Aug 25, 2013

Owning yourself

The revelations of the past few months have thrown into question how and where we choose to portray ourselves online. Mail being intercepted, filtered, and “items of interest” stored by GCHQ, the NSA, and other international government agencies. Evidence of major American Internet services supplying those same agencies with not just specific data, but feeds to their users data, on request, and the probable inclusion of back doors in encrypted services, has come thick and fast from the revelations of Edward Snowden and the reporting of Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian, among others.

Jul 30, 2013

Censorship UK

So, David Cameron proposed Internet censorship last week, to cries of “won’t somebody think of the children?!” He and Claire Perry, his unofficial “Adviser on the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood”, have been talking with varying levels of technical illiteracy about the need to protect the nation’s children from naughty pictures on the Internet. Because, you know, before the Internet those pictures didn’t exist, and if we blocked them we’d have a nation of pure, innocent children who never wanted to look at porn again.