Organising your Research project

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Quantitative & Qualitative

What am I doing?

What am I trying to Achieve?

What methodology suits my project best ?

What Data do I need?

Quantitative : statistical, numerical answers

Qualitative : content, theory, philosophy

Different strategies will be needed for different research

Reflective practice

Planning the Project

•Write down all questions that you want to investigate

•Consider each on their merits and focus on two (primary & secondary)

•Write an A4 ‘first thoughts’ sheet for each

•What is the purpose of the study? Is your question researchable?

•Decide on a Working Title


COME UP WITH A PLAN FOR THE REST OF THE MODULE

WRITE DOWN AS MANY QUESTIONS AS POSSIBLE -  NARROW DOWN  TO A COUPLE

FOCUS! 

1 DRIVING THEME / QUESTION
+ 1 SECONDARY ONE 


Write out a 1st thought sheet

What am I trying to achieve?
is it achievable?
Why am do I want to research it?
What do I want to do? 

DECIDE ON A WORKING TITLE

Project Outline 

 

•Consider timing

•DEADLINE- 12 WEEKS TODAY

•Consider holidays / work / life

•Think about your working title and the different component parts that need researching.

•Allocate timings to each

•Draw up a project outline based on the above

•Allow generous time for initial reading and writing up

•Factor in tutorials

•CONSULT WITH YOUR SUPERVISOR ABOUT THIS

What is the key material on the topic?

What material is already out there?

Pick the essentials

Remember Journals

Come up with a system for  organizing research and referencing

Ethical Implications

•Does the research involve human participants?

 

•Does the study involve participants who are particularly vulnerable or unable to give informed consent 

 

•Will it be necessary for participants to take part in the study without their knowledge and consent at the time? (e.g. covert observation of people in non-public places)

 

•Will the study involve discussion of sensitive topics (e.g. sexual activity, drug use)?

 

•Are there issues of safety for the investigators or subjects? 

•Could the study induce psychological stress or anxiety or cause harm or negative consequences beyond the risks encountered in normal life?

 

•Will financial inducements (other than reasonable expenses and compensation for time) be offered to participants? 

 

•Will deception be necessary, i.e. will participants take part without knowing the true purpose of the study or without their knowledge/consent at the time (e.g. covert observation of people in non-public places)? 

 

•Will blood or tissues samples be obtained from participants? 

 

•Might permission for the study need to be sought from the researcher’s or from participants’ employes

 

•Will participants’ anonymity be compromised or their right to anonymity be withheld or information they give be identifiable as theirs?

 

•Will participants’ right to withdraw from the study at any time be withheld or not made explicit?

 

Questionnaires

•Is a questionnaire the best way of investigating your topic?

•If so, begin to word questions and discuss with your supervisor

•Avoid ambiguity, imprecision or assumption.

•Also avoid double, leading, presuming or offensive questions

•Question Type?

•Think about format / appearance

•Always pilot your questionnaire

•Decide on sample size

•Specify a return deadline (factor this into your project outline)

•Record responses as soon as complete

 

Dissertation Plan - How Does the Censorship of Information Affect Society - (Printing press & Internet)

I have wrote a rough plan of what I want to include within my dissertation and the questions I would like answering. I have slightly veered off again with my idea and have been researching into censorship and how this is also becoming present in today's society. What we essentially saw 500 years ago with the printing press we are experiencing today with the use of the internet. Many countries have censorship software installed which limits the population from accessing certain websites. I think this is wrong in my opinion and it essentially keeps the world sheltered from what is going on. By blocking information the government are essentially censoring reality, it is a forma of social control dictating what we can  and cant access information to. 

There is allot going on with the web at the moment and many file sharing sites seem to be under attack for copyright laws. But in today's society these laws have been pushed to the extreme and nowadays everyone is being sued left right and center in a world that revolves around money. The copyright law used to be there in order to protect creativity but nowadays its just as tool to milk money out of those who break the law. The essay will look at the affects of the printing press and how censorship was a bad option then and how It is happening all over again in today's society, different information is being censored now to what it was back then but we are still experiencing a war on our freedom of speech. Times are changing and the industries need to change with the technology and not sue or censor those who are essentially paving the way for the future. I want to look at who is being affected now a days and the social and moral implications of this and try and explore the benefits of this powerful technology, whilst also taking into account points of view from both aspects of the argument.

Introduction

What is censorship?
What methods have been used in the past?
How has censorship affected society?
Why is the dissemination of information important?
What I will be looking at?
What I want to find out...

The Printing Press

Brief History of the press / Gutenberg
Why was this a break through in communication?

• Importance of Dissemination of Information
• Reformation / Scientific Revolution / Renaissance
• Spread of New ideas and Theories
• Enlightenment
• Standardization of Information
• Reorganization of data
• Research Collection changed
• Changed the way we learn
• Accelerated new science and knowledge
• Ability to collaborate and improve results
• Social Concerns - bridged the gap between town and gown

Censorship of the Press

• Who enforced censorship
• What did they censor?
• Why they did do it?
• What affects did this have? 
• How did they do it?
• Where did it happen?
• Who was censored?

The Internet

• How has communication progressed?
• Why was the internet created?
• Why do we use the internet?
• What are the uses today?
• Who uses it?
• How has it changed the way we learn?
• Links between the press and web
• Social concerns of the web

Censorship of the Web

• Who is enforcing the censorship?
• Where is this happening?
• What is being Censored?
• Why is it being Censored? 
• Who is affected by censorship?
• How is being done?
• What are the social and moral concerns?
• Examples - Pirate Bay 
• Wiki leaks shows what governments are trying to cover up.

Conclusion

• Whats in store for the future with a censored web?
• Summary of arguement.
• Importance of freedom of speech
• Importance of protecting youth

Primary Research Ideas

In terms of primary research, I am slightly struggling to think of ways I can go about getting the information I need. The only thing I can think to do is to carry out surveys / questionaires finding out about peoples experiences with cencorship and first had accounts of why they censor or why they have been censored.

Questionaire / Survey   - General Public

• What are their views on internet censorship
• What do they think internet censorship is
• What content they think is being blocked
• Does this affect them
• Have they ever experienced any online censorship? - youtube, unrestricted access, country specific, social media 
• How they think this affects others
• What are their social concerns with censorship
• What are risks

Questionnaire / Survey  - Companies which censors the internet (College)

• Why do they censor the web?
• What is blocked?
• What is their views on mass internet censorship?
• Do they think it is beneficial or a hinderence?
• How do you decided what is deemed unfit for viewing?
• Is this an internal policy?

Physical Examples of Censorship

• Photography of Censored information / adverts
• Internet Restrictions / Blocked websites

Practical Research Ideas - Publication

For my practical response to the brief I want to look at how we are being censored online and in our everyday lives. I think that we are being kept in the dark about allot of things and I want to create a publication which educates the public about the risks we face if we allow our government to restrict our access to information. We can see how badly this works in other countries and is just a method of control. There are obviously reasons for censoring certain information but in a way it is censoring the truth of the world, and the population needs to be kept in the loop. We have to be careful what information we take on board nowadays because the media is built on a bunch of lies in order to keep the government on the peoples good side.

• Find ways in which I can censor information
• "Censorship doesn't tell the truth"
• "Censorship causes blindness"
• "Sorry page not found 404 error"
• "Corruption causes censorship" - big money
• "Content not available in your country"
• "Books Burn Ideas Dont"
• How can censorship affect everyday life?
• Cut out elements
• Cover up - stickers
• Perferations
• Hidden content
• CODES? - secret codes

PIRATE BAY - STEAL THIS FILM NOTES

 Notes & Quotes:

• Piracy has been around for ages. The tape recorder, VCR etc. All been through it before.
• They sue a few people heavily in order to intimidate a larger number of people.
• Intellectual property is a ridiculous "war" about the production reproduction and distribution of information : Mark Getty biggest owner of intellectual property.
• "The fact that the DVD writer is the new weapon of mass destruction in the world, is primarily because a 50billlion dollar film can be reproduced at the cost of roughly 10 or 15 cents" Lawrence Liang
• This has happened before, "People like to see the contemporary, and the digital era as some kind of unique break, and i think the important point here is not to see it as a unique break, but as a momet that aculates things that have already happened in the past." Lawrence Liang
• Before the press information was fairly scarce and easy to control, The scriabl culture hand picked the people that were given the code to transmit information. People were starved for more books.
• They used to have books that were chained up and guarded as it was very dangerous for people to have access to such books.
• The printing press threatened the control over the spread of ideas.
• The printing press was seen as the unholy work of the devil.
• The printers were hunted down if they printed forbidden text.
• Elizabeth Einstein, "The printers were the ones who were hunted down if they printed the forbidden text"
• "Printing becomes associated with rebellion and emancipation." Einstein.
• The state was very powerful in its attempt to control the printed word,but not only was it incapable of the spreading of revolutionary thought, its very existence, inspired new parallel pirate systems of distribution
• France had loads of printers who smuggled books out of the country.
• Pirates had agents in Paris who were sending pages of books which they thought would do well. They wanted to promote banned books.
• In effect you have 2 systems at war with one another. And its the system of production outside france which is crucial for the enlightenment, not only did the new media system spread the enlightment, but it indited the old regime that this power of public opinion became crucial in the collapse of the government in 7887 - 1788" Bob Darton  Princeton Uni
• Emergence of undisciplined reading public, which were not subject to the same norms of reading or our relation to knowledge as it was in the past was the dramatic shift
• "The fundamental urge to copy had nothing to do with technology its about how culture is created, but of course technology changes what we can copy, how quickly we can copy and we can share it  "Felix Stadler - Media Theorist
• "What happens when a copying mechanism is invented, we can take the printing press or Bittorrent, it shapes peoples habits, it gives people completely new ideas, how they can work, how they can work together, how they can share, what they can relate to and what their lives can be,"  Sebastian Lutgert  - Pirate cinema
• "There's no way that an absolutist political system can totally suppress the spread of information, the new media adapt themselves to these circumstances, and often can become even more effective because of the repression."  Bob Darton  Princeton Uni
• Communicating in itself is an act of copying
• "The one technique that brought us to where we are is copying."  Sebastian Lutgert  - Pirate cinema
• "Sharing is at the heart of in some sense existence, communication the need to talk to someone is an act of sharing, the need to listen to someone is an act of sharing" Lawrence Liang
•  Our urge to communicate is so strong that we have always pushed the tools available to us to the limit then gone beyond them, creating new technologies that reproduce our ideas on previously unimaginable scales.
• ARPA - Networking computers Joseph Licklider heralds of resource sharing 1972 was designed in order to share computer resources. They shared resources easily and was a massive shift from the cooperate and commercial communication systems of the past.
• "one of the really important characteristics of the internet, is that its extremely decentralized, and that the services on the internet are invented and operated by other network users." Seth Schoen EFF
• "The network is built so that there is no one in charge, everyone is in charge of their own communications"  Aaron Swartz  Cofounder of reddit.com
• "The war on piracy is failing for social reasons, people like to communicate, people likle to share things, people like to transform things and technology makes it so easy that theres no way of stopping it." Felix Stadler - Media Theorist
• "The principle here is that you are engaging in internet communication as it was origonally designed, you are able to serve content as well as consume."  Siva Vaidhyanathan  University of Virginia
• There is no way they can stop piracy as the information has already been disseminated.
• When the pirate bay got shut down during the raid, Amsterdam information exchange (AM 6) reported that 35% of all the European internet traffic vanished in a couple of hours.
• Grime scene - they take copyrighted beats and create their own music.
• "people have lamented much, the death of the author, What we are witnessing now is far beyond, its the becoming of producers of former consumers, and that suggests a new economic model for society." Sebastian Lutgert  - Pirate cinema.
•  "One of the things that intrigues me tremendously about the proliferation of material thats out there in the world for people to grab, is the potential creation of millions of new authors" Rick Prelinger  Prelinger Active
• "Thanks to the internet, thanks to digital technologies the gate keepers have really been removed"  Fred von Lohmann   Attornet EFF
• "People can take more of their cultural enviornment, make it their own, use it as found materials to put together their own expressions, do their own research, do their own communications, create their own communities when they need collaboration with others, rather than relying on a limited set of institutions, or on a set of materials that their not allowed to use without asking permission"  Yochai Benkier   Yale Law school
• "We live in a world in which absolute abundance of information is an aspect of everyday fact for a lot of us, and this means we have a certain attitude towards the idea of information as property. Its like you've heard sharing is in our blood, so the struggle to hold onto knowledge and creativity as a commodity by force, its going to be met by our strong urge to share copy and cooperate"   League of Noble Peers
• Its the terrorism of the mind that actually sustains concepts like intellectual property, its a terrorism that's grounded on an idea of brutal repression of that which is actually possible.  Lawrence Liang
• One of the things that we are seeing coming out is culture where things are produced, because people care about it and not necessarily because they think people will buy it, what we will see is things made by the people for themselves." Felix Stadler - Media Theorist
• "Lets build a world that we are actually going to be proud of, not just a profitable world for a few very large media companies"  Brewster Kahle  Internet Archive
• "Making money is not the point with culture or media, making something is the point of media", Peter Munde
• "A force like this, a power like this, zillions of people connected, sharing data, sharing their work sharing the work of others. This situation is unprecedented in human history and is a force that will not be stopped." Sebastian Lutgert  - Pirate cinema
• "We all produce information, we all distribute it , we cant stop ourselves, its like breathing, and when we stop doing it we will be dead." League of Noble Peers

Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property produced by The League of Noble Peers and released via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol.

Two parts, and one special The Pirate Bay trial edition of the first part, have been released so far, and The League of Noble Peers is working on "Steal this Film - The Movie" and a new project entitled "The Oil of the 21st Century".

• Thematically, Part 2 "examines the technological and enforcement end of the copyright wars, and on the way that using the internet makes you a copier, and how copying puts you in legal jeopardy. 
• It discusses Mark Getty's assertion that 'intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century'. 
• Part 2 draws parallels between the impact of the printing press and the internet in terms of making information accessible beyond a privileged group or "controllers".
• The argument is made that the decentralized nature of the internet makes the enforcement of conventional copyright impossible. Adding to this the internet turns consumers into producers, by way of user generated content, leading to the sharing, mashup and creation of content not motivated by financial gains. This has fundamental implications for market-based media companies. 
• The documentary asks "How will society change" and states "This is the Future - And it has nothing to do with your bank balance".
• The film is famous partly for being one of the most downloaded documentaries to date. Part One was released through an arrangement with The Pirate Bay; the filesharing site marketed Steal This Film in place of its own pirate ship logo. This produced millions of downloads for the film and catapulted it to wide recognition on the Internet after it hit Digg, Slashdot, Reddit and other online centers of attention.
•  Steal This Film (Part 2) was distributed in a similar manner, but with more trackers and indexes involved, including Isohunt and Mininova. Estimates of the total current downloads of the film hover at around the 6 million mark via bittorrent alone. Since the creators have not attempted to restrict copying, the film is also available on YouTube, Google Video and many other web-based video service. 

Anti Copyright

• Anti-copyright refers to the complete or partial opposition to prevalent copyright laws. Copyright is known as the owner's right for copies to be only made by the owner or with his/her authorization in form of a license.
• The classic argument for copyright is the view that granting developers temporary monopolies over their works encourages further development and creativity by giving the developer a source of income; normally copyright is enforced within a framework of the Berne Convention, instigated by Victor Hugo and first enacted in 1886. 
• A central anti-copyright argument is that copyright has never been of net benefit to society and instead serves to enrich a few at the expense of creativity. 
• Some anti-copyright groups may question the logic of copyright on economic and cultural grounds. Also, in the context of the Internet and Web 2.0 it can be argued that copyright law needs to be adapted to modern information technology.

Anti Copyright - Economic Arguments


Copyright results in a weaker incentive at creativity:

"The evolution of copyright from an occasional grant of royal privilege to a formal and eventually widespread system of law should in principle have enhanced composers' income from publication. The evidence from our quantitative comparison of honoraria received by Beethoven, with no copyright law in his territory, and Robert Schumann, benefiting from nearly universal European copyright, provides at best questionable support for the hypothesis that copyright fundamentally changed composers' fortunes. From the qualitative evidence on Giuseppe Verdi, who was the first important composer to experience the new Italian copyright regime and devise strategies to derive maximum advantage, it is clear that copyright could make a substantial difference. In the case of Verdi, greater remuneration through full exploitation of the copyright system led perceptibly to a lessening of composing effort."
Scherer, F.M. (2004), Quarter Notes and Bank Notes. The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Princeton University Press


Non-scarcity

There is an argument that copyright is invalid because, unlike physical property, intellectual property is not scarce and is, they claim, a legal fiction created by the state. That is, infringing on copyright, unlike theft, does not deprive the victim of the original item, and so enforcement of copyright law constitutes aggression on the part of the state. 
Kinsella, Stephan Against Intellectual Property (2008) Ludwig von Mises Institute.


Historical Comparison

It is entirely unclear that copyright laws are economically useful, even for the majority of authors. Thus Höffner compared the economic effects copyright law had on authors and publishing in the United Kingdom to those in Germany in the first part of the nineteenth century when in Germany such laws had not been instituted, and found that more books were printed and read in Germany where authors, in general, also made more money. 
Eckhard Höffner. "Copyright and structure of authors’ earnings". Retrieved February 11, 2012. 



Information Technology Arguments

Web 2.0

• One of the founders of Piratbyrån Rasmus Fleischer argues that copyright law simply seems unable to cope with the Internet, and hence is obsolete. He argues that the Internet, and particularly Web 2.0 have brought about the uncertain status of the very idea of "stealing" itself. 
• He argues that in an attempt to rein in Web 2.0, copyright law in the 21st century is increasingly concerned with criminalizing entire technologies, leading to recent attacks on different kinds of search engines, solely because they provide links to files which may be copyrighted. 
• Fleischer points out that Google, while still largely uncontested, operates in a gray zone of copyright (e.g. the business model of Google Books is to display millions of pages of copyrighted and uncopyrighted books as part of a business plan drawing its revenue from advertising). 
• In contrast, others have pointed out that Google Books blocks-out large sections of those same books, which motivates purchases, and supports the legitimate interests of rightsholders.
• Fleischer's central argument is that copyright has become obsolete with regards to the Internet, that the cost of trying to enforce it is unreasonable, and that instead business models need to adapt to the reality of the darknet. Fleischer, Rasmus (June 2008). "The Future of Copyright". CATO Unbound.

Cultural Arguments

Freedom of Knowlege

• Groups such as Hipatia advance anti-copyright arguments in the name of "freedom of knowledge" and argue that knowledge should be "shared in solidarity".  "Second Manifesto". Hipatia. Retrieved 2008-07-25.
• Such groups may perceive "freedom of knowledge" as a right, and/or as fundamental in realising the right to education, which is an internationally recognized human right, as well as the right to a free culture and the right to free communication. 
• They argue that current copyright law hinders the realization of these rights in today's knowledge societies relying on new technological means of communication.
• Such groups see copyright law as preventing or slowing human progress. They argue that the current copyright system needs to be brought into line with reality and the needs of society. 
• Hipatia argues that this would "provide the ethical principles which allow the individual to spread his/her knowledge, to help him/herself, to help his/her community and the whole world, with the aim of making society ever more free, more equal, more sustainable, and with greater solidarity." 

Authorship and Creativity

• Lawrence Liang, founder of the Alternative Law Forum, argues that current copyright is based on a too narrow definition of "author", which is assumed to be clear and undisputed. Liang observes that the concept of "the author" is assumed to make universal sense across cultures and across time. Instead, Liang argues that the notion of the author as a unique and transcendent being, possessing originality of spirit, was constructed in Europe after the industrial revolution, to distinguish the personality of the author from the expanding realm of mass-produced goods. Hence works created by "authors" were deemed original, and merges with the doctrine of property prevalent at the time.
• Liang argues that the concept of "author" is tied to the notion of copyright and emerged to define a new social relationship - the way society perceives the ownership of knowledge. The concept of "author" thus naturalised a particular process of knowledge production where the emphasis on individual contribution and individual ownership takes precedence over the concept of "community knowledge". Relying on the concept of the author, copyright is based on the assumption that without an intellectual property rights regime, authors would have no incentive to further create, and that artists cannot produce new works without an economic incentive. 
• Liang challenges this logic, arguing that "many authors who have little hope of ever finding a market for their publications, and whose copyright is, as a result, virtually worthless, have in the past, and even in the present, continued to write." Liang points out that people produce works purely for personal satisfaction, or even for respect and recognition from peers. Liang argues that the 19th Century saw the prolific authorship of literary works in the absence of meaningful copyright that benefited the author. In fact, Liang argues, copyright protection usually benefited the publisher, and rarely the author.
• Liang, Lawrence (February 2005). "Copyright/Copyleft: Myths About Copyright". Infochangeindia.org.

Criticism of Anti Copyright

•  Copyright proponents such as Sumner M. Redstone of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, majority owner of CBS Corporation, Viacom, MTV Networks, and BET, argue that copyright drives the economy by compelling creativity, and is a fundamental right for both creators and consumers. He argued that all proposed alternatives to copyright protection do not allow for viable business models, as content creators would not have incentive to produce their products if they cannot be guaranteed payment. "Propose to a dairy farmer that the milk he sells become a free commodity available to all, and he will stop cultivating cows. Why buy the cow, when consumers can get the milk for free?'"
  "Copyright is Even More Right in the Digital Age". pff.org. January 2011.
• Richard Verrier, editor at Los Angeles Times who covers labor and production issues in Hollywood, wrote in an article that piracy undermined independent filmmakers, who, unlike larger studios, would not be able to afford revenue loss. Independent filmmaker Greg Carter described it as; "It feels like someone is walking into your house and stealing your furniture... The big studios can absorb it, but guys like me, we're not millionaires. We're fighting like crazy for every dollar, every nickel, every penny just to survive in this marketplace."   Verrier, Richard (September 2010). "Independent filmmakers feel the squeeze of piracy". Los Angeles Times.

The Pirate Bay - Away from Keyboard - Documentary Notes

Notes:

The pirate bay have created a site which works on others committing crimes, generating revenue from porn ads etc.

The Pirate Beurue

They think they can use piracy for reasons of freedom of speech - technological viewpoint : a contact service for communication

The site is created by users, they don't interfere with the content.

"it democratizes and creates great conditions for freedom of speech"

They hope the internet doesnt get monitored and restricted. 

"The copyright industry is digging a grave for the internet, they don't take into account the public benefits of a free internet, the problem is that old people are running the companies, they know how you made money before and they don;t want change"

"I only support copywright if it encourages creativity or economic incitment or is an incentive to create. Not copywright as a huge control mechanism for people who sit on large swathes of rights"
Roger Wallis Pirate Bay witness, 

People see them as right wing extremists

The pirate bay works for reformed copyright laws, an open internet and free access to culture .

The pirate party had registered there own internet service provider. meaning if someone closes them down they would be closing down the party, that means closing down a party who represents Sweden in the EU, that would be a political censorship on the highest level. If your hosted by the pirate party you get political protection. you could say you get diplomatic immunity

 FLATTR - check out

After watching this documentary I feel like there is alot of issues with the legal system, and there is allot of behind the scenes stuff we don't know about. It seems that its not the public's best interests that we have in mind its those of the big companies, all the members of the Pirate Bay did was provide a platform for sharing and took no part in the content that was uploaded. I think it is wrong to censor the internet and essentially takes away our freedom of speech and rights. The internet is a powerful tool with endless possibilities and if the government start censoring what we can do and the content that we can access then we are being subjected to control by the higher powers. The problem that we have is all of the big companies that run and govern the world are run by the last generation of old men who have no intention of getting on board with the younger generations plans. As it said in the documentary. People have found a different platform for accessing music and the industry should change with it.

Olly Lennard Cencorship Article - HuffPost

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/olly-lennard/why-david-camerons-intern_b_3653566.html 

David Cameron's plan to introduce opt-out Internet censorship at service-provider level genuinely scares me. In an effort to crack down on child pornography and the number of children watching legal pornography, the PM has challenged service providers to automatically filter out porn and "sensitive subjects" unless customers specifically ask them not to.

What's more worrying is his treatment of the technical arguments against such a move: in his speech he said, "Set your greatest brains to work on this... You're the people who have worked out how to map almost every inch of the earth from space." Which is to say: "I don't want to talk about the problems or consequences. Just do it."

So, in plain English for the techno-phobic, here is why such a plan would be bound to fail, and more importantly would be harmful if it went ahead:

The censorship will block certain websites. Now, either a person decides which websites get blocked, or a computer decides. The Internet is far too big for a person to sort content into piles of "acceptable" or "not acceptable". According to YouTube's statistics page, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's one website. It would take an army of people working around the clock centuries to censor the web, and every time a video was taken down it would pop up again on a dozen different sites. So the job would have to be outsourced to a computer, which can do it faster.

But computers are apocalyptically stupid. You could program one to, say, search videos for a certain percentage of exposed flesh and then block the ones that have anything over a magic number, but a computer can't tell the difference between a naked person in a pornographic video and a naked person in an art installation, or a medical textbook, or a political statement, or even some flesh coloured furniture. Computers only deal in yes or no, black or white, one or zero; they do syntax, not semantics. So the computer will be too strict and the flow of information will be disrupted. It will simultaneously be too lax - you see this with your spam email folder: the filter blocks emails with the word 'viagra' in so instead the spammers send emails about 'v1agra' and the computer lets them through.

Too many people, and apparently David Cameron is one of them, think that the Internet is a ineffable technological marvel like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that somewhere in a basement there are people in lab coats who have maps of it that look like diagrams of the London Underground. The Internet is no such thing: it's a botch built on a bungle built on a jury-rig. 

For instance, IP addresses (which are a bit like a computer's online fingerprints: they identify it) used to have 32 digits. Why 32? Because the technician who came up with them thought that there would never be enough devices to need any more than a certain number of digital fingerprints and 32 just gave an arbitrarily huge number of possible combinations. The combinations ran out when the Internet exploded out of the gates like a greyhound on cocaine and now IP addresses have 128 numbers, but to stop those running out so fast you may find that all the devices in your house share one. What this illustrates is that you can't just change one part of the Internet without having serious consequences for the rest, and it's no good saying "You're clever: you figure it out." But even if you could, it would still be a bad idea.

You decide what films are appropriate for you to watch. The box has guidelines and maybe they won't sell some to you if you're a child, but you have the final decision about whether you press play. Same for video games, same for books. You have the right to choose what media you consume. If this scheme goes ahead, you won't have that power anymore. You can opt out, but you shouldn't have to. That is not fair on the techno-phobic, who might not understand how to change the settings or will throw away the letter without reading it and then have their information censored by someone else because the default setting is the filter. And do you think that opting out will be anonymous, or do you suppose that a computer somewhere will quietly note the fact that you chose not to have your Internet, pornography and all, dissected? That won't look good; 'John Smith doesn't have filtered Internet: he must be a dirty bugger.' That's the sort of thing that could get blown out of proportion pretty easily and pretty nastily.

Cameron doesn't understand the Internet. Neither does Yvette Cooper, the shadow Home Secretary, who said he isn't being strict enough. The Internet has its ugly side: the spread of child pornography is a nasty, nasty problem that should be "stamped out", and yes, maybe the world would be a better place if we all watched a bit less porn. People do worry about what their kids watch online, but sitting them down and explaining that it's fantasy, that it can mislead and misdirect, will always be a better solution than outsourcing your parenting to your Internet service provider. Punishing innocent people by curtailing the information they want, especially perfectly ordinary information, can never be the answer. More to the point, it's a restriction of your right to choose what you watch. Some of the smaller providers have said they will not censor; if this awful scheme rolls out you should be thinking about switching to one of them.



Analysis

Lots of people clearly think that the censorship laws are a really bad idea. It would be too difficult to filter out all the actual bad content on the web which means that computers will end up censoring lots of un harmful content as well which is a complete watse of time. At the end of the day it should be up to us what we watch or view and not the government. I do agree that there are some things that should be filtered but If we start there its will only progress and get worse until there is no going back. Nowadays everyone is making a fuss over the little problems and not tackling the bigger issues that we are facing.

CENSORHIP ARTICLE - Kadhim Shubber

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/29/censorship-surveillance

"Governments must not use cyber-security as an excuse for censorship or to deny people their opportunities that the internet represents".

So said David Cameron in 2011, criticizing internet censorship and monitoring carried out by other countries around the world.

In 2013, this is the same man who wants to see internet filters installed in homes across the country and whose government collects huge quantities of data from the transatlantic cables that form the internet's backbone.

Our Prime Minister is not only undermining our ability to argue for digital freedom in other countries, but also reshaping the nature of our internet. Cameron's internet is a place where free access to legal content is an optional extra to be requested, rather than the default; it is a place where the ability to communicate privately is an illusion.

"It is the sheer scale of the interference with our collective rights that is quite shocking"

Stephen Cragg QC

In the last month or two, we have discovered, thanks to reporting by the Guardian, that the data you hold with any US internet company, be it Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple or Yahoo, is easily accessible by the US government under a National Security Agency (NSA) programme called Prism. In the UK, we appear to simply indiscriminately siphon data from the cables that carry the internet, under a programme called Tempora. By gathering data for each other, governments are able to dodge the legal protections that their own citizens have from domestic spying.

"How can [our government] argue for that crucial digital freedom [in other countries] if they're going for monitoring at least as much, if not more," said Kirsty Hughes, chief executive of the Index on Censorship, speaking on 25 July as the Index launched a petition calling on EU leaders to help end mass surveillance.

 "The harm on any normal law abiding person is not enormous," said Stephen Cragg QC, the human rights lawyer who has fought the proposed national DNA database in the UK, speaking at the same event. "But it is the sheer scale of the interference with our collective rights that is quite shocking".

The argument trotted out by supporters is that Western spying programmes prevent terrorist attacks. They probably do, but have also been used in ways that chill the freedom of speech. Case in point: the NSA appear to have gathered phone metadata on New Zealand journalist Jon Stephenson on behalf of the New Zealand government, in order to help identify his sources.

To suggest that the vast internet spying and data collection programmes have been built with our interests in mind is a stretch, to say the least. A recently defeated bill in the US Congress sought to curb NSA spying by putting stricter controls on its funding. Those who voted it down receive on average 122 percent more in defence and intelligence funding than those who supported the bill, our overseas colleagues at Wired.com found.

In the UK, we are now combining this machinery for internet surveillance with restrictions on what content you can and can't view online. By 2014, David Cameron will have ensured that internet service providers (ISPs) install parental filters on home broadband by default, with consumers having to opt-out to access the internet properly.

Though described as a "porn filter", this will actually cover a range of material, including "web forums", "esoteric material", and "web blocking circumvention tools" (just in case you were getting any smart ideas).

Turning off the filters will be a matter of a few clicks, but the principle here is less about porn being entirely inaccessible in the UK, and instead that it's a challenge to the idea that an individual should be able to be private if they are acting within the law.

You want to access a full and free internet? Register with your ISP, declare yourself, says David Cameron.

Cameron also only wants age-verification systems for turning filters on and off. If mobile phone filters are anything to go by, this would mean that if you're 16 or 17, you face the strange situation where you are allowed to have sex with other people, but not watch other people having sex online.

Control of what sites the filters block currently lies with Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications that has, rightly or wrongly, been accused of having close links to the Chinese government. Whether that makes the idea any better or worse is missing the point -- one suspects there would be a similar disinterest in my civil rights if it was run by a Western firm -- but the link to China is an interesting one. The Great Firewall of China is a vast infrastructure for monitoring and censoring content on the internet in China.

Surveillance programmes in the West almost certainly match it in terms of monitoring, but when it comes to web filters in the UK, the censoring part, Cameron's proposition is slightly different.

It is not exactly top-down government censorship -- that would be easier to fight. Instead we are being invited to dig the grave for a free and open internet ourselves -- and Cameron's web filters are the shovels.


My Analysis

There are negative and positive points for censoring the internet, on one hand it may prevent terrorist attacks but on the other it is a huge invasion om our freedom of speech and rights. By cencoring parts of the internet I feel we are having privileged information taken away. I can see how blocking certain aspects of the web might be beneficial but at the end of the day it is up to us to be responsible and make our own decisions. Blocking the web will do more damage than good. China's internet laws are extreme and this is how we could end up in Britain if the laws go ahead. We are not been told the full picture there is obviously an alternate agenda going on that we are not fully aware of. The government are invading are privacy the information we look at online is at risk of being monitored and I feel this is against our rights.