The big internet story over the last few days has been how the Internet Watch Foundation has effectively restricted UK access to Wikipedia by putting it on its blacklist of alleged child pornography hosts, which most UK ISPs subscribe to, on account of it showing a 30-year-old album cover which has been available in shops worldwide – and continues to be available – without attracting any legal attention even if it has always been controversial.

As I was busy elsewhere whilst things have been unfolding I was too late to add my own comment, but Andrew Lewin has written about as balanced and informative a piece as possible – link above.

In the olden days, it was an online axiom that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”; when an entire country can now be blocked off from certain pages on certain sites, or certain sites as a whole, simply by diktat by a government department or non-governmental organisation, that axiom is clearly no longer true.

Whatever your views about the specific image in question, one paragraph of Andrew’s article bears specific attention:

“The Government probably thinks it can get away with it as long as it doesn’t look as though politicians’ fingerprints are anywhere too close, but the IWF will respond to government edicts about what’s right and proper with alacrity. We’ve already heard Hazel Blears attack political blogs as ‘a dangerous corrosion in our political culture’ so how long before the IWF decrees those to be against the law or corrupting our morals and do a blanket ban of any such blogs? Sounds like a perfectly proper, moral argument being presented to do just that, after all. Which could be any blog disagreeing with the party of the day … Now is it starting to sound just a little bit like China?”

And as Andrew concludes:

“So I ask you: think of the number one thing you would hate to lose online. And now realise, there’s a very good chance that it can and will be taken away because of the situation we’re sleepwalking into.

Want to wait till it happens? Or do something about it now?”

But of course, “it can’t happen here”.

“Paying for sex with prostitutes who are controlled by pimps is set to become a criminal offence in England and Wales, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said. Anyone who knowingly pays illegally trafficked women for sex could face rape charges, while kerb crawlers could face prosecution for a first offence. Pleading ignorance of the circumstances under which a prostitute is working will not count as a defence”.

It’s an obvious question, but how is the customer of the prostitute supposed to know whether they’re being pimped or have been trafficked into the country or not? Ask to see their tax return? Sign an affidavit or give a receipt afterwards?

More to the point, if the police know any given prostitute is in that criteria (to the extent they could prosecute the customer), oughtn’t they be taking action against the known pimps & traffickers themselves?

The Interwebs have been abuzz the last 24 hours with news Google’s new web browser, Chrome.

As the blurb about it says, this is a fundamental new approach to writing web browser software which takes into account the modern way people use the web; increasingly websites are not just glorified sales brochures, and indeed web 2.0 is much more than just blogs and social networking – on the modern web, people are actually doing stuff; many websites now are full-featured applications, computer programmes, which traditionally would have been stand-alone software sitting on the user’s own computer rather than on a remote server on the other side of the world. As Google explains, by fundamentally starting again from scratch in the way the browser is coded they hope to avoid many of the problems of stability and memory leak which besets complex web applications on current browsers.

On cursory glances, especially bearing in mind it has only just entered public beta and is labelled as version 0.2, it seems to be fine so far – it’s not crashed on me, all the sites I use are rendering fine, and I’ve not yet experienced the serious memory leak problem I usually have with Firefox.

Unfortunately, somebody has spotted something rather dodgy in the terms and conditions attached to downloading it and using it:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

(my emphasis)

Which in a nutshell says, any content you post to a forum, blog, photosharing website, or whatever, you are granting Google a license to also re-use that content for its own purposes of saying how ace the Chrome product is.

As they say on the modern intertubes – Ts&Cs EPIC FAIL.

Reports are flying today through the twitosphere & the blogosphere about some less than community minded behaviour on the part of the Surface Unsigned Festival of rock bands taking place in Birmingham at the Rainbow & the Medicine Bar.

This is basically a ‘battle of the bands’ competition, but it turns out that each band on any given night (of six bands) has to sell at least 25 tickets at £6 in order to go through to the next round of the competition – so effectively the band has to cover £150 for each night they play a 20 minute set in; given many nights of the event there have reportedly barely been 25 people in the venue, let alone 150 people, it’s not hard to work out what might be going on – the bands have been having to stump up that cash themselves.

Now operating a pay-to-play is bad enough, but at least the bands have chosen those terms & conditions of their own free will – stoopid as they might be for doing so. But in what can only be described as a PR own goal, the operators of the Surface Unsigned Festival have sent a legal cease-&-desist take-down notice to the main blog for the creative industries in birmingham, Created in Birmingham, for criticising this practice, claiming copyright violation for reprinting the paragraph from the terms & conditions the bands had to sign containing the evidence of the policy.

Do we want this kind of behaviour from music promoters in Birmingham ?

From the rest of the blogosphere:

• Pete Ashton
• Danny Smith
• D’Log
• Chris Unitt
• Birmingham: It’s Not Shit
• Russ L
• Dave Harte
• Graphiquillan

& much, much more.