France Votes Tuesday On Net Censorship 134
angry tapir writes "French lawmakers will vote next Tuesday on a proposal to filter Internet traffic. Part of a new security bill, the measure is intended to catch child pornographers. However, once the filtering system is in place it will allow the government to censor other material too. Slashdot has previously discussed Australia's proposed ISP-level filter."
Qu'ils mangent de la brioche (Score:5, Interesting)
As an Australian, dare I say I'm waiting with bated breath. The French dumping that section wouldn't help our cause, but passing it would hurt it - the Aus govt is already looking for rationalisation and "me too!" works for voters here.
The whole bureaucracy we have to put up with in these times is far worse when they attempt this bullshit to lead attention away from false promises and actual governmental improvement. Fuck the system basically, especially when there's no history of revolution over here.
In Germany a similar law is defacto rejected (Score:5, Interesting)
In Germany, a law was passed called Zugangserschwerungsgesetz [wikipedia.org]. It said the Federal Criminal Police Office [wikipedia.org] delivers secret list of blocked domains to the ISPs. After the elections in 2009 the government changed and even though the law has come into effect, the new coalition prevented the feds to give out the list. So de facto, Zugangserschwerungsgesetz has been rejected now.
This is partially the success of the German Pirate Party, which both thrived because of this law proposal (membership decupled [piratenpartei.de] in a few months) and forced a public discussion about this law (otherwise it'd just be rubber-stamped: "oh, this law is against kiddie porn. Good!"). It astonished me that the PP actually succeeded to bring common sense into the debate, because politicians often tend to turn of their brain when they hear "kiddie porn". Partially the success was also due to an online petition which had 134,000 signatures (which made it by far the most successful petition in German history).
It is also doubtful that the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz will pass German's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court [wikipedia.org], which in the past has proven to value human rights (such as article 5 [btg-bestellservice.de] of Germany's constitution) very highly.
How about a different approach (Score:1, Interesting)
If they didn't make possession illegal then ordinary citizens with spare time would be able to help track down those who actually make the material.
Re:Moving on to the next boogieman? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Moving on to the next boogieman? (Score:1, Interesting)
(replying as AC because I just moderated some folk. hoping this doesn't revert it..)
Wikipedia says that Child Pornography is illegal in 'most' countries. Of course, I know Wikipedia is no guarantee of truth and no citation is provided there, so I wonder if you have one..?
Another issue is that this 'child' pornography you speak of is not well defined. If you are talking about pre-pubescent children then perhaps it is always illegal. If you are talking about 17yr olds, small breasted women or drawings of Lisa Simpson then perhaps not (and perhaps those jurisdictions where it is, it should not necessarily be - prosecuting teenagers for sexting each other is not right in my book)
..I like the rest of your comments btw..
filtering systems seriously degrade performance (Score:2, Interesting)
one of the things which I do is manage some web sites which take several thousand hits per second. We don't even notice the slashdot effect for example.
Anyway. In China we have a problem with 'clipping'. The traffic looks like a square wave rather than a sine wave. It indicated a performance limitation or choke point. So we opened up a second datacenter and balanced the connections between them. entirely different network, everything.
So the square wave remains, but now half the connections to each site. I.e the problem isn't our network or systems. The customers all come from different networks, so the most likely issue is a proxy or filter which is running out of connections or capacity.
No such problems in europe or america.
Re:This will not be effective at all (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know whether the hydraulic theory has any more evidence to support it, but I think the onus of evidence is on those psychologists who want to jail people based on their urges rather than their crimes...
Re:I don't support pedoes, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
So it doesn't bother you... So what? I thinks, there are lot of people, who are bothered by it. Should we listen to them? Or should we not?
My post was ironic in that all your ideas were once offered to "cure" homosexuals. Yeah-yeah, psychology, colonies, medications, hypnosis, chemical castration, religion. Should I remind, how many of these worked? Now, if you offer to apply these "techniques" to homosexuals, rather than pedophiles (boo! boo!), you're modded troll on /. and punched in face or sued offline.