What made me sad was coming back from vacation, turning on my home computer, and discovering all the browser tabs left open from my vacation planning process. All the flight tracking pages, the restaurant reviews, the hotel booking information and the maps to dungeon locations. That last one is probably pretty specific to my vacation planning, but you get the general idea. It’s like a little window in time back to the day before I traveled, when everything was exciting and waiting to unfold. Now there’s just a pile of dirty laundry and a groove worn in my credit card’s magnetic strip.
As you can probably guess from that introduction, I’m back in Seattle. The vacation was great but work now awaits. I’ve got some interesting photographs to share, as well as a couple of short videos. They’ll appear in posts later this week, when I’ve had chance to sort through them.
In the meantime, I’ll temporarily change direction, and point to a short news story that bemused me on the plane on the way home. US public officials often get criticized (quite rightly) for saying stupid things. The British are apparently seeing this as a competition and appear determined to out-stupid them. In this case by suggesting that conventional internet pornography sites are a key routes to child abuse images. And that the solution for this is for search engines to force users to register as 18 before allowing them to adjust their search settings from ‘disney’ mode to ‘normal internet’. It’s quite hard to sum up just how much stupidity gets crammed into this single article. The British official manages to get the problem wrong, the solution wrong and screw over normal internet users all at the same time.
What blows my mind is that the moron in question – John Carr – is a government adviser. He’s not some idiot politician elected to a safe seat. This is someone paid by the quality of their advice. It’s how he earns his living. Truly amazing.
No doubt Divine Bitches would be a site high on his list of ‘gateway’ sites. However, I’m not lose to much sleep over linking to both it and excellent images like this one.
I found this image via the Felm Cyber tumblr.
Welcome back Paltego! Like you I always feel a bit wistful and nostalgic when I return from a great vacation. Sounds like you had a wonderful time and I look forward to viewing your photos and videos.
As for the stupidity contest between our elected officials I believe that America is still winning. I can’t think of another country where a major political party has made willful ignorance of history and stubborn resistance to scientific fact a litmus test for passing through their primary process. If it makes you feel any better the Mayor of Toronto was apparently video taped smoking crack recently. At least Canada appears to be giving Britain and America a run for our money! 🙂
Thanks hmp. I spent a good chunk of tonight sorting through media and email. Hopefully, I should have a few good posts for the coming week.
American might be winning on absolute terms, but I’m not sure about it when you adjust for size of population (60M versus 300M) 🙂 The US governments financial policies might be a mess, but the British leaders managed to impose austerity at completely the wrong time and give themselves a double (almost a triple) dip recession. It’s one thing to screw things up when you’ve got a dysfunctional political situation, quite another when you’ve got a functional political situation, but still make all the wrong choices! They haven’t been caught smoking crack yet, although I guess that would at least give them an excuse for some of their decisions 🙂
-paltego
Actually, one of their number (no names for obvious reasons) is known to have done coke while being ‘attended to’ by a professional Dominatrix.
That’s why Steve Bell in ‘The Guardian’ always has him dressed in a rubber gimp suit with a ring through his nose 😉
Nothing is worse than coming home to a messy house (or chores like laundry) after a vacation. Ugh, I hate it, and everyone I know does too.
“The British official manages to get the problem wrong, the solution wrong and screw over normal internet users all at the same time.”
Yup, that sums it up nicely. And you are right–how would the registration claiming one is 18 or over prevent one from viewing child abuse porn via Google, anyway? How the heck would this policy possibly be implemented? It makes no sense. Send this one back to the drawing board.
Furthermore, anyone professionally involved in the policy process should…well, know their shit. Only the most idiotic flat-headed miscreant would look for child porn by Googling it. The sick fucks who actually trade and produce that stuff have their own methods of distributing it, and they don’t involve search engines, kink.cxx, or soccer dads on xhamster. Please!
ok rant over
Can’t wait for the pics!
I particularly enjoyed his contention that registering as 18+ on Google would be a strong disincentive for people. It might discourage the casual porn browser (i.e. legal and good customers of porn sites), but why on earth would it be an issue for people looking for child abuse images? If you’re screwed up enough and crazy enough to download that, how would the entirely legal step of confirming your age with google be an disincentive? And does he seriously think that looking at kinky porn is just one small step away from child abuse? Something is seriously broken when people this stupid are involved in policy making decisions. At least he didn’t describe the internet as a series of tubes.
-paltego
Fellow Seattlite!
Actually, this has been going on since at least 2009. While I was in Portsmouth, England for a shipyard repair period, I purchased a 5gb thumb drive to web surf. While activating the thumbdrive, I ran into the “age restriction” problem while trying to access my account on a web page (BDSM related). I had to go back into the store to have them override the restriction (I was 47 at the time), which gave them a chuckle. Personal rights have been eroded in England since the 1700’s, so this does not surprise me.
That’s pretty strange. It must have been a block on the particular internet connection you were using, much like some companies do for employees. It’s the kind of thing that drives me nuts.
-paltego