government who "owns" the colony
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[needs citation]
Are you really that disconnected from your world that you cannot see the resources? You are standing on them. You can do lots of agriculture if you do not poison the soil and deplete it with monocultures. But in the UK, I have a feeling you already know. in the US, complete countries of cotton are considered normal. Being an island, you are literally blown away with energy. And that will increase. It already does.
And yes, you don't want to pay for labour. It is the same here in the Netherlan
Maybe Not (Score:1)
Gov says we'll keep the money, you do the work. (Score:1)
So, now the government can't even be bothered to enforce the laws it feels are important and wants to foist law enforcement duties onto google.
Or, maybe this is an admission the government is such a bunch of dorks that they couldn't do the job anyway.
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If it works, it is the Gov's genius. If it fails, it was the corporations. Plus it doesn't effect the budget.
Brilliant future ideas:
* Drug testing before being allowed to get drugs from pharmacies.
* For the US, gun sellers and/or buyers must do volunteer service as deputy border watchmen.
* Grocery stores must keep a running tab on who buys what, cross referenced to medical databases on health/weight for tax reasons.
Surprised by the lack of comments... (Score:2)
...I mean c'mon! The title has 'Google', 'copyright' and 'police' right in it!
Oh wait...I suppose people are off making fun of hillbillies [slashdot.org], arguing about the merits of climate change research [slashdot.org] or mooning over Windows 8 [slashdot.org].
Never mind.
Here we go (Score:2)
The beginning of the end.
Clueless cretins (Score:2)
His name goes on the list with David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Theresa May and others who simply don't have the first faintest idea on how the Internet works and how the 15yr old kids in school are experts at breaching any firewall (they get out of the firewall jail their senior schools impose - they'll do the same for any British firewall).
Paid ads excepted? (Score:2)
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the public facing one does. There has always been and always will be a not so obvious 100% free internet. It just requires an education and IQ test to gain access.
Those that think a stylized E is the internet will not find it.
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Really? Who pays for the computers and routers and such? How about the electricity?
I suspect the people that own them, relevance?
How does its content differ from the public internet?
That's a secret. No one tells secrets to AC's. But the rest of us know. It's all a conspiracy to keep you in the dark.
How many people are on this secret Free internet?
Everyone but you.
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Also, do you feel that that scaled well?
Nope. But nowadays no one has to shell out a couple thousand bucks for multi-port modem cards and multiple phone lines. Everyone is connected to a very fast network backbone with a transport protocol built in. Technology has evolved. What is stopping you from joining my private network on port 23? Or we could do it encrypted on any other number of ports. And how much does it cost me to host that? Almost nothing. What's more I can host it from almost anywhere in the world within a couple hours and without le
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Yes. Shhhh.
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Aside from North Korea, Burma, sub-saharan Africa and the islamic hell holes, I don't think there's a country I'd rather not live in.
Having fled the UK a few years ago, I entirely agree. Fortunately it's bankrupt with no sign of any way out so with any luck it will improve over the next decade or two.
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I seriously doubt Australia will get any kind of mandatory internet censorship anytime soon, the political will to support it has largely vanished.
What we may see here in .au though is laws that make ISPs more responsible for copyright actions, mostly as a result of pressure from AFACT after they lost the iiNet case.
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With luck, the AG's will put a decent rating system in place for games.
With luck, the current government will survive long enough to put enough of the NBN in place that the dogs on the other side won't be able to dismantle it...
Yup, we're the lucky country.
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You forgot to add the USA to that list. And Australia is getting pretty screwed up lately with talk of great peoples firewalls etc, but they still have bbqs and Steve Irwin so I'll let them pass. Apart from that I completely agree with you.
BBQ-es still exist. Steve Irwin - mostly a living memory [wikipedia.org] now - a dear one, but still only memory.
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