jonathan.rawle.org

Today, many internet service providers in the UK have censored a page on Wikipedia due to an image used on the page. The image was blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an “independent, self-regulatory body” that aims “to minimise the availability of… child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK.” ISPs quite voluntarily use a list provided by the IWF to decide which pages to block. The IWF are free to decide that any page they choose is unsuitable, and to make it unavailable to internet users across the UK. On this occasion, they claim to have checked with the police, and been advised that the image in question is “potentially illegal”.

So what is the image in question? It’s actually the cover of an album, Virgin Killer, which was released by a German rock band called the Scorpions in 1976, which features a photograph of a naked girl. I’d never heard of the band or the album, and never seen the cover art in question, and neither would the majority of people have done. But now, thanks to the IWF’s intervention, everyone in the UK, and indeed around the world, will know of them, and many will no doubt have looked up the album cover to see what all the fuss is about.

There are many technical issues with the way the page has been blocked. My ISP, Be Unlimited, is one of those to have blocked the page. If I try to visit it, I see a message saying, “Not Found. The requested URL en.wikipedia.org was not found on this server.” The message is completely incorrect. In many less democratic countries that have wide-ranging censorship, attempting to view a blocked page displays a message to say that it’s blocked. If we must have pages censored, we should be told so, not have it disguised as a server error. Also, the way the block has been implemented means that all British users of Wikipedia are now channelled through a small number of proxy servers, sharing IP addresses. That means it is almost no longer possible to edit Wikipedia without an account (and impossible to create an account), and any anonymous users who do manage to vandalise Wikipedia can not be traced. I’m very concerned about the use of proxies, which can only have an impact on the performance of Wikipedia, which isn’t always the fastest site anyway. And as the IWF decides more and more sites have a single “potentially illegal” page, all those sites’ traffic will also go through the same proxies. The internet will get slower and slower, and the government will have all the traffic going through a central point where it can be monitored more easily for insertion into their big database.

The funny thing is, the content has been blocked in rather incompetent and ineffective way. They have blocked the page containing the image, not the image itself, so entering the URL of the image still allows it to be viewed, but at the same time, the entirely inoffensive text about the album is inaccessible. Then there is the fact that it’s possible to view the page using the HTTPS version of the English Wikipedia. Secure web pages are much harder to block or monitor. Yet even more ridiculous is that the same album cover is visible to all British internet users on the Georgian, Finnish and Ukranian language versions of Wikipedia. (Note that I haven’t linked the articles in question above, rather the main pages of the Wikis. It’s simple enough to use the search, but please check the laws in your country first.) Not to mention, the album is still on sale in the UK, and has been for more than 30 years, and is available from Amazon. As Wikipedia spokesman David Gerard says:

When we asked the Internet Watch Foundation why they blocked Wikipedia and not Amazon, apparently the decision was “pragmatic”, which we think means that Amazon had money and would sue them, whereas we’re an educational charity.

Something has to be done about the paranoia surrounding the issue of child abuse. Efforts should be directed towards catching the evil people who genuinely are responsible for abusing children or distributing masses of obscene material. Those people no doubt share knowledge to get around any obstacles that are in their way. They certainly aren’t going to be visiting Wikipedia to see the cover of a record from the 70s. I don’t believe blocking pages according to the IWF’s list serves any useful purpose. People who are determined to see illegal material will find ways of doing so. Anyone else is very unlikely to encounter such material unless they deliberately look for it. When a questionable image is hosted in a civilised, western country such as the US, surely the correct course of action should be to liaise with the authorities in that country to have the material taken down – if our laws prove to be tighter than the other country, we should be asking ourselves why.

Allowing an unaccountable organisation to add whatever pages they like to a blacklist is not a very happy position. Who knows what other criteria may be added in the future? Websites criticising the government maybe. Or perhaps they will block pages that explain how to circument digital rights management on Hollywood films. Internet censorship is a road we should not go down, and today’s development is already a step too far in that direction.

News sources everywhere are proclaiming that Barack Obama has been elected the first black president of the United States. Yet as Mr Obama is of mixed African-European heritage, one can state just as validly that he is the 44th white president.

A similar thing is true for Lewis Hamilton, said to be the first black Formula One driver, let alone champion. I’m clearly not the only person to consider this, as a letter to a national newspaper this week shows.

Of course, I don’t want to belittle either achievement. It’s welcome that someone of any ethnic minority group can break through the ultimate glass ceiling to take up one of the most powerful offices in the world, or take the world championship crown in a wealthy and glamorous sport.

Lewis Hamilton deserves much praise for the sentiments he expressed to the BBC:

But he added that, like Obama, he did not see himself as a role model exclusively for minorities.

“I don’t sit here and say I want to be an inspiration for one generation or race,” he said.

“The great thing is it opens up doors for all groups – anyone can get into it. I want to be as positive a role model as possible because I don’t believe there are that many out there.”

Hopefully in the not too distant future, no sport or other field of excellence will be considered so exclusive. When anyone receives a distinction, they will be praised for their achievement and not for belonging to a particular ethnic group.

And hopefully, the day will come when, whatever the background of the American president, he or she will be congratulated simply for winning the election on their merits as an individual (or due to having the most money – it is the USA after all!)

So let’s say well done Barack Obama for becoming nothing more or less than the 44th President of the United States of America.

The number of complaints made about the BBC radio show in which Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made a prank call to actor Andrew Sachs currently stands at 27,000. However, the number of people who complained following the actual broadcast stood at just two. The remainder have seemingly only complained following the media coverage in the subsequent days. It’s likely that many of the complainants didn’t actually hear the show in question, or if they did, they have only been motivated to complain by the recent news stories. Ofcom is investigating the incident, but should they take the huge number of complaints into account? I think they shouldn’t – or at least not with the same weight as more genuine complaints. A broadcast has to be judged in context, and while in this case the nature of the phone call made is clearly disgraceful and unacceptable, to allow people to complain about broadcasts they haven’t actually seen or heard would set an unwelcome precedent.

Imagine if a documentary series that usually draws a small audience showed a programme about a religion which some followers objected to. With the power of the internet, they could soon persuade plenty of others to send in complaints. Also, outside of broadcasting, suppose for example that I object to neighbours being allowed to disturb each other with excessive noise. If I read about such a case in the newspaper, can I then complain to the Environmental Health department about it, despite living in a different town and never having experienced the disturbance for myself? As much as I might hate noise, even if I heard a recording on the radio, I wouldn’t know what it sounded like above the ambient noise, and I wouldn’t know any background to the case. Clearly people should only complain about things they’ve experienced first-hand.

What had probably driven such a large number of people to complain is the sudden realisation of the sort of content that it being paid for by the Licence Fee. So why didn’t any of the original listeners to the show complain? It seems the mainly young audience don’t see anything wrong with swearing and making lewd remarks on the phone to an elderly man, or with publicising sordid details of a woman’s private life. And why don’t they see anything wrong? Because they are continually exposed to this sort of behaviour every day on TV and radio.

When Andrew Sachs appeared in Fawlty Towers in the 70s, John Cleese played Basil Fawlty, a hotel manager who was rude and unpleasant to guests, for its comic value. However, not only was it fiction, the character of Basil Fawlty was a good model of how not to behave, and not to be a good hotel manager, which was what made it so funny. Today, however, so-called comedians see the need to be foul-mouthed and rude to real people, but they are not laughed at as fools because they are behaving improperly, but rather their victims are laughed at. The likes of Ross and Brand are considered role models by young people, who will go on to copy them when they are out in the street. No wonder our society is becoming what it is.

The BBC needs to stop paying what is effectively public money to the likes of Brand (£200,000) and Ross (£6 million). Brand has already resigned. I’ve never seen what’s so great about Jonathan Ross: he’s an untalented and irritating presenter at the best of times, who seemingly got where he is simply through having a speech impediment, so this latest incident would be a good excuse to get rid of him. A lot of the blame must also fall on the editor who decided to broadcast what was a pre-recorded show. And if Ofcom does fine the BBC, how about subtracting the fine from next year’s Licence Fee, rather than it going to the treasury? The fact that each household would only receive a rebate of a few pence just illustrates how pointless this sort of fine is when any big organisation is involved, but at least it would eliminate the often-raised complaint that Licence Fee payers were effectively paying the fine.

Tonight the clocks go back in the UK as British Summer Time ends. At this time every year, the media is full of stories about why we should stay on BST in the winter (either with or without double summer time in the summer). Usual reasons given are to save energy, and to reduce the number of accidents. This year, however, the claim is that keeping the clocks an hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time could create jobs. To quote from the reports:

The Policy Studies Institute report said £3 billion could be generated each year in the [tourism and leisure] sectors, while fuel consumption in factories would be cut if there was an extra hour of daylight in the winter months.

The flaw in that statement is that there wouldn’t be “an extra hour of daylight”. The only way to increase the number of hours of daylight in the winter is to move to a lower lattitude. Changing the clocks simply moves hours of daylight from one part of the day to another.

Most people have to go to work every weekday morning, and return home in the evening. Over the last couple of weeks, it has already been dark in the morning when people rise to go to work. If the clocks stayed on BST throughout the winter, the sun wouldn’t rise until after 9am in London in the middle of winter. Not only would they have to get up in the dark, most people would arrive at work in the dark too. That could surely increase the number of people suffering from seasonal affective disorder, and it certainly wouldn’t be very good for all those people for whom mornings are already not the most productive part of the day. It could be claimed that the lost productivity due to darker mornings would cost billions.

In the middle of winter, the sun would set in London before 5pm BST anyway. So how are people meant to make use of the evening for additional leisure time in the daylight? Unless they left work early, they wouldn’t be able to. If they are going to work different hours anyway, then the time zone is irrelevant. The tourism industry should realise that keeping the clocks on summer time won’t turn the winter into summer. The reason people don’t want to go out in the winter is because it’s cold and the weather’s bad. As with increasing the number of hours daylight, the solution to this is also to move further south.

The reason that moving the clocks forward in the summer enables daylight saving is because there are plenty of hours’ daylight in the summer to make use of. In the winter, there are only a limited number of hours, and those should be distributed to make the life of the ordinary, working person as comfortable as possible. Darker mornings would hit those in the north of Britain even harder – and that means people in Berwick, Cumbria and even Manchester, not just people in Scotland. Allowing Scotland to have a different time zone will not help people in those other places. The UK may have moved forward an hour during the Second World War, but that can be considered part of the discomfort of living in wartime conditions. We shouldn’t subject the population to that during peacetime!

Greenwich Mean Time represents the correct time zone for our longitude. As they are on European time, France and Spain are in the wrong time zone, yet this doesn’t have the adverse effect on them that it would on the UK: by the time you reach mid-France, there is an extra hour of daylight in mid-winter.

So next week, enjoy the lighter mornings, as the sun shines on the autumn leaves or even the sparkling, frosty cobwebs as you are on your way to work. Who cares if it’s dark when you leave in the evening? It’s too cold to stay outside after work anyway, so look forward to returning to a warm and cosy home with the curtains closed.

Earlier this month, it was announced that the TV game show, Going for Gold, is to be brought back to TV screens by Channel Five. The first programme is tomorrow. Instead of Henry Kelly, it will be presented by another former Classic FM presenter, John Suchet. There will be some notable changes to the show, too. Going for Gold was most notable for having contestants from all over Europe, which made it stand out from other TV quizzes. However, the new series will no longer be an international competition.

Reports also say that contestants will compete daily for a cash prize, with the winner returning the following day to defend his or her title. Part of the genius of the original series was the way the contestants – even ones who didn’t win – returned in subsequent programmes to have several attempts at winning, which also meant that viewers got to know the contestants and could follow their favourites from day to day.

The format may have been tweaked from year to year, but it worked something like this. A series ran for 19 weeks. A week would start with seven new contestants, and there would be an initial qualifying round to choose four contestants to play in that day’s programme. The winner of the programme went through to a final on the Friday, while the losers reappeared the following day. On the Thursday, there would be four remaining contestants so they all had a chance to play without there being a qualifying round. On Friday, the four winners then competed against each other, and the winner went through to the semi-finals. The following week started again with seven new people. (I’m using the terms Monday to Friday quite loosely, as often the schedule slipped so it was not aligned with real weeks. Instead of saying “tomorrow” or “next week”, Henry Kelly always said, “When next we play Going for Gold” for just this reason.) After eight weeks, it was the first semi-final week. Starting with eight contestants, this had no weekly final, and was simply five standard programmes, with the winner of each going through to the finals, and the losers returning the following day, with five chances to go through in total. The following week, the entire process was repeated, taking another nine weeks. The finals week followed the format of a standard week, but starting with 10 contestants instead of the usual seven. The Friday was a grand final featuring the winners of the four programmes that week, with the overall winner taking the holiday prize.

The minimum number of programmes on which a particular contestant could appear was two (if they won the first programme of the week then lost the weekly final) and the theoretical maximum was 15 appearances (work that one out for yourselves!) It was a very clever format, because once viewers were familiar with the contestants, it increased the tension throughout the week as the viewers waited to see if or when the ones they were following would win.

While Channel Five deserve some credit for bringing back a decent quiz that has at least some intelligent content, it seems they have lost the two features that stood Going for Gold apart from other similar programmes. So I’m afraid that, instead of a gold, I can only award them a bronze.

• Going for Gold at UKGameshows