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Claire Perry’s porn prohibition set to make politicians look foolish

The government is going to protect us from pornography on the Internet. Our children will at last be safe from depravity and corruption. Hurray! Claire Perry MP (Conservative) has accused Internet service providers of being complicit in exposing children to pornography and wants something done about it. Specifically she wants ISPs to filter the filth, unless a subscriber specifically wants to receive it. David Cameron has now jumped on her bandwagon, clearly without first checking to see which way it’s heading or whether the wheels are properly attached.

This isn’t going to be popular with the consumers and producers of Internet-delivered pornography, but that’s their problem. What worries me are the technical issues, and the consequences of trying to implement any form of censorship.

Let me make this clear: IT WON’T WORK. There is no technical solution available that can prevent porn from being transmitted over the Internet, and there never will be. It’s simply not possible for a computerised filter to tell the difference between porn and everything else, and it will become much harder if you give people a reason to avoid detection. About the best you can do is block known porn websites, and if the site promoters cooperate (i.e. keep them on fixed addresses) then you’re going to get a reasonable level of protection. And porn publishers, at present, are likely to cooperate. They’ve no interest minors viewing their wares, because minors don’t have the credit cards to pay for it. And besides, it’s a multi-million pound industry which includes many serious people with children of their own and similar concerns to the rest of us.

However, as soon as you start blocking these sites at ISP level, porn publishers will have to change tactics, as they’ll want to evade such draconian filtering. Legitimate producers will suffer; the vacuum will be filled by others underground, joining the leagues of the cyber-criminals, operating from agile addresses on servers operating outside jurisdictions that care. Claire Perry’s bright idea won’t work. It’s not better than nothing; it’s worse.

The porn operators would disguise their sites to avoid the filter, and in order that customers might find them, spam everyone using every means possible as they did in the late 1990’s. Right now you need to go looking to find it – a simple Google search away. If Perry gets her way it’ll be delivered to everyone’s Inbox, Facebook page, Skype and every other instant messaging technology you can think of, It’ll be encrypted and impossible to filter. It’ll be indiscriminate; kids will receive it too. If such a law was enforced, all encrypted content would have to be blocked as there is no way of telling what it is. This means farewell to, Skype, secure connections to your bank, private email, working from home on a VPN… Okay, it’s not realistic as well as being unenforceable.

The Internet dealt with issues similar to this twenty years ago, before the politicians were involved, but if the technicalities aren’t for you (as they aren’t for Perry and Cameron), there are plenty of other parallels. Society’s attempts to ban bad things that some people still want always seem to make things worse. I need hardly mention prostitution, drugs and alcohol, but I will. Making drugs illegal when so many people want to use them has simply improved the margins for the suppliers. Where there’s money to be made, people will find ways to smuggle drugs; and if the whole business is illegal then it’s certainly going to be completely unregulated. And it’s not a lack of resources and commitment. If we can’t stop people supplying drugs to inmates of a high security prisons we stand no chance of banning drugs anywhere else.

Similarly, it’s folly to attempt to ban pornography transmission on the Internet. There is no way to do this technically, and any attempt that simply makes it more difficult will give the criminals a huge advantage over the legitimate publishers, making regulation impossible.

The government is allowing crazy headlines out about this consultation and what they’re going to do. No doubt they’ll be consulting with child psychologists, women’s rights campaigns, children’s charities and a few suits from big business ISPs. Why don’t they consult the right people first – computer scientists. Ask the most important question:  “Is it possible?” Committees can spend as much time as they like navel-gazing on the moral and policy issues, but that’s not going to change anything if it can’t be implemented. It’s just going to make them look stupid.

 

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Government’s red-herring email law

The government (UK) launched a red herring at the Internet today, and the news media has lapped it up. “We’re brining in a new law to allow security services to monitor email and other Internet traffic.” This is actually referring to the fact of the communication; not its content.

The TV news has subsequently been filled with earnest spokespersons from civil liberties groups decrying the worst Big Bother laws since New Labour got the boot – anything to get their silly mugs in front of a camera. Great news drama – the Conservatives moving over to the dark side.

Wake up people! What they’re proposing is just not possible. Blair already tried it in a fanfare of announcements and publicity, but anyone who knows anything about how email and the Internet function can tell you that it’s not even technically possible on so many levels.

1) Email does not necessarily use an ISP’s mail server or web mail service. Home users probably do; any company or organisation will most likely use their own. If anyone wanted to avoid snooping, they would too.

2) Users of commercial mail services are anonymous if they want to be. With a few minutes effort it’s possible to hide your IP address, or use an untraceable random one, and there’s no other trail leading back to an individual. The international criminals being targeted will know the tricks, for sure.

3) The security services already have the powers to do this, and do use them.

4) If the ISP is outside the UK, then what?

When the Blair government announced something similar I had to write to the government department concerned asking for the details. I heard about it from the general news. Apparently I, as an ISP, needed to keep records for a year – but records of what, exactly? They didn’t contact me to warn me it was happening; they can’t as there is no register of ISPs. There’s no definition of what counts as an ISP either. And needless to say, the government department concerned didn’t write back with the details.

So why is the current government making this announcement about an announcement now? Could they be wanting to change the news agenda? As usual they can rely on the media types to completely miss the fact it’s nonsense. Eventually the BBC got Andrew Mars on to comment, but I suspect his interview snippet was severely edited to suit their agenda.

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What is to become of Computer Science?

When people ask what I do, I normally say I work with computers. “Ah,” they say. “You’re in IT. My nephew is in the same line.” Well actually, no – I don’t do IT and I don’t do the modern version: ICT. I was around long before these terms were coined, and they really don’t apply. IT is all about setting up Windows and writing Macros in Excel (if you’re advanced).  If I say I’m a computer programmer it’s assumed I’m a “web developer”. System programmer doesn’t mean anything to most people; assembler programmer even less.

Then a few years ago I realised what I was – I’m a Computer Scientist. Well I lecture on Computer Science degree courses, ergo I must be. Actually this antiquated term is very appropriate for an antiquated computer person, and if the hat fits…

Back in the 1970’s and early 1980’s we were all Computer Scientists. If you wanted a computer you pretty much had to build it yourself with a soldering iron and a load of chips and when complete, you had to program it. If your employer purchased one of these expensive items ready built, you still had to program it yourself – unless you were an operator, in which case you merely had to understand it. You learned a lot in the process, if you were that way inclined.

These days people want a career in IT, so they do Computer Science courses at University. They’re wasting their time. They learn very little from the university about computer science, and the university is perfectly happy with that. The way computers work is difficult; difficult means expensive to teach and certain to put off students. If you put off students, you get less money. So you need to teach easy stuff.

Easy stuff in Computer Science basically comes down to playing around with luser-land software, animation packages and an SQL query or two – but not too hard. Perhaps write a bit of HTML by hand before moving on to some web page design package or CMS.

Here’s the conundrum.

Students = money, but only if they stay the course.

A low pass rate = Less students want to do the course.

Without lots of students passing the course, you don’t get enough money and everyone loses their job.

Computer programming is difficult. Most IT students can’t hack it. Therefore it has to be dumbed down to an extent you’d never believe. Those with the aptitude could program before they came on the course; those without it would never learn.

In 2009 the university I taught programming at decided that the need to pass the programming module was affecting their overall pass rate, so they made it optional. Yes folks – you can get a Computer Science degree without being able to write a single line of code. I’d name names here, but I understand this is common practice at many institutions, so what’s the point?

Now I’m not saying I’m unique or even special in understanding how computers work. There are plenty of others of my generation that know as much, if not more. What I’m wondering about is what happens when our generation retires? It’s not possible to go through the learning process we had back then – learning by tinkering and doing (because frankly, the education system was nowhere near the leading edge back then either).

I believe there was a sweet spot at the end of the 1970’s, where microprocessors had just appeared on the scene and you had to understand things from first principles if you wanted to do anything with them. If you didn’t have to construct a machine yourself, you certainly needed to program it if you wanted it to do anything – and they were simple enough back then that this was a realistic possibility.

Sitting in front of a modern Windows PC is not the same experience at all. With a PET/Apple/Tandy computer you turned it on and the first thing you saw was a prompt to start entering your program in BASIC. You lived in a programming environment. With CP/M it was only a few keystrokes away. Now we’re presented with a graphic user interface and no programming language whatsoever – just Facebook. The complexity of the Windows API is daunting; more so given that everyone thinks its cool to write stuff using the current favourite object-oriented wrapper library. In order to achieve anything looking like a modern computer program (where the graphic user interface is everything) you have to jump through numerous hoops before you can get started. If I complain, I’m pointed at the application generator – it’ll write most of the code for me, apparently. If you ask what the reams of generated preamble code it actually produces is for, people just shrug their shoulders and ask why you’re questioning it.

In 1998 I found myself writing a system-level utility for Windows inside a large company, and needed to sort an array into alphabetical order. I don’t think there’s a Windows API function, and qsort seemed to be missing from the library, so I consulted the lead Windows programmer across the room. The answer came back to put my strings (one by one) into this file selector structure (as file name), make some call or other to the file selector box and presto – my strings would come back sorted. No, he wasn’t joking. Two minutes later I’d written bubble-sort, for the umpteenth time.

This was thirteen years ago; how much has it deteriorated since then? I’m lucky to be developing software either solo, or with a developer of my generation, so I’m probably insulated against the worst excesses.

So, back to the point: where are we going to get Computer Scientists from? I started on the sweet spot, where it was possible to learn pretty much everything about the computer in front of you – every instruction, every I/O register, and every line of the operating system. As computers expanded, our knowledge expanded, but could rest  on these early foundations. We can’t do that any more. If we ran a three-year degree course in computing and started from the basics you’d end up with me someone whose knowledge was wide enough to cover a BBC Micro. They’d need another twenty-seven years after that to reach the modern era, and by the time they qualified they’d be thirty years out-of-date.

And why should anyone even bother? I can assure you, there’s more money to be made out of IT than Computer Science. The only decent return available if you understand computer fundamentals appears to come from cyber-crime, and even then that’s as  perpetrator; no one wants to pay for security.

I’m told that the government plans to bring back an element of programming into the ‘O’ level maths (or its modern equivalent). This is a start, but a small one.

In the mean time I’m watching the other members of the OS/2 drinking club fall away and wondering what is to become of us. The draw of Bletchley Park grows every stronger.

 

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Phone hacking gets serious

A committee of MPs are currently grilling the management of News International trying to find someone to blame for the ‘phone “hacking” scandal. It has to be someone convenient; definitely not the people who are actually responsible. That’d lose them votes. This is because those ultimately responsible are the readers of the tabloid newspapers with their insatiable appetite for the personal details of anyone famous, or in the news.

Readers of the Daily Mirror and the Sun/News of the Screws are mostly to blame, together with the Daily Mail, Express and “celebrity” magazines. They’re creating the demand; the publishers are in business to satisfy a demand. This isn’t to say I approve of the business – the cult of celebrity is one of the most rotten things about modern society – but blaming those making a living by never underestimating the public’s bad taste is like condemning a lion for eating an antelope. The tabloids are profitable; proper newspapers are a money pit.

But the politicians don’t want to blame the tabloid readers (aka most of the electorate), and neither does the news media want to blame their best customers. Instead they’re nervously jostling for position in a circular firing squad.

Politically, blaming the Murdoch Press is the best answer. Politicians would love to control the media, but in the west this is a tricky position to engineer. The fact that a sub-contracted investigator to one tabloid accessed the voice-mail of a missing person who subsequently turned out to have been murdered is a pretty flimsy pretext, but they appear to be making the most of it. Oh yes – they messed with a police investigation by deleting old messages. Hmm. My mobile ‘phone voicemail does this automatically – why blame the hack? Just convenient, and it makes it seem more shocking and no one is going to mention this obvious explanation as a possibility. This morning I heard Neil Kinnock suggesting the press needed regulating. Well it worked for Castro, Stalin and Kim Jung Il, his socialist role models?

Last weekend the News of the World was forced to close; a newspaper (in the broad sense of the word) was muzzled to cheers of delight. They were doing something illegal, and they had to go. Actually it was only made illegal in 2000 by Blair’s government (arguably it only came in to force in 2002). Prior to this it was dodgy ground, but there was always a public interest defence. This is key. Journalists used to be able to snoop on whoever they chose as long as it was in the public interest. Each individual case had to be argued on its merits; it was safe. Now journalists face a very real risk of prosecution simply for looking into the dealings of corrupt politicians, organised criminals and dodgy police officers (especially). New Labour’s idea is that only the police and security services were allowed to do anything like this – i.e. The state should have a monopoly on snooping. This is the same model used by the Gestapo, the KGB, the OVRA and the Stasi. It’s used in various countries in the modern world; there was no free press to hold the secret police and politicians to account.

Does this mean Blair and New Labour deserve to be lumped in with the dictatorial heads of police states? Probably not – they produced a large amount of stupid legislation in a hurry and I could well believe this was simple incompetence. However, it’s notable that politicians now are hardly lining up to condemn these totalitarian laws. Why would they? One of the major beneficiaries have been the politicians themselves, who like to have a protect “private life” outside the glare of publicity.

As a final note, watch for the Mirror – they were the subject of more complaints about illegal intercepts (by a long way) than The Sun, Screws or anyone else on Fleet Street (or Wapping). So far they’re being protected. If you think this is a conspiracy theory, check the complaints for yourself on the Ofcom web site. Don’t expect the news media to report it – not in their interests!

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Oil war or humanitarian mission?

I’ve woken up today to hear we’re in yet another war to protect oil supplies, this time in Libya.

What’s actually happening is that a bunch of dodgy people are trying to take control from the existing a dodgy government by force of arms. The UN (a label of convenience) is weighing in on the side of the anti-government faction that controls the oil fields (or did yesterday, things are moving fast). The excuse is that they’re protecting civilians.

Now this is something of a civil war. There are four groups involved. Firstly there are the government forces. They’re not civilians and it’s their job to protect the state. If we had an armed uprising in the UK (such as the IRA), the state army is there to protect the government. The Libyan army likewise.

The second group are the anti-state “army”. Actually they’re not an army; they’re several groups of civilians with guns and bombs. The state army is defending the state against them, as would be expected. Is the UN protecting these “civilians” from the state army? It looks like it; or more specifically the UN is providing military support to this groups, against the government.

The third and fourth groups are the pro and anti-government civilians. By siding with the anti-government lot (simplistically, those in the east) you could argue that you’re protecting those civilians, but as you’re not (apparently) protecting the pro-government civilians in Tripoli from the rebels, it’s a very thin argument.

All governments in the region are dodgy (Israel is the only real democracy as we know it). The rebels are dodgy. It’s a dodgy place, and there are dodgy people around. It’s the way things are, and we should be leaving them alone. Otherwise we’re imposing our version how things should be on someone else. But unfortunately a lot of these places are financed by the oil we’re dependent on buying from them, which is what makes Libya a special case (along with Iraq).

Pretending that it’s a “no fly” zone for humanitarian reasons, basically siding with the rebels, is a scandal. If we’re going to war we should be honest about the reasons, not making them up after the event (like Blair and Bush). And if they think they’re backing the right horse with military support and they’ll be rewarded later, they know nothing about the culture in that region. I’m not even sure they’ve backed the right horse; Gaddafi’s government doesn’t roll over easily.

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Cameron on Gaddafi – it’s personal

I’ve just watched David Cameron being interviewed about the situation in Libya. He’s saying things like “Stop Col. Gaddafi”, and “Col. Gaddafi is brutalising his people”, referring to Libya’s stated compliance with a ceasefire.

This is worrying. Col. Gaddafi isn’t attacking civilians, repressing his people or doing any of the other things David Cameron and Barak Obama are accusing him of. HE is sitting in an office. Elsewhere in Libya there are people with differing interests fighting each other. It’s called a civil war.

When our politicians refer to such problems in terms of a specific personality, such as Col. Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein or even Adolf Hitler we’re in for trouble. It’s not one person creating the situation, but a sizeable group of people with a vested interest. They’re missing the point. Or more likely, they’re hoping we’ll miss it.

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Alternative Voting

I’ve just had a very nice chap on the ‘phone asking me if the AV campaign could count on my support in the forthcoming referendum. I told him that would be premature.

AV is attractive, but so is the existing, tried and tested system that has done us fairly well for nearly a century. Prior to that we had a similar system, except that women weren’t allowed to vote. This was probably wrong, but made sense at the time as women haven’t always been as clued up as in modern times (which was definitely wrong). Going back further we’ve had systems where (crudely put) only the best educated in society have had a vote, to various extents.

The idea that democracy is good, and therefore more democracy is better, doesn’t really hold water. Democracy was popularised by the ancient Greeks in Athens, but even back then they could see the problems (Plato’s Republic is an interesting read, and Socrates was a smart guy with a solid handle on it).

The good thing about democracies is that they allow you to boot out a bad government, which is why we must keep them. But do they get you a good government? I’d say, based on the evidence, that the more democratic you get, the worse the worse decisions the government is likely to take.

The AV camp keep pointing to Australia as a working example. If this is the best they can come up with, we’re in big trouble. Just take a look at Australian politics in action and you’ll see what I mean.

Another of their arguments, to quote the Electoral Reform Society, is that it “Penalises extremist parties, who are unlikely to gain many second preference votes.” They don’t back this up with research, so here’s an anecdote about the BNP (argue amongst yourselves as to whether they’re what was being talked about).

In the 2010 elections, talking to voters (especially in the less well-off and looser-tongued areas) the subject on the BNP came up. “They make a lot of sense and I’d vote for them if I thought it would do any good…” was a message I got quite frequently, in spite of the pariah status imparted to the BNP by the media. This was followed by “but I don’t want Gordon Brown to get back in.”

And there’s the rub. The AV camp believes people will vote positively with AV: vote for who they really want. What they don’t realise is that, at present, a lot of people are voting against who they don’t want, more than anything else.

So how will “extremist” parties fair under AV? Pretty well, I suspect. People would have voted for the BNP with their first choice, and against Gordon Brown with their second. The Electoral Reform Society idea that extremists will be disadvantaged needs some justification.

It’s not just me that thinks this, however. Take another minority extremist party, the Greens (they want to do some pretty extreme things with the economy); what do they reckon? Well their conference voted to back AV and they’re actively campaigning for it. If the Electoral Reform Society is correct then surely the Greens would be wiped out. That scenario doesn’t seem to bother them overly.

On the other hand, the sake-up that minority parties could bring might be just what we need as a society. Remember, you don’t need end up with an MP from such a party, but the realistic threat they might get in is bound to influence the policies of the main parties. For example, in the general population there is a majority to bring back hanging (never mind the issues involved with multiculturalism). The educated liberal elite in the main parties are always putting the brakes on the death penalty when the idea comes up, but if AV really does give the people a purer voice, things may get interesting on this any many other issues.

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No Fly zone in Libya is a bad idea

EU Foreign Ministers are planning a No Fly zone for Libya to protect anti-government protesters, and Russia has decided to stop selling the Libyan government arms. No one should have been selling arms in that part of the world, but “no fly” zone?

Let’s be clear – a no fly zone involves either words (which won’t work) or attacking Libya to enforce it.

The Libyan government is fighting armed protesters/rebels and fighting back. It’s their prerogative. A no-fly zone would obviously help the rebels because they don’t have an air force. The UK government is doing various things to ingratiate itself with the rebels, probably because they’re close to the oil fields. But is this wise?

Gaddafi’s lot are as odious as they come, but we now seem to have an agreement to leave them alone and they’ll leave us alone. Blair decided this in 2004, visiting the Mad Dog in Tripoli and making peace (forgiving him); to their credit the Conservatives weren’t so keen. But is anyone stopping to think what the rebels might be like? Based on previous experience, they won’t be terribly friendly if they win.

This is something the Libyan people need to decide. If we get a “no fly” zone it means attacking Libya and taking sides in what could turn out to be a civil war. We should be careful what we wish for.

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Sally Bercow

I’m riding home on the tube with my complimentary copy of the Evening Standard, looking at a photo of Sally Burcow (New Labour activist wife of the Speaker) wearing “nothing but a sheet”, accompanied by an interview concentrating on how “sexy” the office of Speaker and politics in general cab be.

This is either part of a plot to deliberately discredit her nominally Tory husband, or perhaps she really is that naive. If it’s the latter, you’d have thought he’d know better, at least.

Actually, I don’t think John Berco needs any more discrediting – it’s time for him to go.

Incidentally, it’s not the choice of sheet that bothers me personally, it’s the nature of the interview.

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Egypt – be careful what it wish for

Obama (and the British government, to an extent) seem to have the knives out for President Mubarak at the moment. It’s called populism, and theyre trying to make themselves popular with certain sections of the middle east. Mubarak seems to have been a pretty good ruler given the standards in the region, but he’s got the skids under him already so they’re toadying up to his opponants.

Of course, when meddling in the internal affairs of another country they need an excuse. In Iraq it wasn’t regime change, it was weapons of mass destruction. In Egypt the best they can come up with is democracy. The Egyptions deserve democracy and Mubarak isn’t letting them have it. He’s given them peace and stability, but apparnetly democracy is more important.

I’m not so convinced. Failing third world countries are seldom helped by it. Where they have it, it’s left over from colonial days and tends to be used to get a new dictator in place, often with disasterous results. Look at the exmaples – Rodeshia, India, Pakistan, Ivory Coast – pick a third world country and try to find ways democracy has helped. I’ve been trying hard and I can’t think of any exanples. How about Russia? They threw off the corruption that developed under communism and replaced it with…? Okay, there’s East Germany – they’re probably better off in all respects.

Mubarak and his clan are hardly squeeky clean, but its a matter for the people of Egypt and the west is never thanked for interfering , but we never learn. Our leaders might find themselves stuck with embaressing “friends”, and the people of Egypt may end up blaming them.