{"id":639,"date":"2009-01-07T12:28:45","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T12:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/?p=639"},"modified":"2014-04-11T18:27:03","modified_gmt":"2014-04-11T17:27:03","slug":"the-lunatics-are-running-the-asylum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/archives\/639","title":{"rendered":"The lunatics are running the asylum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One is brought up with the assumption that those in charge are reasonably intelligent and to achieve government office you would need to be very bright indeed. I am sure that some of them are very smart, though don&#8217;t ask me to name one just at the moment.<\/p>\n<p>So how did someone like the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.andyburnham.org\/\">Rt. Hon Andy Burnham MP<\/a> become Culture Secretary? I refer you to this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/scienceandtechnology\/technology\/technologynews\/3965051\/Internet-sites-could-be-given-cinema-style-age-ratings-Culture-Secretary-says.html\">interview in the Daily Telegraph<\/a> late last year. Now, I don&#8217;t expect him to know everything, not even in his own portfolio, but the mark of intelligence is knowing when you don&#8217;t know and finding out by asking someone who does.<\/p>\n<p>He clearly knows nothing about the internet; in fact, it looks doubtful if he has ever used it. So, just to help him out, here are some facts.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The government doesn&#8217;t control the internet. No government does, how ever much they would like to; it is amorphous. The ISPs don&#8217;t control it either, they just provide the end user connectivity. Even restricting it to English language sites doesn&#8217;t narrow the problem.<\/li>\n<li>There is no reliable way to prove your age, especially online. Not even that you are an adult.<\/li>\n<li>The computer or whatever is being used belongs to the user, not the ISP. The way they work also belongs to the user; it is a bit late to back track on that and try to implement some sort of DMCA controls on them now.<\/li>\n<li>There are too many web sites out there to be content rated manually and any automatic method is unreliable, hence trying to control access to it that way doesn&#8217;t work. Any attempt to do so will certainly miss some very bad places, stop access to some very good ones and give people a sense of complacency. ISPs did try offering Child Safe services but they were not popular because parents found them limiting for all but the very youngest of children.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIt worries me &#8211; like anybody with children,\u201d he says. \u201cLeaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Right! It is not something you should do either. Learn to spend some time with your children.<\/p>\n<p>To further support my argument, note that Andy Burnham previously worked for David Blunkett and Ruth Kelly when they were drafting the ID card ideas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One is brought up with the assumption that those in charge are reasonably intelligent and to achieve government office you would need to be very bright indeed. I am sure that some of them are very smart, though don&#8217;t ask me to name one just at the moment. So how did someone like the Rt. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=639"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1186,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/639\/revisions\/1186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/west-penwith.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}