"Expert Body" To Decide Which Sites To Block For Copyright Infringement 173
Barence writes "Rights holders in the UK are proposing to appoint a 'council' and an 'expert body' to decide which websites should be blocked by ISPs for infringing copyright. The controversial Digital Economy Act made provisions for sites accused of hosting copyrighted material to be blocked by British ISPs. 'The cost of the proposed scheme is not indicated, but is likely to be substantial, including the running cost of two non-judicial independent bodies and the cost to ISPs of permanently blocking websites,' Consumer Focus said."
Piss Off (Score:1)
Who said you can block what I can see? This aint Egypt!
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No, this is private industry deciding privately what is done on its private networks, which supply the public with public information all subsidised at public expense.
The Internet you see, is a magical place, where there are no rules, laws or traditions. And like all magical kingdoms, eventually some Great Witch or Dark Lord thunders over the horizon and conquers the land, ushering in an age of tyranny, oppression, and misery for all inhabitants.
The ISPs have brooded long in their dark lairs, waiting for th
Re:Piss Off (Score:5, Insightful)
In the meantime, attempts at shutting down websites have actually been implemented in the US - http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/13/218206/First-Challenge-To-US-Domain-Seizures-Filed [slashdot.org]
In destroying freedoms, the US leads and the UK just follows on behind.
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Sorry to have to break this to you, but you have it exactly the wrong way round.
This expert body idea is just a deranged proposal from rights holders that will go nowhere because the digital economy bill is already unpopular. There's easy political capital to be made in toning it down, and the bill is starting to have questions asked about its legitimacy in parliament.
Meanwhile, as the post above says, the USA is already seizing domain names associated with piracy. The USA is actively implementing this anti
The list starting with big sties (Score:3, Insightful)
google
bing
Yahoo
*torrent
torrent*
isohunt
youtube
megavideo
Megaupload
RapidShare
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Forget the reviews; Just treat it as a list of VPN providers and take your pick.
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Record labels pirate their own artists work: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/January2011/10/c9214.html [newswire.ca]
So let's add:
sonymusic.com
emi.com
riaa.com
etc.
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Yahoo?
Geocities and Briefcases have long been over guy
Yahoo, the search engine. Which does indeed print out links to Mafiaaware when given the right search terms (try iso the hangover)
Re:NOT TRUE (Score:4, Insightful)
My understanding is that The Pirate Bay just links to copyrighted material and doesn't actually host any. Google links to copyrighted material, and actually hosts an awful lot.
The moment this blocklist goes live I will personally demand that Google and every other major 'net search engine, and any website hosting forums that I can post links to are immediately added and blocked.
This is an unworkable system, I'm not going to tolerate it, and I assure you, my opposition is nothing to do with 'piracy'.
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Fuck the 'average' user. Do not cut off swathes of the Internet because of the actions of 'average' users.
Do not implement industry controlled blocklists. Do not trust the media companies. Do not outsource legislation.
Which parts of these are anything to do with criminal actions?
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Generally stories about copyright infringement and such are packed to the brim with breathtakingly stupid comments in the vein of "I shouldn't have to pay for anything".
[citation needed]
At least, I see posts explaining the conditions in which one is willing to pay, and opposition to their tactics, but that type of comment is rare. And I'm here all the time pretty much. You are grossly generalizing based potentially on a miniscule % of comments exactly like that.
Freenet (Score:3, Informative)
Freenetproject.org is one of interesting alternatives to information blocking. Still high-latency (sites opens in 10 seconds, bigger >1 MB files download in minutes) but probably most secure (more then TOR/i2p?) and definitely uncensorable.
Installation takes 5 minutes.
With 5 more you can get addons: Frost, FMS and Freetalk boards&sharing systems.
Btw #freenet on irc.freenode.org - we will gladly assist new users.
Noooooo.... (Score:3)
There are no details of how the two panels would be made up, but the importance of the proposals mean they could have wide-ranging impacts on civil law
So, before it's ratified, no one (the general public) will have any idea that it's made of shills and stakeholders.
Wonderful...
They've lost it. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're nuts. It's like pissing in the ocean, just what do they think they'll accomplish? Is there anyone in any government anywhere with a brain? I look around and see people out of work, rampant crime, war, and these asshole have time for this stupid shit?
Re:They've lost it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is there anyone in any government anywhere with a brain? I look around and see people out of work, rampant crime, war, and these asshole have time for this stupid shit?
How else so many wars can be supported with so many people out of work and rampant crime? Someone need to foot the bill - why do you think ACTA is kicking?
Errr... you are not suggesting these wars need to stop, are you?
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You must be new here!
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They're nuts. It's like pissing in the ocean, just what do they think they'll accomplish? Is there anyone in any government anywhere with a brain? I look around and see people out of work, rampant crime, war, and these asshole have time for this stupid shit?
They get a salary whether or not they do anything about those problems, but bribes only come if they pass laws large media companies want.
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Is there anyone in any government anywhere with a brain?
Yes. Maybe their motivations are not what they claim they are.
There is, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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The comedy is that Ken Clarke's had at least three of his constituents write to him highlighting how fucked up this proposal is, and all he's done in response is forward those letters to the minister involved, who in turn has done fuck all, and continues to exclude the Open Rights Group from the discussions.
Ken can of course hide behind the fact that he didn't actually vote for the Digital Economy Bill - albeit because he was on a fucking jolly instead of being in parliament, where he should have been voti
Unfortunately, it's the rules (Score:2)
They're captured (Score:2)
They're nuts. It's like pissing in the ocean, just what do they think they'll accomplish? Is there anyone in any government anywhere with a brain?
They do what the money tells them to.
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Obviously, stupidly copying a french invention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public_Safety [wikipedia.org]
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Why not kill two birds with one stone and vote for them? ;-)
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How will the filtering even work? (Score:5, Informative)
So the techniques I'm aware of:
1) Deep packet inspect for gets to specific sites.
2) DNS hijacking.
3) IP address blocking of known sites.
1) All 3 of these have workarounds. Deep inspection of traffic can be overridden with the use of HTTPS.
2) DNS hijacking could be bypassed by using DNS servers from outside the country (or setting up your own). Of course, they could filter traffic on the DNS port outside of their network and force you to resolve everything through your ISP.
3) IP address blocking can only be worked around if you route through another IP. This means using a proxy or VPN.
I can tell you if my country did this, I would setup a VPS in another contry, install OpenVPN on it and use OpenVPN when I wanted to get access to more questionable sites.
There are workarounds to any type of blocking they do. Unless they completely lock down the internet for their customers (forced proxy servers or something), people will work around it.
Re:How will the filtering even work? (Score:5, Insightful)
It will guarantee a two-tiered Internet.
A. Internet for people who know what they're doing
B. Everyone else.
I am not sure if I am against this or not. Part of me rages about the censorship. The other part says "meh, it was better when it took actual skill to hook up a modem and set up a BBS"
--
BMO
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Skill was convincing the sysop to give you superuser access through any means necessary....
and avoiding $700/mo phone bills.
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The list of blocked sites will come out one way or another, and then act as a handy guide for people to follow. The moment you say "you can't look at this" people will want to look at it. That is exactly what happened with that Scorpions' Virgin Killer entry on Wikipedia, despite the fact that it was deemed child porn at the time. It also brought ISPs blocking servers to their knees.
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And even if all of this came to pass, the most they'd manage is to turn back time to the Napster era when we know they didn't have P2P sharing problems... That's workaround #4, if they hit all centralized solutions then move to a decentralized one.
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There already is such a system in the UK, and it went through with so little fanfare that very few people know about it.
The organisation looking after it is the Internet Watch Foundation [iwf.org.uk], and it deals mainly with child porn. The way the block works is that they manage a blacklist of pages on sites. When you try visiting a site on the blacklist, your browser session is invisibly proxied; when you try to download the offending file it's blocked.
What's particularly disingenuous is how the block appears to you
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The IWF isn't compulsory, though, it's just that ISPs can play the think-of-the-children card against each other. A&A, for example, don't use the IWF filter.
This plan, as I understand it, doesn't provide for such a choice.
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How do I know? Because this is the system (called cleanfeed) that most ISPs in the UK have already
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As a UK resident I have heard a little more mentioned about this. There is a link below basically saying they are going to use the IWF as a model:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/8419812/ISPs-discuss-central-blacklisting-body-for-piracy-sites.html [telegraph.co.uk]
The IWF work by forced proxying for sites that are on the ban list. Then the proxy can just filter out the individual pages of a site that they object to.
Obviously whatever they do will be possible to bypass, but the idea is just to make this as trick
Don't doubt the experts (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't doubt the experts (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sometimes I find the distinction between "because you are educated" and "because you've created a theoretical, ideological model that's clearly very far from the way real people and the real world acts" is hard to make in practical discussion. In both cases it's likely to be dismissed as ivory tower thinking. It would be like someone arguing to say the sky is green. I don't want to try picking apart your model trying to find the flaws, particularly as me not finding them will convince you further of the val
But there are fair points for both sides here... (Score:2)
The fundamental problem with this issue is that there is genuine merit on both sides of the argument.
It is clearly the case that certain Big Media organisations have engaged in legally dubious pricing practices over the years and have engaged in hostile lawsuits against innocent targets. It is clearly the case that privacy and freedom from unwarranted state intrusion into our lives is valuable and should be protected.
On the other hand, it is also the case that there are sick people in the world who really d
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In the UK, "experts" in "expert bodies" are there to whitewash decisions that have already been taken. The few real experts that actually act the role and do in fact evaluate and make recomendations on the subject matter are ignored, kicked-out of the comission or even villified in the media.
There are several cases of members of expert bodies that did in fact made recommendations that went ag
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Remember, citizen, opposition to the opinions of the educated is anti-intellectualism.
Oh! That's why the intellectuals are always first against the wall when the revolution comes. I learned something today.
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If you learned something today doesn't that make you an "intellectual"
Up against the wall with you.
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Despite the sarcasm though, distrusting experts BECAUSE they're experts is a tiny bit less sensible than trusting them for the very same reason. Start bashing them once they've ACTUALLY said something you disagree with.
Remember - the experts are not charged with defining copyright law. They're charged with upholding it.
If you honestly think TPB is based on anything other than a complete lack of respect of established copyright l
What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
A government agency in charge of deciding which sites to block. I can't imagine anything going wrong here, no way.
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Don't be silly - it can't be a government agency. If it is part of the government it might count as a "public authority" and be open to Judicial Reviews of its decision and be bound by the Human Rights Act. Any government agency running public censorship will be dragged before the courts (either in London or Strasbourg; possibly Luxembourg) in days.
Far better to ask ISPs to set up a private organisation [iwf.org.uk] to do this, make it voluntary to implement, then threaten ISPs with legislation if they don't "volunteer"
To Paraphrase Goering... (Score:2)
That's how you make an expert corpse (Score:2)
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Who will be allowed to challenge the expertise of the members of the 'expert body'?
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well said.
The thing to do is to catch them reaching for their gun, or their illicit material that some hacker put there. Everyone is a criminal, just find their crime before they find yours.
Cost externalization, typical corporate thinking (Score:2)
'The cost of the proposed scheme is not indicated, but is likely to be substantial, including the running cost of two non-judicial independent bodies and the cost to ISPs of permanently blocking websites,' Consumer Focus said.
MAFIAA: austerity [businessinsider.com] my ass, we don't give a fuck about UK deficit (to surpass [guardian.co.uk] the Greece one), you just take care I still receive my money
Doing it wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up. (Score:1)
What an insightful comment. People fail to see that piracy isn't as much a lack of technological protection but the social reality that information cannot be controlled.
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And you think this won't be used to block things other than illegal movies and music? Perhaps even things that would make people think if their brains weren't occupied by the aforementioned stuff?
Social problem. Technical solution. (Score:5, Informative)
That sounds good, but I don't think it is true. Let me give a short example (pasted from: http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/dickens_london.html [fidnet.com]):
Until the second half of the 19th century London residents were still drinking water from the very same portions of the Thames that the open sewers were discharging into. Several outbreaks of Cholera in the mid 19th century, along with The Great Stink of 1858, when the stench of the Thames caused Parliament to recess, brought a cry for action. The link between drinking water tainted with sewage and the incidence of disease slowly dawned on the Victorians. Dr John Snow proved that all victims in a Soho area cholera outbreak drew water from the same Broad Street pump.
Sir Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the new Metropolitan Board of Works (1855), put into effect a plan, completed in 1875, which finally provided adequate sewers to serve the city. In addition, laws were put in effect which prevented companies supplying drinking water from drawing water from the most heavily tainted parts of the Thames and required them to provide some type of filtration.
Social problem. Technical solution.
Re:Social problem. Technical solution. (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, it was quite clearly *not* a social problem (polluted water? technical problem) and the "solution" was at best half technical. Last I checked, passing laws wasn't a technical solution, and if it had really been a social problem, people would have continued to pollute and drink from the Thames even after it was pointed out that was a bad idea.
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Social problem: disease caused by unclean water
Technical problem: there's sewage in the river that we drink from.
Social problem: people are dumping sewage into the river we drink from
Technical solution: build adequate sewers.
My point was that technical and social problems are often intertwined so blanket statements like the parent comment are not universally true.
Like the "solution to spam" checklist --- right on (Score:1)
Your comment is right-on and reminds me of the now-put-to-rest checklist which was posted over and over again, replying to people who thought they had a technical solution to the problem of spam email.
We see now that all of these technical solutions, which dealt with technical details of how email worked, could never eliminate spam itself, which has now mutated and is a cancer infecting all the varied forms of digital communication which now exist. Why? Because it is a social problem (enough people are dumb
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Those are tools, not solutions. Both can be defeated in various ways and neither is a complete solution to their base problem, only a band-aid over the most obvious threat vectors.
No way this can be corrupted... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No way this can be corrupted... (Score:5, Insightful)
Read it again. It will be RUN by the copyright cartels. That's what "Rights holders" means...
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At least they take out the corrupt middle-men ("politicians") out of the loop. Maybe more parts of the government could be improved in a similar way, like drug dealers being in charge of determining which drugs should be legal and illegal to sell.
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And the drug dealers would want to keep their high-profit drugs illegal, because they can't make the same amount of money with legal drugs. Something to think about when you consider why some fairly harmless drugs are illegal.
It's worth it! (Score:1)
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If we all gave them our money maybe they'll go away, it'd almost be worth it.
Prove or GTF Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's time we demanded of these so-called rights holders - "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them - to conclusively prove to us that granting them these copyrights has actually done anything at all to encourage further creativity? If they can't prove that, then we should revoke their rights and let them scratch in the dirt for a living like the rest of us. We've been presuming for far too long that copyrights (and patents) actually function as intended.
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Do we really need copyright to get that sorta creativity? I think I could get it just by bribing a few lawyers, accountants, and economists. All of them are already on the take to somebody already anyway.
Re:Prove or GTF Out (Score:5, Informative)
Please note that this story is from England, and while England may look a lot like the US, its present government is assuredly not chartered under a constitution starting with "We The People". Other than that, you're largely correct.
Copyright as we know it (a government-established, time-limited, monopoly to each printed work, held by the author) started with the Statute of Anne, as a reform of the previously existing unlimited monopoly on all printed works held by the "Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers" (i.e. the London printer's guild, the MAFIAA of their day).
Of course the publishers, anxious to regain their previous unlimited monopoly in fact, if not in law, fought the effect of the law on two fronts. They sought to have a common-law copyright (of infinite duration) recognized, with the Statute only codifying a co-existing fixed-term right. To support this, they went to great efforts to spread the notion that copyright was a natural right of the author, and existed for their just compensation -- despite the clear statement of the Statute that copyright was a grant of the government "for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books"; thus shifting the question from one of effective policy to one of theft, piracy, and the author's presumed starving children. (Of course, the publishers, then as now, were the ones profiting, usually buying the rights to a book outright, rather than signing a contract with eventual payouts based on sales -- so the benefit to hungry children was and is quite unclear.)
Additionally, they sought statutory extensions to the fixed term when it was about to run out. To quote an anti-MAFIAA pamphlet of the time:
Unlike their counterparts in the 20th century, they were unsuccessful in getting that first extension at the time; since the USA, after it attained independence, enacted a near-perfect clone of the British copyright law of the time, it's quite reasonable to suppose the sanity and spine of Parliament at this time is wholly responsible for you having any public-domain works available.
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Some of that is new information to me. Thanks for taking the time.
Of course it's not surprising that the new United States adopted Britain's "intellectual property" laws; no doubt Britain was at the time trying to impose them as widely as possible on trading partners, just as the United States is doing today. I'm sure we would have wound up on some precursor to our own present-day Special 301 list if we had rebelled against Britain's IP laws, too.
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> "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them
We, the people, did NEVER grant them those rights in the first place. Never. Those "rights" were all created and granted in pre-democratic times and simply dragged along for centuries. Those rights have literarily NEVER been confirmed by a populous vote. Never.
What we, the people, did do though, is to never oppose those rights directly, since the established parties of the so called "representative democracy" dont let us vote on it directly. The only way to t
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Everything you said is technically correct. I didn't mean to say that we plebes had actually done the granting, rather that our governments who are supposed to represent our interests had done it for us. I meant it as a bit sarcastic, knowing who it is that governments really represent.
Are we ready for that next overdue revolution yet? I'm counting the days, errr... months, errr... years.
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Perhaps it's time we demanded of these so-called rights holders - "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them - to conclusively prove to us that granting them these copyrights has actually done anything at all to encourage further creativity? If they can't prove that, then we should revoke their rights and let them scratch in the dirt for a living like the rest of us. We've been presuming for far too long that copyrights (and patents) actually function as intended.
Its worth remembering that the enforcement of the GPL and other licences on which open source software is built relies on copyright law:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html [gnu.org]
Maybe you are saying that each copyrighted work should be individually examined but that was not made clear in your post.
Tax Payers Foot the Bill (Score:4, Interesting)
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Decided to update this in relation to Copyright: (Score:5, Interesting)
You/Your company/government advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting piracy. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) Pirates can easily use it to discover new upload/download sources
(x) Creative Commons and other legitimate licenses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop piracy for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with your broken system's overhead as you propose another system
( ) Customers will not put up with it
( ) Copyright lobby groups will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from pirates
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many internet users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(x) Pirates don't care about invalid peers in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the internet
(x) Open proxies in foreign countries
(x) Ease of searching the tiny alphanumeric address space of all domain names
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in TCP/IP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than TCP/IP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches from ad banners
( ) Armies of worm-riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of Copyright lobby groups
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Copyright lobby groups
( ) Dishonesty on the part of the Copyright lobby groups themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Windows XP
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) TCP/IP packets should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Bittorrent without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Uploading/downloading data should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time domain names are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government monitoring my internet access
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person/company/government for suggesting it.
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Awesome! That's honestly funny, and so true...
Mod parent up!
It is good to appoint a council... (Score:2)
Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
The interesting thing is... if you treated copyright infringement much like we treat marijuana here in Australia, things would get a lot better.
A little bit of weed doesn't do a lot of damage and is kinda fun every now and then. A lot of weed is pretty bad, but as long as you're only using it yourself, eh... not a huge issue, but clearly you should cop a fine for it.
But deliberately growing warehouses full of weed, for the express purposes of selling it is pretty bad since it's usually tied to organized crime. Even worse, deliberately manufacturing *cocaine*, a much worse drug, is clearly bad and should be punished heavily.
So we understand that there are "less bad" and "more bad" scales on these things. But now, what if the cops (or vigilante groups with huge congressional power posing as cops) are mass-producing cocaine? Surely they should be fallen upon from a great height and made an example of, right?
http://gizmodo.com/329648/mpaas-university-toolkit-taken-down-for-violating-copyright [gizmodo.com]
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/ [torrentfreak.com]
That's just the top two results on a quick Google search. Other examples exist, I'm sure of it.
Now, the MPAA in both cases didn't just download an illegal copy of Photoshop. They stripped out the licencing and branding, rebranded it as their own, and then used it an profit making enterprise as though they themselves wrote it. THAT is the kind of copyright infringement that SHOULD be punished- it's literally taking someone else's work, pretending it's yours, then making money from it. They didn't just shoplift a copy of Photoshop from a store, they claimed they wrote it themselves.
And yes, they should be punished far worse than any individual. They pretend to be the ultimate authority on copyright enforcement, and treat it extremely gravely- Jamie was sued into bankruptcy for downloading mp3's for personal use. Surely their own actions, however, which are so much more malicious in nature, and so much more damaging to a society as a whole (and again given their position as de-facto "copyright cops") should be treated far more harshly. An individual who is busted for speeding gets a fine, a police officer who is busted for speeding can lose their job. And these particular police officers aren't even cops, more like shopping mall Rent-A-Cops arresting 13 year old kids for possessing a bit of weed while simultaneously running a commercial grade meth lab in their basement.
Yes, the MPAA's incidents are not nearly as numerous as the huge amount of copyright infringement that goes on everyday, but their actions are so much *worse* given their circumstances. They should be punished accordingly. If anyone should understand copyright infringement and copyright law, it should be the MPAA.
So, given this, I propose the MPAA and all its affiliatories, sister companies, shell companies, parent companies, CEOs (present, former and past) and anything to do with them should be purged utterly from the internet to make an example of them.
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A lot of weed is pretty bad, but as long as you're only using it yourself, eh... not a huge issue, but clearly you should cop a fine for it.
Why?
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And the definition of "TOO X" is "more X than me at this moment".
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You can substitute "pay a tax" instead of "pay a fine" if you wish. :) I support legalization and taxation of soft drugs, it was just an (admittedly a little clumsy) analogy.
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Yeah, that was one of the ones I was thinking of but I was specifically looking for examples of copyright infringement. You are completely correct though...
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I'll be the first to admit it was a somewhat clumsy analogy, but I just couldn't find a car analogy that would fit.
Incidentally, I support legalization and taxation of soft drugs, so I agree with what you said.
Above the law (Score:2)
Seems appropriate (Score:2)
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Floppies are no longer made, so you have been taken care of.
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Maybe if more people like yourself who are supposedly against it would stand up for what they believe in instead of hiding behind the AC Mask.....
The C is there for a reason!
Re:recommended motto change (Score:4, Insightful)
Slashdot. News for pirates. Stuff that's anti private property rights.
If this site is going to keep featuring stories that are only of interest to the Marxist thief contingency among us, then just go ahead and make it official already.
You are missing the real point.
1) They block the child porn. Few people will defend that.
2) They block 'copyright material'.
3) They block whatever they feel like, suppressing critical stories on themselves and allowing critical stories on their political enemies. After all they really do believe that they know what's best for the public and they desire power above all else.
4) The country is in the hands of a few corrupt people who will abuse the situation for all they can take out of it. - Massive profit!
They have setup their infrastructure at stage 1 and are now working on implementing stage 2.
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Cos its big business that has big bucks!
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