andygates

The "wikipedia censorship" flap is over.  The IWG reversed their decision, saying, "Following representations from Wikipedia, IWF invoked its Appeals Procedure and has given careful consideration to the issues involved in this case. The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list." (full statement here, including acknowledgment of the Streissand Effect)

This is right and proper, and happened in good time. 

But only one of the filtering ISPs - Demon - told users that they were being filtered and pointed users to the IWF's site.  The others gave a fake 404 error page.  This is really the nub of it: if we're to have filters, we need to know what they are and who runs them.  We need to know that there is an appeals procedure and it needs to work in a timely fashion. 

Wikipedia is an edge case, a high-profile and marginal decision.  It's by no means the only error by "decency" filters - I know of swimwear categorized as smut and kids' swimwear categorized as kiddy smut, and away from smut, political sites were being put on blacklists by their political opponents during the recent US election campaign.  You've got to know who's doing the filtering and it has to be quickly and easily reversible when it is wrong.

Ultimately, filters are broken.  John Gilmore, one of the great beardy gurus of the internet, described it most succinctly: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."  On a human level, "oh that page is broken, I'll google for another."  On a technical level, proxies and tunnels and encryption and innovation - just ask Chinese nerds. 

A cultural observation that's at least a year late: leekspin.com.  Open up that leek-spinning girl and her Finnish gibberish loop, go on.  I wonder if Loituma sound as charming in the rest of their stuff?  Now you've got a soundtrack for the rest of this rambling...

Cunning science thought: Hawking radiation is what you get when a spontaneous particle-antiparticle pair appear across an event horizon.  Imagine for a moment that the cosmic horizon - that limit to the observable universe - is an event horizon.  Turns out that if you calculate the energies involved, they're a near match for dark energy.  Only... I thought the cosmic horizon was an artefact of the observer, being just the point at which the expansion of the universe reaches the speed of light.  My head hurts.

In other news, Wired has a good article on what it calls "Your outboard brain" - the colossal mass of stuff we know when we're online.  I'm a damn expert online, but an opinionated arse offline, so I grok this.  The article stops short of examining the philosophical implications of calling this an "outboard brain".  The human consciousness is just one of a bunch of processes bubbling around in our inboard brains.  What's going on in this outboard stuff that we may not be aware of?  And if you buy into the memetic model of information, it's even weirder: the outboard brain is an inevitable development, once the inboard one reaches capacity you need more memespace or you're just not as sexy as the other guy.  But this is shared memespace - which I think means that Wikipedia and Google are the collective unconscious.  And it means that a large portion of my memespace is actively being thought-in by other people.  The Singularity may already have happened.  Crumbs.

Still listening to the leek girl?  Excellent.