child pornography

In an unexpected watershed moment, one of the last remaining bastions of free speech, Reddit, has banned the posting of “suggestive or sexual content featuring minors.” In one fell swoop Reddit has asserted that it retains moral control over the direction and usage of the site.

Around 30 offending subreddits have been shut down, and Reddit is promising to keep on top of any new subreddits that emerge.

One thing that I've noticed each week in doing the funniest/most insightful comments post is that the winners are almost always relatively "early" commenters.

This makes sense. The earlier your comment gets in, the more people likely to see it... and thus vote for it.

I sometimes feel like I should reserve a special shout out each week for a "late" insightful or funny comment, but I haven't gotten around to it.

So it's interesting to see that the highest ranked comment this week on the insightful side of the coin is actually pretty far down a thread.

The keynote in question shows how the copyright monopoly is fundamentally incompatible with horizontal unmonitored digital communication, and therefore, with the Internet and private communications as very concepts.

Anonymous, the group of high-powered hackers famous for taking down websites belonging to Bank of America, Sony, has turned its vigilante brand of online activism on child pornography sites.

The date was May 27, 2007, and the man was Johan Schlüter, head of the Danish Anti-Piracy Group (Antipiratgruppen).

He was speaking in front of an audience from which the press had been banned; it was assumed to be copyright industry insiders only.

It wasn’t.

“Child pornography is great,” the man said enthusiastically. “Politicians do not understand file sharing, but they understand child pornography, and they want to filter that to score points with the public.

Once we get them to filter child pornography, we can get them to extend the block to file sharing.”

In March 2010, the MPA won a significant legal battle against Usenet indexing site Newzbin and in May the site collapsed under a mountain of debt.

The celebrations following the site’s demise were to be short-lived.

Newzbin was quickly resurrected under new management as Newzbin2, and the MPA faced the prospect of taking on new legal action against the site’s new owners.

Rather than tackle Newzbin2 head on, Hollywood tried a different approach.

For about a decade now, we've been talking about attempt after attempt after attempt after attempt by the Australian government to