This guy doesn’t know when to quit.

Andy Burnham is trying to become Britain’s version of Al ‘I invented the internet’ Gore. This time, after lying about the ID card, trying to blackmail ISPs to send threatening letters to their users and just being a lying shetbag he now wants to bring the utterly fascist BBFC regime to…

TEH INTERNETZ!

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming American administration to draw up new international rules for English language websites.

What Andy Burnham believes or does not believe doesn’t amount to a hill of beans to me. When he connects to the internet and I connect to the internet we are peers. He doesn’t have any more say in anything than I or any other user does, unless he provides some useful service that someone can either use or reject. Andy Burnham hates the internet because it is something that he and his fascist neu labour scumbag control freaks cannot control because it is beyond their ability to censor, manipulate or give orders to.

The Cabinet minister describes the internet as “quite a dangerous place” and says he wants internet-service providers (ISPs) to offer parents “child-safe” web services.

The internet is a dangerous place; it is a place that is dangerous to liars like Andy Burnham, who lie and lie and lie and lie and think that they can get away with it. The internet has changed all that; he cannot lie with a loose tongue. Someone somewhere will use Google against him and then write it up on their blog and then the whole world will see him for the liar he is, for decades to come. They have woken up to this very real threat to their lie machine and will now try anything to shut it down.

This is only the beginning.

Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, he confirms. When asked directly whether age ratings could be introduced, Mr Burnham replies: “Yes, that would be an option. This is an area that is really now coming into full focus.”

The only thing coming into full focus here is the depth of the insanity of Andy Burnham. Giving ‘film-style’ ratings to websites is completely unworkable. Even if it was workable, the idea is immoral. Who is going to sit and trawl through the millions of English language websites? Who is going to pay for it all? (see below for the answer to that one)? Obviously this means a massive power grab for the BBFC, who would need a new huge building filled with cubicles and an astronomical budget.

The British Board of Film Censors watches every film that is released in the UK, and then blackmails directors into making cuts of what it deems inappropriate before issuing a rating and a certificate:

They were and are total villains:

Historically the Board has faced strong criticism for an over-zealous attitude in censoring film. Prior to the liberalising decade of the 1960s, films were routinely and extensively censored as a means of social control. For example, Rebel Without a Cause was cut in order to reduce the “possibility of teenage rebellion”. Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night was cut to remove “overtly sexual or provocative” language.

[…]

and they have and do disrupt commerce:

19 June 2007, the BBFC has refused to certify the PlayStation 2 and Wii editions of Manhunt 2, meaning that it would not be legal to sell in the UK (though it would still be legal to own), unless Rockstar made extreme changes and resubmitted it,[4] or appealed the ruling.[5] Rockstar appealed to the independent Video Appeals Committee and finally won the case in March 2008, forcing the BBFC to grant an 18 certificate against its will.[7]

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Board_of_Film_Classification

Now.

Rockstar were prevented from selling a game in the UK by this arbitrary gaggle of imbeciles, and they lost one year of sales thanks to the BBFC. They were not compensated for these loses of course.

More importantly to this post is the fact that every game film and advertisement that is given a rating by the BBFC has to be PAID FOR BY THE SUBMITTER, who they rather ridiculously call ‘the customer’.

Manhunt 2 cost million to develop. If they had caved in and ‘re-cut’ it, it would have increased their costs dramatically in terms of development and then having to sell two different versions instead of one. What is so galling about the BBFC is that they one day say that you cannot play this game, and then the next, say that you can. It was the same with ‘Video Nasties’; you could not watch ‘The Evil Dead‘ or ‘The Driller Killer‘ in your own home, but now you can watch all of these government censored films on free to air TV. Their censorship of these games and movies costs untold hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenues, and all of it for no reason, since they almost always subsequently back down and allow people to watch movies that they previously banned or ordered cuts to.

But this is primarily a financial scam in the making.

Here are the rates that people have to pay to have their works certified.

As you can see, Features, trailers and advertisements have a ‘handling fee’ of £75 per submission plus £6.00 per minute for full length of work.

If we are talking about Bladerunner for example it would cost:

(117*6) + 75 = £777

to get a certificate. Now multiply that by all the films that come out every year.

Then, they rate Video Games. The rates are ‘Handling fee’ of £300 per submission plus £6.00 per minute for full length of work.

Legend of Zelda “A link to the past” takes 5 to 15 hours to complete. That means:

(15*60*6)+300 = £5700

I’ve taken the maximum of 15 hours because I am assuming these old geezers are as thick as shit.

Now, you may say that Nintendo and Ridley Scott can afford this money. So what? It is completely immoral that the BBFC can arbitrarily block them from releasing their films and games based on their own prejudices…but that is not what I am ultimately aiming at.

If Andy Burnham were to be successful in getting the BBFC to rate websites, HMG would be in for literally hundreds of millions of pounds. They would charge fees to everyone with a blog or a website, and blogs would no doubt be subject to regular re-certification, since the content changes regularly. If you do not pay your fee and accept a government rating, you go off line. Period. They would either ask require your ISP to delete your site or simply add you to the list of unrated sites that cannot be accessed. the result is the same; you become inaccessible.

This, my friends, is a TAX on the internet, pure and simple.

ISPs, such as BT, Tiscali, AOL or Sky could also be forced to offer internet services where the only websites accessible are those deemed suitable for children.

Yet another pointless burden on the beleaguered ISPs. Parents need to monitor their children’s internet use, or simply forbid them from using it.

Putting a child on the internet alone is like giving a 13 year old a Glock, £1000 in cash and a Harley and leaving them in the middle of SOHO at 1AM on a Saturday night.

YOU JUST SHOULDN’T DO THAT.

Mr Burnham also uses the interview to indicate that he will allocate money raised from the BBC’s commercial activities to fund other public-service broadcasting such as Channel Four. He effectively rules out sharing the BBC licence fee between broadcasters as others have recommended.

The license fee’s days are numbered. Mark my words.

His plans to rein in the internet, and censor some websites, are likely to trigger a major row with online advocates who ferociously guard the freedom of the world wide web.

They will never work. He does not understand the internet, computers, how and why the internet has become so successful, and how those forces will prevent anyone like him from destroying it.

He would do well to study the phenomenon of Anonymous. If he DARES to try and implement this, he will find out first hand what the words “quite a dangerous place” means when it comes to teh internetz. If he continues to even talk about this garbage he is going to face an Anonymous style flood of actions the likes of which he cannot even BEGIN to imagine.

The internet does not belong to government, or to anyone. No one can control it, and anyone who tries gets bitten in the ass.

However, Mr Burnham said: “If you look back at the people who created the internet they talked very deliberately about creating a space that Governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now. It’s true across the board in terms of content, harmful content, and copyright. Libel is [also] an emerging issue.

The only issue here that he is concerned about is the internets ability to instantly transmit the refutations of and permanently store the facts that refute lies.

The people who created and who continue to maintain the internet understand how powerful a thing this is, and they will do literally anything to keep it clean; i.e. free from the dirty hands of liars like Andy Burnham. There is no such thiing as ‘harmful content’. The actions of the BBFC prove this categorically in their arbitrary and always reversed rulings on what does and does not constitute ‘obscene material’. We will not allow our internets to be subverted, corrupted or interfered with by computer illiterate liars and control addicts. It is designed to resist control, to route around censorship as damage and there is NOTHING that the likes of subhuman monsters like Andy Burnham can do about it.

If he thinks that he can run to 0bama to help him in his quest, he is more than delusional. America has a written constitution with guaranteed rights of free speech. There is already case law preventing government from rating newspapers and other such nonsense. Anyone who wants to operate an English language website away from Andy Burnham’s fascist regime can simply move their content to a USA server; most of the Blogspot blogs are hosted in the USA already….but Andy doesn’t know any of this…is is a totally clueless luser, an ID10T of the first order.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical.

And you can take that view and shove it up your arse.

This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it;

yes it is, you LIAR.

it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people.

This is yet another LIE.

Anyone who does not want to see something simply doesn’t look at it. The internet doesn’t push things that people do not want in front of their eyes; Andy Burnham is one of those people who DELIBERATELY goes out of his way to find the most repellent things unimaginable to prove his point that the internet needs his control, when in fact, it is only HIM and 200 other people who are watching that filth, and the other 200 are journalists writing salacious stories about how bad the internet is!

We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”

The public interest lies in YOU having nothing to do with the internet. Period. You and your fellow animal Mandelshon – yet another chinless wonder out of the same mold that spawned you – who wants to nationalize Nominet, the body that organizes (very successfully without interference from Government) .co.uk domains is another example of how you want to totally control the internet. That particular scumbag’s department wrote the following letter to Nominet:

“In a letter dated October 15, senior civil servant David Hendon, BERR’s Director of Business Relations, asked Nominet chairman Bob Gilbert: “What arguments would you employ to convince my Ministers that the present relationship between government and the company is appropriate in ensuring that public policy objectives in relation to the management of the domain name system and the standing of the UK in the internet community are understood and taken into account?”

Im not making that up; “justify why we should not incorporate you into the government” and if they think the reasons are not good enough? Well then, I guess you just have to bend over Nominet.

You people just DON’T GET IT.

The internet was created without you, thrives because you are not involved in it, and it will RESIST every effort you make to control it. If you think its bad when companies leave Britain because the business climate is so bad here, wait till you try and control the internet. With a few simple commands websites that are money making enterprises can flee britain at no extra cost to the business and transparently as far as the user is concerned.

Mr Burnham reveals that he is currently considering a range of new safeguards. Initially, as with copyright violations, these could be policed by internet providers. However, new laws may be threatened if the initial approach is not successful.

Nothing that this lame brained luser can devise will work. All it takes is a single developer to write a single protocol and the whole world changes.

Take the example of Napster (who we supported). If no one had tried to shut them down, there would have been little incentive in finding a solution to the problem of how to help people share files. Sadly, the imbeciles shut it down.

And the war started.

The first salvo came in the form of Gnutella, an attempt to decentralize the filesharing service so that there was no single point of attack for the buggy whip luddite Andy Burnham’s of this world….then came the Tzar Bomba: Bittorrent and the super popular trackers like Suprnova, Mininova and The Pirate Bay, and the countless other smaller trackers out there. One man, Bram Cohen created Bittorrent by himself. It now accounts for one third of all internet traffic.

I guarantee you, right here, right now, that if ANY sort of concerted effort to censor or rate the internet comes to pass, that someone is going to release a protocol that sits on top of the internet and brings everyone what they want without interference from any third party. People have already started working on projects that do just this. They will become infinitely more efficient once there is a real need for the software. It will work on all devices, in all places, and no one will be able to stop it.

Andy Burnham is on a hiding to nothing. He is on the wrong side of history. He is a total fool, and a laughing stock, and if he is ‘successful’ he will be personally responsible for bringing about exactly the sort of internet that he does not want.

“I think there is definitely a case for clearer standards online,” he said. “More ability for parents to understand if their child is on a site, what standards it is operating to. What are the protections that are in place?”

This is another lie. There is no case for government to take this role, there are already ways for parents to know what their children are doing online, and some operating systems have this BUILT IN. The fact of the matter is that Andy Burnham is not only not wanted for this role, he is not needed.

The OPPOSITE of what he is saying is the truth; the appalling record of the BBFC is proof that government is there merely to censor and harvest money from industry. They do not actually care about what is or is not ‘decent’. If they did, the list of banned films would not change. While we are on the subject, did you know that they CUT TNG to remove mention of peace in Ireland?

He points to the success of the 9pm television watershed at protecting children. The minister also backs a new age classification system on video games to stop children buying certain products.

TV is not the same as the internet.

This is just another example of how confused Andy Burnham is; he cannot distinguish between TV broadcasting and and internet websites and services accessed from a computer. The fact is that computers give parents absolute control of what does and does not display on their screens. TV never did that, although they tried to make it happen in the usa. Internet access now gives fine grained control to parents in a way that they never had previously. They can select only the sites that they want their children to use, and block everything else. This happened without anyone having to tell the makers of OSes that they needed to do it; people are responsible and do not need government to manage them. They can find the right balance for themselves, create the services and tools they need for themselves and Parental Controls in the major OSes is proof of that.

Mr Burnham, himself a parent of three young children, says his goal is for internet providers to offer “child-safe” web services.

I wonder how he controls internet access for his own children? I’m sure that he DOES control their access; if he can do it, what makes him think that other parents need his help?

“It worries me – like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do.

And so….DONT DO THAT.

This isn’t about turning the clock back.

To when? A date before the internet was in most homes?

The internet has been empowering and democratising in many ways but we haven’t yet got the stakes in the ground to help people navigate their way safely around…what can be a very, very complex and quite dangerous world.”

ROTFL.

The only stake that needs to be put somewhere is into the heart of this vampire. No one needs your help to navigate the internet you piece of garbage. The internet is very simple to use, and the world is NOT dangerous you fear-mongering sack of shit.

Mr Burnham also wants new industry-wide “take down times”. This means that if websites such as YouTube or Facebook are alerted to offensive or harmful content they will have to remove it within a specified time once it is brought to their attention.

Not going to happen. Facebook has over 100,000,000 uers. If someone writes ‘fuck’ on their profile, there is no way that the Facebook staff will be able to respond to a takedown notice on short notice. And even so, the sky is not going to fall because something that Andy Burnham, Catholic, thinks is offensive or ‘harmful’. These words my friends, are those of a delusional miscreant looking for a job; a perfect example of idle hands doing the devil’s work. And for the record, both Facebook and YouTube are based in the USA, where they have RIGHTS, which you cannot in your idle imaginings erase ‘for the greater good’.

He also says that the Government is considering changing libel laws to give people access to cheap low-cost legal recourse if they are defamed online. The legal proposals are being drawn up by the Ministry of Justice.

Judge Dredd is way too busy to be dealing with that dontcha know.

Mr Burnham admits that his plans may be interpreted by some as “heavy-handed” but says the new standards drive is “utterly crucial”. Mr Burnham also believes that the inauguration of Barack Obama, the President-Elect, presents an opportunity to implement the major changes necessary for the web.

See what I mean? DELUSIONAL.

These plans are utterly crucial to him maintaining some sort of relevance and nothing more. They will not work, will not be adopted, and are further eroding the paint layer of usefulness from his unctuous body.

“The change of administration is a big moment. We have got a real opportunity to make common cause,” he says. “The more we seek international solutions to this stuff – the UK and the US working together – the more that an international norm will set an industry norm.”

It will not happen. There are too many computer literate people, too many countries with written constitutions to allow this to happen, and finally the internet itself will not allow it to come to pass, for technical reasons.

The Culture Secretary is spending the Christmas holidays at his constituency in Lancashire but is planning to take major decisions on the future of public-service broadcasting in the New Year. Channel Four is facing a £150m shortfall in its finances and is calling for extra Government help. ITV is also growing increasingly alarmed about the financial implications of meeting the public-service commitments of its licenses.

TV is dead.

Mr Burnham says that he is prepared to offer further public assistance to broadcasters other than the BBC. However, he indicates that he does not favour “top-slicing” the licence fee. Instead, he may share the profits of the BBC Worldwide, which sells the rights to programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing to foreign broadcasters.

“I feel it is important to sustain quality content beyond the BBC,” he said. “The real priorities I have got in my mind are regional news, quality children’s content and original British children’s content, current affairs documentaries – that’s important. The thing now is to be absolutely clear on what the public wants to see beyond the BBC.

“Top-slicing the licence fee is an option that is going to have to remain on the table. I have to say it is not the option that I instinctively reach for first. I think there are other avenues to be explored.”

[…]

Telegraph

Blah blah blah Bollocks.

I have to say, I really do enjoy watching these morons make total asses of themselves. Whenever they talk about the internet or computers, they expose their complete lack of understanding, their lack of insight, their incompetence and inability to think.

We can see just what sort of people they really are, how useless, pointless and dumb they are, and most importantly, how weak they are.

Articles like this should make it abundantly clear that the world really has turned in our favor, and that it is only a matter of time before ‘people’ like Andy Burnham are consigned to the scrapheap. We will simply do without them. And their pronouncements, if they are even there to make them at all, will just be ignored or deliberately sabotaged, like the unbelievably cool people at The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea are doing right now by giving parents the option to ‘shield’ their children on ContactPoint.

This is how fragile their control is; I have always said that their control and power is an illusion. It only takes a handful of people to change everything. These councilors are just a small number of people with principles and now they are going to potentially bring down ContactPoiint single handedly!

Now imagine Andy Burnham against the entire internet.

What a joke!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Censorship, Software, Someone Stupid Said, The Facts, The Law, wtf?.