New laws on viewing of child pornography in Sweden

Just to continue the thread on child pornography in Sweden. I came across this article that states that they are also looking to make viewing child pornography a crime soon. Reference of article dated November 2009, so we can expect this to happen in 2010. Sweden’s neighbours Denmark and Norway already have such legislation in place. This new law would make viewing child pornography on the Internet a crime, the offender does not even need to download the images.

Possession of child pornography still legal in Japan :-(

Sweden was quite slow in making the possession of child pornography illegal, I think it was not until 1971, hence I was amazed to find out today that in Japan it is still NOT illegal. To go further the government is actually blocking efforts to make it illegal! They say that to make it illegal conflicts with the ‘freedom of expression’!

What about the children’s right for ‘freedom of expression’. The Japanese National Police Agency said it received 4,486 complaints from the public of child pornography on the internet in 2009 and a record 650 people were charged with offences related to child pornography. Campaigners believe that represents the tip of the iceberg.

I agree with the closing statement of Julian Ryall in Tokyo writing for the Telegraph.co.uk “The only people who will be pleased at the failure to pass this legislation are paedophiles.” Read more here.

You’ve got 0 friends

Following May’s post earlier this week, I was more than amused to be pointed towards this South Park episode “You’ve got 0 friends”. Would you believe me if I was to say that I have never watched South Park before? And now I can say that I have watched almost a complete single episode… well nearly to the end before I was pulled away to attend my daughter. However I saw enough to feel the need to share with you.

This episode epitomizes both the cool highs and lows and dilemmas of Facebook. Take a look even if you don’t like South Park, as is the case with myself. Especially all of you with a Facebook profile will find it very funny 🙂

Just to add to all the news about Facebook

As if there is not enough news about the latest facebook changes, I had to write something to contribute to all that noise. This is my $0.02.

For a person who has moved around quite a bit and away from home, facebook is a convenient tool to keep in contact with people who are physically far from where I am. Heck, it made it easier to keep in contact with the friends who live in the same city as I do. My friends though are probably not going to get a whole lot of information about me given my highly paranoid privacy settings. (One may also see this as me being too lazy to fill in all my favourite quotes, movies, music, tv shows, my employer data and where I was educated. So really, there is no data in the first place to be made public.)

When I first read in the WIRED article that what one writes in one’s status update can automatically put one on a certain fan page and viewed by everyone, I got quite upset. But after some digging, I realised that maybe they didn’t get it all right. Status updates are still within one’s privacy control. Unless you allow everyone (and I mean everyone on facebook) to view your status updates, then of course it will appear when anyone (and I mean anyone on facebook) will see your status update when they search for that fan page. It just shows how confusing it can get with every new policy change and takes a while for one, even the tech savvy, to understand the changes. I appreciate facebook’s attempt at making privacy settings more fine-grained but this makes it more complex as well and thus difficult to explain and for people to comprehend.

What I particularly dislike about the policy changes are the default privacy settings and the expanding definition of basic information that is made available to everyone in facebook. It would also help if facebook understood the difference between publishing and making something public within a sphere you created. (See article.) For example, this blog entry is publishing. It differs from having this as a note posted on my facebook page because the privacy setting I would have limited (and controlled) the people who will be able to see post.

Below I highlight two issues that I personally find worrying and perhaps, more difficult to deal with.

(1) I think I have a good grasp on how to control the data that I made public and what is kept to my circle of friends. What is a concern though, is the information that my friends are posting about me on facebook. That is something that I do not control. Everyone perceives privacy differently and mutual agreement / consenus should be required in order for data to be made public. It would be nice to see a function within facebook that requests for permission to post a photo of a friend or even tag a friend. This respects the privacy of all parties involved. And if this is a cumbersome process, perhaps it will make one think twice about what to post online. More are exercising self-censorship as mentioned in this article in the NY Times.

(2) Another concern does not involve so much the social aspect of facebook but applies more to application security. These are the vulnerabilities in web applications that lead to data leakage. Here are some that have been reported in the past by Sophos. The leakage of IP addresses and the security hole in the chat.

So to conclude, nope, I am not going to drop off facebook land any time soon. But I will reconsider if ever become famous. Can’t have any photos of me sent to TMZ. Not that there are any discriminating ones.

Digital recorder stolen by Portuguese MP

A Portuguese MP suddenly interrupted an interview and took the digital recorder from the journalists. He is now being charged with robbery and affront to free speech and free press.

The recorder can contain protected information and a privacy violation will probably be discussed in court.

You can see a short video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_CylnffuTA

Phone-tapping scandal in Portugal

In what seemed to be a regular police investigation, ended in a phone-tapping scandal. Almost six months ago, during a regular police investigation, José Sócrates, the Portuguese prime minister, was among those whose telephone calls have been recorded. The suspect under investigation would talk several times with the prime minister but the recordings would be considered illegal and couldn’t be used in court.  Only the president of the Portuguese Supreme Court is allowed to authorise an investigation to the prime minister, and he considered the authorisation from the judge, invalid (although it would be impossible for the judge to know in advanced to whom would the suspect be talking to). Only after six months were the recordings destroyed, after what seemed to be a huge debate regarding privacy and law issues and the use of recordings in courts, particularly those from politicians. In the meanwhile, for the first time, a Portuguese prime minister has to answer to a parliamentary investigation commission.

China to ban internet anonymity

Currently in China, those who cannot afford their own computers and reliant on webcafes, must link every instance of computer usage at a specific computer to either their ID card or their passport. This is very annoying for me, as the only time I go to internet cafes these days is when I have lost my keys, and so invariably also do not have my passport.

The Government also has a very tight relationship with the Internet Service Providers. Whilst researching the practicalities of internet anonymity through TOR on my home computer, my internet access was cut a few times, and eventually my route to all publicly broadcasted TOR entry nodes blocked.

As China is on route to turning its internet black list into an internet white list, it is eagerly looking at the further step of forcing users in all instances of internet participation, online forums for example, to display their real name; and of course for that real name to be linked to their ID card number, and other identifiable information.

More can be read here

It looks like being barred from facebook, twitter, blogspot, youtube and wordpress will be the least of worries for those with a social or political conscience.