Is the answer really to block everything?

I was listening today to a program which went out on Radio 4 last night about the mass prevalence of porn on the internet. It seemed to be indicating that access to this material will somehow lead my generation, being the first to really have gone through adolescence with it, being either sexual devients who will beat up women because there is violent porn, or we will become addicted to the point where we won’t leave the house and form real relationships leading to the ultimate demise of society. The impression I really got, despite them wheeling out the stock public school ‘voices of youth’ to give their perspective, was that much of the program seemed to be about how many adults seem unable to deal with teen sexuality in a sensible way. Whenever I listen even to technologically literate adults talking about things like porn on the internet, their immediate answer is that they should block it from their twelve year old, for example. While I don’t totally disagree with the sentiment, I feel that it somewhat misses the point. Technological blocking is an attempt to avoid the awkward conversations. Personally, I wouldn’t want to talk about porn with my father, and I doubt he would want to with me, but there is an education issue. The knee-jerk response is not to deal with the issues, but really to do the technological equivalent of brushing them under the carpet. Out of sight, out of mind.

This approach has long been the favoured option of schools. Coming from St Paul’s, which under the stewardship of David Smith,is coming blinking into the light of a much less filtered internet, I had a fair degree of experience of coming up against, and going over, under or around, the web barriers. His argument, which I agree with, is that these barriers may put the minds of the staff and parents at ease, but they don’t actually address the issue, or indeed actually block anything for very long. The issue is, and always has been, education. During the course of the BBC program I listened to, they were talking with an exec from Microsoft who told the reporter that Windows (and OS X) have parental controls included, but they are turned off by default. The question was asked, why not have ‘kid safe’ computers on sale which have the controls turned on by default? The answer to me seems simple – these controls don’t really work. As I said they don’t block anything in a very robust way, but they also tend to be over-zealous about their blocking attempts. Again, at St Paul’s, they tried over and over to find a blocking solution which worked. Tom Turner, a current student and @dynamization on twitter, posted this today:

This kind of thing was a constant problem, and the incorrectly blocked sites where usually forwarded onto the IT Support who manually removed them from the blacklist, but that doesn’t change the fact that in this case a John Betjeman poem has been blocked under the category of “Swimsuit and Lingerie”. Are the parents at home, who aren’t even tech-savvy enough to go into Control Panel or System Preferences to turn on the blocking controls for themselves, really going to be able to be there to unblock every time a poem needed for English homework is blocked, and indeed would they know how?

At school this kind of thing was a constant pain in the arse. I know during my time, and no doubt still, a disproportionate amount of David’s time was taken up dealing with this kind of issue. Do we really want to be introducing this kind of crap into the home environment as well? It is about time the parents who, growing up in the ’60s and ’70s should hardly be shocked by kids wanting to explore sexuality, woke up and smelt the coffee. This kind of thing won’t be solved by a splash-screen telling you that ‘computer sez no’.

People three or four years younger than myself are even more accustomed to the internet. One of the stories mentioned in this BBC program was about a twelve year old girl in the US, who was prosecuted under child porn laws for taking a photograph of herself naked and sending it to friends. Now the fact that I think that the ruling is lunacy (I always thought those laws were to protect the child from exploitation, not to preserve moral beliefs) aside, I have no doubt that these kids have no idea that it is illegal to be looking at a picture of say a 14 year old, even if you are 14.

While blocking may be the simple solution, in my mind, it isn’t the right one.

A round-up and some thoughts

Well I think I finally found something I could write about – a general brain dump of the past few months and my useless opinions on them. Nothing spurs me on to do something useless better than the impending threat of collections in just over a week, and pretty much nothing done in preparation so far.

I started at Oxford this October as many of you know, and I have to say that the term, although only eight weeks long, has been incredibly intense. I was of course under no illusions that Oxford would be easy, but a essay being set during Fresher’s week set the tone for how the rest of the term was going to go. That being said, and while I do find myself working to the exclusion of almost everything else (except Spooks of course. iPlayer saves me again), I have really enjoyed the experience. As I am sure everyone says wherever they are in the world, be it Oxford or Bangor Tech, the people are great and the environment is fun. I never got the ‘Oh My God I am at Oxford’ revelation moment I expected, but I did find myself quietly grinning to myself at times. Although I have signed myself up for another four years of intense work and a life going at a pace that is constantly a little faster than I would like I am happy with it – experience tells me I will never pick the ‘easy’ path for myself, and so if I am going to be killing myself for these years I might as well be doing it in somewhere like Magdalen and Oxford.

During these few months the world has again changed. We saw Obama elected. Despite my cynicism around the elections about the timing of his family tragedies, I am very excited about the prospect of having someone who can string a coherent sentence together in the office of ‘the leader of the free world’ (said in suitably appaling American accent and mocking tone..). That title really does annoy me – it is self-appointed and arrogant. If the Americans were leading by any sort of example then maybe it would be justified, and maybe Obama will justify it, but time will tell. There are a few things which scare me about the US in general. The expansion of the borders to include everywhere within 100 miles of a border, thus allowing illegal stop and search in a large swathe of the US – the so called ‘constitution-free zone‘. The bringing home of marines to help operate at DUI checkpoints in California and elsewhere. Then there is Obama’s proposed citizen militia – many have drawn parrallels to Brown/Black shirts, and the dogs in animal farm. I just think of the finger-men from V for Vendetta. Time and time again it has been shown that if you give a man a badge, they assume authority and get drunk on it. You only have to look at the security people in airports who bark at you as God in their own domain to know that what little authority people think they have will make them feel superior and in the right.

No blog post of mine would be complete without the compulsory tech-related comments. The final Apple appearance at the Macworld show is this year, and the keynote tonight will be given by Phil Schiller. I am actually quite excited as I hope he won’t present it with the same smugness that Steve always did. Don’t get me wrong, the man is justified as being heralded as turning around Apple and making it what it is (I write this of course from my MacBook Pro), but the smugness and arrogance of the presentations sometimes made me feel a bit sick to my stomach at times. The question really is whether this heralds the end of Macworld as an event. Sad as it is, I feel that it does. I know that for me and some other Mac-centric friends Macworld is pretty much only about the keynote. We will follow it on twitter or engadget, and then forget about the other two or three days. I would love to see a show of hands in the Moscone theatre of who would have come to Macworld if there were no Apple keynote. My money would be on very few hands being raised.

As I write this, the final thing which springs to mind, mainly because it is a ‘breaking’ story, is that twitter was hacked. I wonder if it is coincidence that this has happened as the publicity of twitter has spiked recently. I saw a Daily Mail story lamenting how the celebrities share the minutiae of their days via tweets, and a few weeks back they were whining about Jonathan Ross having the gall to enjoy his suspension and to tell people about it. They had the stock indignant Tory MP saying that if he was enjoying himself so much then maybe it should be made permanent, yada yada, but the point is that twitter is being noticed. Barack Obama used it during his campaign, although since it has gone almost dead since the election, I reckon people’s hopes of tweets from the Oval Office along the lines of ‘Off to meet Vladimir. Oh Joy! *sarcasm*’ will not be happening. As twitter becomes more and more popular, not only will it be plagued with even more scaling issues like those we have become so used to with unacceptable downtime etc, but just like as the Mac platform gains Windows ground, they will become a bigger, juicier target for people wanting to have a bit of a laugh and gain some kudos with their friends. The recent twitter hack was achieved by gaining access to the twitter admin tools, as confirmed by @netik in a video interview with Leo Laporte. While I am very encouraged by their transparency on the issue, it is a pretty serious breach for something which is becoming so popular, used by many ‘big names’ as a platform.

Hopefully this toe-dipping back into blogging will spark me to write more stuff, but in the mean time, I hope all had a good Xmas and New Years, and that 2009 isn’t as much of a blackhole as it is looking like is it going to be.