French internet cops issue terrorist takedown for… Grateful Dead recordings? French internet cops have demanded that the Internet Archive remove more than 550 instances of "terrorist propaganda" from its site. There's only one problem: the illegal and offensive content they have identified includes live recordings of the Grateful Dead, archives of TV news shows and pages from Project Gutenberg – which …
Incidentally I did once build a device that projected a beam of electromagnetic energy.
I recently bought a device that projected a beam of electromagnetic energy for my son's fourth birthday and should have a video of it somewhere. For those of you who are worried, the device projects a quickly dispersing beam of electromagnetic energy in the range between about 380 and 780 nm. He was super happy to have his own flash light.
For my friend's birthday I used several manufactured devices that produced a broad spectrum of EM waves in all directions, deriving their energy from an uncontained exothermic reaction, just to liven the place up a bit.
Fortunately they were able to blow the candles out with out any problems.
Evidently - but if the side effects is that state agencies can't no longer hire morons, they will run out of applicants.
What is needed is also an auditing of takedown requests to understand if someone is abusing of his or her power, or maybe is simply so lazy to avoid to vet what is being requested, and just relies on the fact that he or she has some form of authority thereby is someone else's issue to sort it out, at their own risk.
However, what is needed is better collaboration from both sides - content providers should avoid to publish anything just because it brings in money, and law enforcement agencies will have smaller haystacks to probe for needles. In both cases you need people who have a decent education to understand what a needle is.
How can you govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?
Well, I don't know how many but I believe that the British Isles produce a larger variety of cheese than France. As of late this just confirms what de Gaulle said though.
Edit: the British Cheese Board states over 700 British named cheeses. There you go, "mange ça!"
700 British named cheeses? Nah, they're just talking about the dialects. They're all just variations of Cheddar, or Cheddah, or Chetda, or Chetdah, etc... They occasionally throw in something completely off like a Red Leicester, but really its just a Red Leicester Chedder i.e. A chedder made in Leicester by a commie.
It's a True Fact, gov, i saw it on dem da Internet...
This same France is the one that wanted to decimalise the clock to show 10 hours in a cycle... and yet cannot come up with a decimal way of speaking numbers above 69... At least English only does the numbers 11-19 weirdly. 99 in French on the other hand.... eight twenties ten nine. No wonder they can't tell their terrorists from their cheshire cats!
99 in French on the other hand.... eight twenties ten nine. No wonder they can't tell their terrorists from their cheshire cats!
99 is EIGHT twenties ten nine? No wonder they have trouble
Now Welsh is so much more sensible: four on fifteen and four twenties
You obviously have never hung out wiv de yoof. Going back to the 70s it was always septante, huitante and nuanante. In France I always make a point of using these alternative versions in shops etc. They always understand me.
Edit: I'm not sure how to transcribe "nuanante" and I've also had a couple of drinks. Work it out for yourself!
> the British Cheese Board states over 700 British named cheeses.
Please kind Sir, please can you direct me to a cheese board where I can have 700 cheeses.
Sod, starters and main course. Sod, even, dessert. Just bring bring me the cheese board and a damn good bottle of red will you.
> Make that a bottle of red port (or even white port), please.
I wouldn't recommend you ask for that in France though, they serve port from the fridge!
If one is expected to take one's service revolver, walk outside and do the decent thing for passing the port to the right, what fate is reserved for those that serve port that cold!
The Dutch are too well mannered to do such a despicable thing.
The Portuguese of course understand port (while I don't recall being offered a cheese board as such while there I have enjoyed some nice cheeses, plus some of my favourite red wines are Portuguese).
No this aberration, as far as I know, is just with the French. Of course not all French people feel this way, the friendly barman from whom I learned of this trait was equally appalled by his countryman's behaviour and promptly poured me a glass of St Joseph to calm my nerves.
uh oh! Another person who is behind the times. There's a big difference between what is "correct" and what is actually spoken. For example, all these lazy folk that say *"gonna" instead of "going to". For counting in French please refer to my post above.
*I hate that!
It's not the French citizens, it is one of the French government's many arms. Although the French electorate might vote the politicians in, what they decide to do after that is far too important/technical/involved to allow the people to have any further say in the matter...
It's not the French citizens, it is one of the French government's many arms.
National character/inclination/mindset has got to have something to do with it.
It's very convenient to wash the mass public clean of all responsibility, but the roots proceed into the population at large, even if it's just allowing their government and it's many arms to behave that way.
The British public are no less responsible for the Brexit shambles.
They asked the question. We gave them the answer. At that point we were no longer part of the process. So the subsequent complete and utter balls-up is entirely down to the government. Pretty much what someone above said about France.
"So the subsequent complete and utter balls-up is entirely down to the government."
FWIW, Parliament is just reflecting the popular vote. Many wanted to stay, and a few more than many wanted to leave, but with their own ideas of what leave means, many of which were discussed before the referendum (eg hard brexit, Norway model, Norway+ model, etc., etc..) With only a 52% majority for leave, not all agreeing on what kind of leave they want, this was always going to be a bit of on issue.
It's Parisians, rather than the French. No matter who sat on the (actual or metaphorical) throne, Paris has always held itself apart from the rest of the country, lurking at the heart of "the island of france" and treating anything outside that department as little more than a source of food and tax revenue. The revolution only replaced the king with a president and committee; the treatment of everything outside Élysée palace, that modern-day Versailles, as something to be ignored unless it can be exploited for the personal gain of its residents and hangers-on, is only the continuation of a tradition that dates back to the earliest kings of France.
I suspect the law enforcement agencies are using bots to identify what they see as terrorist content and no one is manually checking to see what it is actually is before the take down requests are issued.
I foresee the proposed UK law about website that are promoting 'harm' having the same problem. As harm is a very broad term which could cause lots of content that is legitimately allowed to get removed because the internet platforms will just start deleting content without checks rather than risk getting fined.
"I suspect the law enforcement agencies are using bots to identify what they see as terrorist content and no one is manually checking to see what it is actually is before the take down requests are issued."
You're almost certainly right.
The best solution would probably be to ignore them. If they want to enforce the request eventually someone is going to have to take legal action. A bit of common sense would indicate that the material would be reviewed by a human before proceeding. If common sense wasn't applied it would very quickly become publicly embarrassing and if it would they'd be left wallowing in the bots' excrement.
A bit of common sense
Now there's a novel idea. Seems that common sense has been killed off by governments world-wide from national all the way down to the locals. I've always thought that those who run for government office and those in positions above worker bees are somewhere just above amoeba because they have ambitions.
I've lived in France these last twenty years and usually each time I see an example of French govt. stupidity it is usually matched in due course by British govt. stupidity. No sooner do I think 'no-one could do any worse!' than, yep, they match it in spades. However, I think Britain is currently winning the race to the bottom. I'm not sure that even the French political elite really come up to something to match Brexit.
The UK isn't a patch on the French for political instability.
In the last 200(ish) years France has had multiple revolutions, monarchy, dictatorship & 5 iterations of the republic where the method of government has changed significantly, all kicked off by events that make the UK Parliaments handling of Brexit look like a poor TV sitcom.
The device I built was a variant of a spark gap tesla coil but with a hollow breakout point made from copper fishing weights driven from a modified ccfl inverter array with outputs summed through diodes from old disposable cameras. It managed to intermittently drain a 7Ah SLA in seconds drawing over 60A but never found out why. It could also vaporize steel pins when run without the secondary, made from red clock wire on an electric candle former and then coated with Krylon glaze connected.
by coincidence the coil was pointed at the cupboard. Would probably say that the resonance might have been in the low MHz range. I ended up sending the secondary to someone else but unsure if they managed to duplicate the experiment.
If I remember correctly (my French isn't that good any more), the Marseillaise also has a rather terroristic content, should be taken down. And that is just for starters. How about Nathalie by Gilbert Bécaud? And I am pretty sure we can find something in the works of Johny Halliday as well.
For now I will relocate to the offices of some good friends:
Robespierre Headhunters
Avenue de Guillotin 666
Paris
"illustrate very well why this requirement would be harmful to the free sharing of information and freedom of speech that the European Union pledges to safeguard"
Anyone believing that the EU will safeguard free speech or free sharing of information is just deluded. This isnt a particular stab at the EU as monsters but as uncoordinated politicians all trying to have a say and justify their pay. Then it must be applied at the country level by another load of government minions.
Politicians everywhere at any time have had a fear of anything which empowers people (actually the worst offenders might not be the politicians themselves but their staffs)*. They also have a strong belief in magical solutions to their problems. The internet combines both of these. We'll need a few more years before this settles down. In the meantime the best solution to this particular one might be to simply throw back the lists asking for them to be reviewed. The faster the requests keep coming in the better.
I remain convinced, however, that the British courts plus the ECJ will do a better job of protecting my rights than the British courts alone.
*The private car has long been an example of this, certainly since the days of Barbara Castle if not earlier.
Content takedown requests that can be clearly demonstrated to not be "OMFG terrorists AARGH" will count as a mark against the agency reporting. Too many negative marks, not enough positive marks, the agency will be labelled "vexatious" and all subsequent requests will be ignored.
Simple.
I don't know what agenda the various factions of French government have in all this, but it actually doesn't matter too much.
The net effect of this sort of stupidity suits the purposes of authoritarian nutjobs down to the ground.
Folk have only so much time and energy to protest about anything, so by putting up takedown orders (they're not going to be requests for much longer) for silly reasons, they reduce the opposition to takedowns on the stuff they genuinely want to supress.
Incidentally, forget about 'left' and 'right', this strong trend towards authoritarianism is showing its face across the political spectrum, though it's nearly always happy to use those terms to divide and rule. Sometimes this is done with considerable sly cunning, though I'll refrain from giving examples to avoid exactly this trap - they're easy enough to spot for anyone prepared to let go of thinking of themselves as left or right wing.
It would be helpful if all lawmakers were to consider that
a) you will never catch all the edge cases. If you catch all the edge cases, new ones will pop up.
b) laws are implemented / enforced by humans on human behaviour and will therefore be an error-prone interpreatation of what already is messy business. If you REALLY want to weed out any 'bad behaviour' you need to be willing to accept a lot of false positives and unintended inconvenience. And if you think a lot of false positives and unintended inconveniences are undesirable, you need to be willing to accept that some 'bad behaviour' will get through.
This is just as true of internet filtering as it is to the 'war on drugs', catching speeding violations, identifying social security abusers, catching tax dodgers etc etc. For pretty much everything, it's not worth trampling over the rights of millions of law abiding citizens just to marginally increase the chance of catching a couple of bad apples.
The solution to such abuse is simple; SEVERE financial penalties need to be imposed for EVERY spurious copyright or terrorism claim. If anybody files a copyright infringement claim that turns out to be bogus, the penalty should be at least five times the fine for the infringement itself.
I'll bet that the Grateful Dead would like to send the French Government on a trip to 'Dark Star' and be subject to listening to G-D live sets as recorded by the audience 24/7 on the journey.
I wonder if there is some comeback that those affected by this f**kup can get from the French as in loads of mulah?
As mentioned they may well be going after the Bible next. Lots of violence in there.
Ended with the priest (?) running the proceedings being stoned for the same reason...
Correct, at that time there were still Judaistic priests. The active priesthood died out in the diaspora, as it was an heriditary position with strong restrictions on allowable marriages, but their descendents are still walking among us, recognizable by their family name, which is still the old title of the position (Cohen).
I have some audience tapes I made of the good old Grateful Dead in Paris in 1981 (I think - I was a touch out of it then and have a touch of grey now, so memory isn't that great). I'm waiting for the French authorities to pop over on the basis of their amazing powers of deduction etc. Is this seriously down to 'Blues for Allah'? Jesus these people are mad.
The suppression of terrorism and hate crimes using the internet is a serious and praiseworthy project. The recent enforcement effort by IRU against Internet Archive was arbitrary and laughable. It has done real damage to the project to protect us from violence propagated using the internet. They never should have had legitimation by using EU IRU servers for their email. The EU IRU needs to make a statement condemning the French IRU's absurd action against the Internet Archive. This statement should both advocate the suppression of terrorism and hate crimes propagated via the internet and provide concrete methods of vetting such accusations and ensuring reasonable compliance, eg not all requests to remove popular music need compliance within 60 minutes, videos of the recent murders in Chistchurch must be immediately suppressed.
Is there any way to contact the EU IRU? (There's another problem which should be addressed!)
A ridiculous request on content gathered running some scripts and without even double checking the results. Highly popular targets that immediately appear as victims of government bureaucracy. This action is clearly designed to backfire. What's the purpose? Did they want to make a case against the law? Did they want to concentrate the attention on this law? Al lot of European countries already have in place copyright/libel/terrorism laws that are prone to abuse, but actually they aren't needed very often, a system based on tightly controlled search engines and robot driven spam is enough to put in place a censorship system that can match the great China Firewall.
I may be wrong on the possible explanations, but for sure this is not a stupid action done for stupidity.
Crack to a crack whore. You can't give them even a little or it all goes horribly wrong. Here crack whore hold my kilo, be back in a sec; don't do anything stupid now you hear!
Censorship to governments is like this; Yes there may be very good reasons to allow a *little*; but they have proven time and time again that they simply cannot control themselves or be trusted.
Time to just say no to censorship in all its forms.
There is an awful lot of suspicious material, how can they find it all? We must report it to them. I believe Disney has a site and movie dedicated to Alladin. Being middle eastern themed, it must be terrorist related. I know there is alot of youtube videos on making things go boom. There is a group out there calling themselves the mythbusters that has a bunch of them, they seem very experienced at it. Another larger amateur group calling themselves rednecks show how to do this in your own back yard. You don't have to look far to see evidence of terrorist preparations. As they say see something, say something.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
