Teknovis

There are two articles in the news today regarding child pornography prevention measures that are being applied at national level. These articles caught my attention because I think that they are great example of how not to apply censorship!

The first article describes how six ISPs in the UK are blocking access to a Wikipedia web page that contains a photo of a naked girl in her early teens. Initially this sounds reasonable, but the block is being applied to the whole page rather than simply the photo. Furthermore, the photo is of a well known album from 1976 by a well known band. So clearly the intention of publishing this web page is not to promote child pornography.

The ISPs are implementing the block using a transparent proxy that is not forwarding the original client IP address to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this means that Wikipedia cannot identify individual clients within these ISPs, so all users of these ISPs are now blocked from updating Wikipedia!

To add to the stupidity of this situation, the photo is widely available on the Internet already, and a simple search for “virgin killer” on Google Images finds it. Apparently many UK bloggers are now posting the image in protest.

For more details about this see Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over ‘child porn’ album cover.

I am delighted to report that my ISP (Eircom) is not blocking access to this web page! I hope it stays this way. If you want to test your ISP then simply try viewing Virgin Killer.

The second article describes how an Australian judge recently found a man guilty of possessing child pornography. The child pornography was a fake Simpsons cartoon that depicted some of the characters have sex. For more details about this see Fake Simpsons cartoon ‘is porn’.

Again, this seems like excessive policing to me.

Tags: Censorship, Eircom, Google, ISP, Pornography, UK, Wikipedia

I have a few email accounts on which I do not perform any spam filtering. There is no real need to, because I usually receive about five messages in them per week, and about three of these messages are usually spam. So I have a quick glance at them, and then hit the delete key.

I got one such spam email this morning. This email was promoting yet another wonder drug for men who are worried about the size of their penises. However, there was something very different about this email – it had a Christmas theme! I will not quote it here, but the general message was that certain ladies will be very happy with what Santa will be capable of giving them this year :|

It was the first time that I ever saw a Christmas themed spam email!

Tags: Email, Spam

I was looking at a video on YouTube earlier (Making of the Ryanair Cabin Crew Charity Calendar 2009 – not that it is relevant ;), and I suddenly realised that the video player was widescreen! Some quick investigation revealed that some videos already make use of the extra width.

More details about this change can be found in the official blog post Bigger Isn’t Always Better… But in This Case, We Believe It Is.

Tags: YouTube

A French friend of mine sent me a link this morning, and told me to take a look at it. The link was http://www.obama08.fr/, so I was expecting another Barack Obama website.

However, if you visit this link you are actually taken to http://www.elysee.fr/, which is the official homepage of the French President!

I think that this is nothing more than a good joke, because the registration details for each domain are quite different according to the WHOIS Service for French domains.

Tags: Barack Obama, France, WHOIS

The Register describes some security vulnerabilities in two of Barack Obama’s websites in Congratulations, Barack – Now fix your websites. The most significant security issue that the article highlights is the fact that the administration pages load the Google Analytics JavaScrip file urchin.js. from the Google website. In theory, this means that Google can use this JavaScript file to do almost anything that they want with Barack’s websites. Not a good situation :(

Apparently, many readers did not share the author’s view on this security issue. So the author wrote a follow-up article that provides more details, and opinions of experts from OWASP, in Google Analytics – Yes, it is a security risk.

Independently, it seems that Barack is currently in negotiations in order to continue using his PDA! Apparently, communications devices are banned in the White House, and there are accountability and traceability issues associated with their use! That is an inconvenience! More details about this in Obama tries to stay connected.

Finally, I have heard that a considerable number of websites have appeared that are designed to help the Obama family choose what type of puppy they will get :) Gosh, it must be nice to have enough time to be able to create websites like this!

Tags: Barack Obama, Google, JavaScript, OWASP, PDA, The Register, US Election 2008

The EU launched a new digital library called Europeana last Thursday. The purpose of this digital library is to contain documents that are of cultural significance to the citizens of the EU. Initially, the digital library contains over 2 million items, but this is expected to grow rapidly.

The website was designed to handle initial traffic of 5 million visitors per hour. However, after its launch the website was receiving over 10 million visitors per hour! This naturally had serious consequences on the performance of the website, and several hours later the number of visitors had not subsided. Therefore, the website has gone offline until it can cope with this larger number of visitors.

I am sure that the website creators are delighted with the level of interest in their website, but I wonder how they got their estimates so wrong. Perhaps there is no way to reliably estimate how many visitors a new website will receive. I also wonder what steps they could have taken to dynamically cope with such large numbers of visitors.

More details about this story can be read in New EU online library crashes under weight of interest.

Tags: Digital Library, Europeana

The Register has two articles describing how a 19 year old college student in Florida discussed his proposed suicide online, and how he then broadcast his suicide live online to an audience of over 1500 people! The articles are Teen discussed suicide plan online 12 hours before webcam death and US teen tops himself live online.

Naturally this story is very sad, but I think that somebody was bound to commit suicide online some time based on the popularity of the Internet.

I think that if somebody is suicidal then he/she is likely to commit suicide, and it is wrong to blame the Internet for this. Nevertheless, I now expect the usual backlash of people wanting to ban the Internet, YouTube, or whatever website or technology is currently deemed to be the cause of all evil in the world!

Tags: The Register, YouTube

I am a big fan of free speech, and I really dislike censorship, especially at state level. I feel this way about both the Internet and the traditional media.

I think that freedom of speech in relation to the Internet is quite good in Ireland at the moment. Everybody here can legally view any websites that they want. At least I am not aware of any blocking of illegal sites. As far as I know, it is even legal to view child pornography in Ireland! (However, it is illegal to intentionally store it, and that is what people get charged with in court. Yes, this does create a great technical argument!)

Unfortunately, many other EU states do impose blocks on certain sites in order to censor them. For example, I think that most EU states have bans on web sites relating to, or glorifying, Nazism. Of course it is fairly easy for me to have this view in Ireland, since we never experienced the atrocities that most of the EU experienced within the last 100 years.

I have two main problems with Internet censorship:

• It is often technically infeasible or pointless
• It often creates a huge artificial interest in the censored subject

TechCrunch has an article called German Politician Blocks Local Wikipedia which demonstrates both of these points perfectly!

Tags: Censorship, Germany, Ireland, Nazism, Pornography, TechCrunch

The 2008 Golden Spider Awards were announced last night in Dublin. Congratulations to all of the winners!

The Golden Spider Awards are in addition to both the Net Visionary Awards and the Irish Web Awards. It is impressive (or surprising) that there is room for all three awards in Ireland!

The winners that caught my attention were:

• TV3, because its website has improved significantly since I last saw it.
• Ordnance Survey Ireland, because its online mapping facility is really cool! (I wonder will it remain free!)
• Sentry Wireless, simply because I never heard of it, and it is in an interesting space in the market!
• Damien Mulley – Irish super-blogger!
• Boards.ie. I am familiar with this website, and it deserves recognition for taking the generic concept of a bulletin-board and turning it into a popular website. I wonder has this been replicated in any other countries? I am not actually very fond of Boards.ie, because I find it is full of opinionated local trivia that is of little use.

Most of the other winners are easy viewing :)

However, I have to say that I am slightly sceptical of the Golden Spider Awards due to the fact that so much money is involved in them!

Tags: Boards.ie, Damien Mulley, Golden Spider Awards, Irish Web Awards, Net Visionary Awards, Ordnance Survey Ireland, Sentry Wireless, TV3

Blacknight have an article on a recent domain name auction in Camera.co.uk Sells For 35k.

The article highlights the sale of what was perhaps the most interesting domain – camera.co.uk. There was a reserve of $15,000 for this domain name, and it eventually sold for $35,000!

I guess that not everybody feels that the economy is all doom and gloom at the moment!

Tags: Blacknight