Ok, actually no Hitler at all, but a usefully cynical video:-)
Showing posts with label child porn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label child porn. Show all posts
Friday, April 30, 2010
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Digital Convergence Conference HK
Pangloss is having a bonza time at Peter Yu's East:West extravaganza (average session : 6 speakers, 15 mins each!) in HK. This is the most tightly and geekily organised conference I have ever seen. When you have two mins to go, the computer (not the chair!) warns you loudly, in Stephen Hawkings voice. When your time is up, if you don't wander off meekly, it makes a series of noises: STOP!, explosions, angry baby crying(VERY LOUD!!) and so forth - varied to prevent desensitisation. I suggest this programme be open source coded and exported to all future cons :-)
Hong Kong is currently obsessed with two things: swine flu and Green Dam Escort. No, not an aspect of Internet pornography:) HK being terrified of repeat SARS, all of us got temperature taken before allowed in to conference hall. All schools have been closed, and about 90% of locals are wearing masks. Very surreal seeing tech support, photographers and caterers all wearing masks while running around helpfully: feeling of constant risk of being dragged off to be subjected to the alien probe.
Best paper so far: Rebecca Mackinnon of Human Rights Watch, HKU, etc, on angry responses to the Green Dam Escort software embedding censorcode project . In essence from next month all PCs to be sold into mainland China are to have filtering software known as Green Dam installed on them to provide prior exlcusion of unwanted content (wherever the country of origin was). Naturally in the usual way of such censorware, newspapers have already proven that the software allows in nude body art girls but excludes Garfield; also in a lovely confluence of obsesssions, the South China Post observes nude pink pig images are also excluded..
Chinese is a punning language so Green Dam also translates (I think?) as river crab. As China Digital Times then puts it, "The first law of Chinese cyberpolitics is “Where there are River Crabs, there are Grass-Mud Horses (那里有河蟹，那里就有草泥马).” According to this “Law of the Grass-Mud Horse,” online censorship always meets resistance. "
Cue numerous UGC protest YouTube vids of river crabs singing local kiddy songs about green mud horses dubbed with very rude words. Please someone look who speaks Cantonese! They played one, and all local Chinese speakers blushed and giggled! Pangloss wants a translation badly :)) Try starting here.
Anselm Kamperman Sanders later added the interesting gloss to this that Green Dam can actually be seen as a a kind of media control by standards - and thus might be open to international pressure in future by WIPO who are looking at extending control over standards as part of IP harmonisation (or WTO?) Interesting in the context of the current Chinese drive to create its own national standards eg their own version of Office formats and HDTV standards. In some ways Green Dam is the tip of an iceberg of prospective trade war.
Hong Kong is currently obsessed with two things: swine flu and Green Dam Escort. No, not an aspect of Internet pornography:) HK being terrified of repeat SARS, all of us got temperature taken before allowed in to conference hall. All schools have been closed, and about 90% of locals are wearing masks. Very surreal seeing tech support, photographers and caterers all wearing masks while running around helpfully: feeling of constant risk of being dragged off to be subjected to the alien probe.
Best paper so far: Rebecca Mackinnon of Human Rights Watch, HKU, etc, on angry responses to the Green Dam Escort software embedding censorcode project . In essence from next month all PCs to be sold into mainland China are to have filtering software known as Green Dam installed on them to provide prior exlcusion of unwanted content (wherever the country of origin was). Naturally in the usual way of such censorware, newspapers have already proven that the software allows in nude body art girls but excludes Garfield; also in a lovely confluence of obsesssions, the South China Post observes nude pink pig images are also excluded..
Chinese is a punning language so Green Dam also translates (I think?) as river crab. As China Digital Times then puts it, "The first law of Chinese cyberpolitics is “Where there are River Crabs, there are Grass-Mud Horses (那里有河蟹，那里就有草泥马).” According to this “Law of the Grass-Mud Horse,” online censorship always meets resistance. "
Cue numerous UGC protest YouTube vids of river crabs singing local kiddy songs about green mud horses dubbed with very rude words. Please someone look who speaks Cantonese! They played one, and all local Chinese speakers blushed and giggled! Pangloss wants a translation badly :)) Try starting here.
Anselm Kamperman Sanders later added the interesting gloss to this that Green Dam can actually be seen as a a kind of media control by standards - and thus might be open to international pressure in future by WIPO who are looking at extending control over standards as part of IP harmonisation (or WTO?) Interesting in the context of the current Chinese drive to create its own national standards eg their own version of Office formats and HDTV standards. In some ways Green Dam is the tip of an iceberg of prospective trade war.
Another fascinating paper was Anne Bartow on what I've labeled "fair trade porn": why not deny IP protection to commercial pornography (which has such in US law at least) unless it meets health and safety standards, like ensuring the sex workers involved consent, are over age, etc? Pangloss thinks there's an interesting analogy here with fair trade coffee or organic veg, where some people are prepared to pay higher prices to know more about the provenance and social goals of the product. Now porn is so widely and openly used, would there be a market for this? is porn not something you WANT to be "dirty"? And is there any spare money for fair trade porn, like organic veg, in a recession! |
Thursday, May 08, 2008
The Strange Case of the Moral Panic That Didn't Bark
.. or tae see ourselves as others see us..
Via my colleague Mark Telford, this abstract from Philip Jenkins, a criminologist.
Why Do Some Social Issues Fail to Detonate Moral Panics?
Philip Jenkins*
* Department of History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University, 407 Weaver, University Park, PA 16802, USA; jpj1@psu.edu
Abstract
A ‘moral panic’ is characterized by such themes as the novelty of a particular menace, its sudden explosive growth, and the menace it poses both to accepted moral standards and to vulnerable groups and individuals. Some problems, however, apparently have all the features that would generate a self-feeding media frenzy, and, yet, they do not do so. I will explain this absence of panic by examining the issue of internet child pornography. The failure to construct the problem in ‘panic’ terms reflects the technological shortcomings of law-enforcement agencies, which force them to interpret available data according to familiar forms of knowledge, rather than comprehending or publicizing new forms of deviant organization. This lack of awareness then conditions the nature of political investigation and media coverage.
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/azn016
Does anyone on this list NOT think there has been a moral panic over child pornography? In the US, the Time cover of 96, the CDA, the COPA, et al.... are we and the criminologists on different planets??
Via my colleague Mark Telford, this abstract from Philip Jenkins, a criminologist.
Why Do Some Social Issues Fail to Detonate Moral Panics?
Philip Jenkins*
* Department of History and Religious Studies, Pennsylvania State University, 407 Weaver, University Park, PA 16802, USA; jpj1@psu.edu
Abstract
A ‘moral panic’ is characterized by such themes as the novelty of a particular menace, its sudden explosive growth, and the menace it poses both to accepted moral standards and to vulnerable groups and individuals. Some problems, however, apparently have all the features that would generate a self-feeding media frenzy, and, yet, they do not do so. I will explain this absence of panic by examining the issue of internet child pornography. The failure to construct the problem in ‘panic’ terms reflects the technological shortcomings of law-enforcement agencies, which force them to interpret available data according to familiar forms of knowledge, rather than comprehending or publicizing new forms of deviant organization. This lack of awareness then conditions the nature of political investigation and media coverage.
http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/azn016
Does anyone on this list NOT think there has been a moral panic over child pornography? In the US, the Time cover of 96, the CDA, the COPA, et al.... are we and the criminologists on different planets??
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Stamping out child abuse image websites?
Interesting report on the Beeb about how the IWF have identified how many sites trade such images and concluded there are 2,755 such sites worldwide.
A laudable aim and if achieved, quite amazing. It doesn't of course take into account the anecdotally well known fact that serious organised pedophile rings now mainly obtain and swap their wares via closed P2p nets - "darknets" - and that penetrating these is getting ever harder since the arrival of easily used encrypted P2P.
However perhaps this isn't the time to be too cynical (what me?) and as the IWF imply, closing down commercial websites would at least cut off the feed from those not already inducted into the "inner circles" of darknets.
Then perhaps we could start putting more resources into actual child abuse in this country and less into the shadowy scare figure of the online pedophile :)
"Of these, 80% are judged to be fully commercial operations.
The IWF said this "manageable" number could be eliminated if net firms, governments and police worked together".A laudable aim and if achieved, quite amazing. It doesn't of course take into account the anecdotally well known fact that serious organised pedophile rings now mainly obtain and swap their wares via closed P2p nets - "darknets" - and that penetrating these is getting ever harder since the arrival of easily used encrypted P2P.
However perhaps this isn't the time to be too cynical (what me?) and as the IWF imply, closing down commercial websites would at least cut off the feed from those not already inducted into the "inner circles" of darknets.
Then perhaps we could start putting more resources into actual child abuse in this country and less into the shadowy scare figure of the online pedophile :)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)