Cognitive Conga: a blog

Because some personal and professional web projects I’m working on at the moment are using Wordpress as a CMS – or even as a pseudo web framework – it’s becoming prudent for me to learn the structure of its guts.

My opinion about WordPress has long been that it’s an excellent blogging engine, but that this acts against its suitability as a general purpose CMS, and even further against its usability as a general purpose web framework. Even though the wordpress.org community is working to improve the platform’s workability in the latter two roles, WordPress still has many blog-centric assumptions built in. These assumptions are a hindrance to developers like myself, who would prefer to use a more content-agnostic framework (e.g. Django or Symfony) unless we’re creating a site that is first and foremost a blog. Indeed, using WordPress to build a web app that calls for a framework would be like using a nice racing bike for an off-road adventure: an uncomfortable and costly experience.

But, as I’ve said, I need to use it for a few projects: projects that aren’t entirely under my control. And since I want to reduce the number of frameworks/CMSs/etc I’m trying to keep up to speed with, I’m thinking of migrating my own website (which remains, apart from this blog, very much an offline work in progress) onto WordPress, to force myself to learn to love it… or at least, to fight from the belly of the beast. So here I go, fitting chunky tyres, suspension, and a new frame, handlebars, saddle, brakes and gears to my racing bike, like a crazy person…

Yesterday, I encountered the first of the many bugs caused by WP’s blog-centric development I anticipate encountering while I undergo this process. It’s a problem with home.php, which the Wordpress docs say in one place is for the site’s homepage, but say in other places is for the blog index (i.e. a list of the latest blog posts). Given the name of the file, I think it ought to be for the former, but in practice it acts as the latter, which in my opinion is a bug.

I posted to the WordPress forum about it, but received no replies, so today I decided to ask for feedback on #wordpress. While I was waiting for a reply on #wordpress, I also searched the WordPress bug reports to see if it had been reported as a bug, and found that it had, although the reporter’s proposed solution is not quite the one I’d have preferred. It’s a start, but it looks like if I’m going to get my way, I’ll have to get more involved, and in any case, the fix won’t be made to WordPress until at least the next point release.

So, I’m in the belly of the beast, and I’m fighting.

For posterity, and for credit to #wordpress user indranil especially, here’s a log of the IRC chat I had on #wordpress (I’ve deleted posts irrelevant to my issue):

[14:07] *** now talking in #wordpress
[14:09] <sampablokuper> Hi folks, I posted a message to the forum yesterday about home.php functionality, but it was to a thread marked as "solved", so I don't think anyone's really been very interested in following it up. I'd be grateful for opinions. Here's the thread: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/194606
[14:57] <indranil> sampablokuper: the thing is, you're overriding what's called "home", hence home.php is not required anymore.
[14:57] <indranil> it's not a bug
[15:01] <sampablokuper> indranil, can you explain that in a bit more detail please? How is it being overridden?
[15:02] <indranil> sampablokuper: say you have the default WP structure
[15:02] <indranil> "home" is the blog index
[15:02] <indranil> which uses the home.php as it's own template.
[15:02] <indranil> think of home.php as the blog index's template
[15:02] <indranil> not WP's
[15:02] <indranil> now, when you set "home" to a page
[15:02] <indranil> the page uses page-something.php or it's own template to template itself
[15:03] <indranil> the blog index as the home doesn't surface anymore...
[15:06] <sampablokuper> indranil, you say, '"home" is the blog index'. To me, that's a bug. Home should be the home (root) page of the WP site, regardless of whether that page displays a list of blog posts or static content or whatever. In other words, if my WP site is hosted at www.mydomain.com, the home page is what a user sees when she visits www.mydomain.com . This is the standard meaning of "home page", is it not?
[15:07] <indranil> yes, but when you change the behaviour to use a page, you also change the "home" pointer, and for compatibility or something, home.php means the specific blog index..
[15:11] <sampablokuper> indranil, 'and for compatibility or something'... that's the bug: there's actually no need for it to behave this way. An alternative, and better, behaviour would be for home.php to be called when the site's home (front) page URL is accessed. And indeed, this is how the template hierarchy describes it.
[15:13] <indranil> the template hierarchy describes it when the blog index is the front page. that the blog index is still WP's first love as home is possibly a bug
[15:16] <sampablokuper> indranil, 'the template hierarchy describes it when the blog index is the front page.' I guess it does, but it doesn't make this explicit (AFAICS). It just assumes that home page = blog index, which is an increasingly false assumption now that WP is becoming more widely adopted as a general purpose CMS.
[15:17] <indranil> sampablokuper: yes. that fact that WP can change home page is a fairly new thing, and it'll catch on I'm sure...
[15:19] <RandyWalker> indranil: fairly new? O_o
[15:19] <indranil> RandyWalker: isn't it?
[15:19] <indranil> what was it 2.5?
[15:19] <indranil> that's also new!
[15:19] <RandyWalker> it was before that, IIRC
[15:20] <indranil> hmm
[15:22] <sampablokuper> indranil, RandyWalker, I think it might have been 2.1: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7715
[15:26] <sampablokuper> indranil, I've found a bug report along the lines I was thinking (though it proposes a different solution: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6801
[15:27] <indranil> it's been bumped from 2.5.1 to 2.8.. you can hope it gets tested..
[15:29] <sampablokuper> indranil, yes, I noticed that. I'm using 2.7, but I'm glad a fix is in the pipeline.
[15:30] <indranil> sampablokuper: unfortunately, it's been in the pipeline from 2.6
[15:30] <indranil> hopefully it'll get rectified this time
[15:31] <sampablokuper> indranil, yes, it's sure taking a while to be addressed. I'll see if I can post something helpful to the bug report to add my insights (if they can be called that). Thanks for your help!
[15:31] <indranil> sampablokuper: no problems. yes, you should add that, and maybe even open a forum thread asking for it to be added..
[15:34] <sampablokuper> indranil, yes, I was thinking about linking it to the forum too. I'll certainly mention it in the thread I was posting to, but since that one's marked "resolved" when in reality there's an open bug about this issue, perhaps I ought to open a new thread. I'll give it some thought
[15:34] <indranil> open a new thread definitely...
[15:34] <indranil> [resolved] tags don't get much love from mods
[15:36] <sampablokuper> indranil, RandyWalker, I notice that #wordpress doesn't seem to have published logs. Would you object to my publishing our conversation on the web, either on my own blog or in a forum post? I think it might be helpful background (in addition to the bug report I found, etc) for people to understand the issue.
[15:37] <RandyWalker> we had a conversation?
[15:37] <RandyWalker> go for it
[15:37] <sampablokuper> Random, ty
[15:37] <indranil> RandyWalker is hogging the glory!
[15:37] <sampablokuper> s/Random/RandyWalker/
[15:37] <indranil> RandyWalker: didn't this place have logs?
[15:37] <indranil> long long back!
[15:39] <sampablokuper> indranil, indeed but would you mind if I published a log of our convo above?
[15:39] <sampablokuper> If you'd prefer I didn't, that's ok.
[15:39] <indranil> sampablokuper: not at all! go right ahead!
[15:39] <indranil> lol not at all.. publish at will
[15:39] <sampablokuper> indranil, cool. Thanks again
[15:39] <indranil> sampablokuper: and open a forum thread to get the attention
[15:42] <sampablokuper> OK, I'm off to get on with this. Thanks for the help, folks!
[15:42] Disconnected (2009-01-04 15:42:12)

I am furious with Israel.

The incursion into Gaza - as though the air strikes weren't abhorrent enough and as though the futile incursions of other years somehow represented lessons not worth learning - reminds me of some lyrics Frank wrote a few years back:

Three/four decades bored... Oh me oh my I am almost speechless with the irony.
Whatever happened to the victims of the most monstrous crime in history?
From justifiably angry camp survivors, steeped in Zionism,
to bookshelf copies of Mein Kampf with neatly crossed out anti-semitism.
You're not learning the lessons taught.
Your cycle of history is pathetically short.
You were there, you saw and heard,
and thus destroyed the lessons of Nuremberg.
You'd kiss that shining Lipstadt, fresh from judicial victory.
But I class her academia with Irving, her enemy.
And I won't have that accusing finger turned around and pointed at me.
You compound your racism by painting criticism with the broad brush charge of bigotry.

So think before you open your mouth and don't tell me it didn't happen. These sights and sounds engraved on hearts. We can't doubt the voices of the million dead, but we can't doubt the indictment of these honest men (Gaza, West Bank, Hebron, Jerusalem...). We saw your bloody thumbprints on the gun-stocks in Beirut, and we heard your hateful footsteps at the Temple of the Mount, so come on Sharon, face up. It's too easy to let hate breed hate, but that'll never be a decent excuse.

The events of a few nights ago came about as a result of countless infinitesimal occurrences (as, presumably, all events do) and a few other, more macroscopic, ones that I am consciously aware of and will, briefly, recount.

At the age of 11 or 12, I learnt of the word agnostic and was taught a little of what it meant. This was in an R.E. (religious education) class at my state school, a class, incidentally, that was taught by a conspicuously Christian man, but which gave its pupils an overview of several prominent religions and religious positions. I immediately recognised agnosticism as being the position I felt most sympathetic towards, simply because neither the theistic nor the atheistic arguments I had encountered were entirely convincing to me (though they were, on the whole, thought-provoking).

A couple of days ago, I began reading Agnosticism: contemporary responses to Spencer and Huxley (Pyle, ed., pub. Thoemmes: 1995), in an effort to begin to distinguish more clearly, in my mind, the numerous range of positions that exist between orthodox theism and committed atheism. Andrew Pyle’s introduction has excellent clarity, which drew me in, and the range of primary source extracts – of which the rest of the volume consists – struck me as being apposite and concise.

But this is not a book review. One assertion of Pyle’s struck me particularly: Both [David Hume and Immanuel Kant] … would have vigorously rejected the label of atheist. I was familiar with hearing Hume called an atheist, and although I had never felt entirely comfortable with that labelling, I had not yet, I realised, seriously challenged it. Pyle’s claim prompted me to investigate further, and although Hume appears to have been willing to be considered outside the jurisdiction of the Church – to prevent his being charged with heresy – he was also willing to defend himself, in writing, against accusations of atheism. He was, if not agnostic (for that word was not yet coined), then sceptical or irreligious – but almost certainly not what I would call a committed atheist.

Some months ago, I saw a few minutes of an episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks which featured a comedienne who I hadn’t heard of previously, Josie Long. Long warmed the cockles of my wintry heart when she asked Stephen Fry – who was trying to hum a song to her at the time – if he would adopt her. I, too, rather like the idea of having Stephen Fry as an adoptive father. I decided then that I’d very much like to see one of Long’s stand-up shows.

Many months later, I saw Ben Goldacre give a talk in Cambridge. At the end of his talk, he mentioned he would be on the line-up at an event in December. I booked myself a ticket to that event after reflecting that:

• I liked several other people on the bill (yay, Josie Long!)
• seeing any one of those performers would normally cost at least a third as much as the ticket for the December gig
• my time for booking tickets and travelling to shows is limited, so the more performances I get to see in one evening, the better
• there would be lots of performers at the December show.

So there I was, a couple of nights ago, sitting in row Z at the Apollo, applauding as Long took the stage, when she said, almost as her opening line, Now, David Hume, he was an atheist… Oh no, I thought, as my lungs filled, I’ve been waiting to see her perform for ages and now I’m going to heckle her from the back row. I bit my tongue, but it resisted. No, he wasn’t! I bellowed. On stage she paused, perhaps unsure if the audience was suddenly angling for panto. Yes he was, wasn’t he? she asked, Wait, was he agnostic, then?

It’s not easy to have a nuanced dialogue across a packed 3,632 seat auditorium, especially when only one of the people in the dialogue has the microphone and she’s the one the other 3,631 people want to hear. I reflected hastily upon what to reply and settled, simply, for Yes. It was anachronistic, but in the sense that Hume was neither a committed atheist nor traditionally theistic, but following his reason as far as it would take him (to paraphrase Huxley’s positive agnostic principle), it was at least approximately accurate. A few people in the audience groaned, and someone a few rows in front of me hissed to his neighbour, Hume was an atheist, but I was relieved to have set the record straighter. Long didn’t let it spoil her joke, which turned out to be a riff on the story about Samuel Johnson and Adam Smith arguing over Hume’s equanimity in the face of death (for more on which, see, for instance, Leslie Stephen’s Samuel Johnson, chap. IV). In retrospect, my reply should have been, It’s a bit more complicated than that.

Fortunately, thanks to the wonderful Mark Thomas, who was also on the bill, and who is interested in my work (Darwin is my day job), I was able to go to the bar, where I had an opportunity to meet her, after the show. This gave me an opportunity to explain myself and to show her the Pyle book, which I happened to have with me. She was lovely about the whole thing, and now I find myself wondering if I mightn’t have ended up being inadvertently patronising.

You see, I must confess, that Long seemed so youthful to me – the fact that she mentioned she was studying for a maths A-level only added to this confusion – that I assumed she really was much younger than in fact she is. I forgot entirely that she had been to Oxford, and instead it entered my head, completely wrongly, that perhaps she had had only a secondary school – rather than a university – education. In mitigation, I can only plead that I was at least a little bit star-struck.

More humbling for me still is the fact that after all this, when we ended up sharing a late cab back to North London (together with the double bassist from the orchestra, whose instrument protruded nearly the length of the vehicle), she subsidised my fare rather than have me pay by card.

So, Josie, for that, and for being such a terrific sport, I owe you. I must confess, though, that the cynic in me is starting to wonder whether, if it provides financial compensation, I couldn’t become a career heckler in scholarly comedy circles. But wait, that’s pretty much what being an academic is, isn’t it?

Technically, it is midwinter. Therefore, at this latitude, one could expect it to be rather cold this morning, but it is not. It is so mild, in fact, that when I strode into the garden* just now to hiss at a fox that was yowling by the cat flap (I have a fear that a fox will eat our cats), I did not need to put on any clothes.

The fox fled, but whether from my growls and hisses, or from the pale blankness of my naked white flesh in the dim glow of London’s ambient illumination, I will never know.

*When I am in London, I sleep on the sofa bed in the living room, which has a door on to the garden and thin windows through which the local animal life is clearly audible.

I was talking to Candy about what, aside from the contents, can make a book attractive to me. An arresting cover, a spine that doesn’t crack… and it shouldn’t be too heavy, I said.

Isn’t that exactly how you like your women? she quipped.

But I Googled everything! Lena cried.

Google doesn’t know everything, though, said Tom. It doesn’t know what you had for breakfast this morning, for instance.

If we had a holobot, it would! retorted Lena. It could watch me eat, semrec me doing it, upload that to Google and then everyone in my filter would be able to find out.

What Lena said was true. If they had a holobot in their dorm – or, better still, a holobot each, like the Ivy League students got – Lena would have been able to semantically record her breakfast for the world to see. And if she didn’t want the whole world knowing, she could restrict the information to people she chose to select in her privacy filter.

But holobots weren’t legal in the UK yet, and were still only experimental technology in the US. Lena’s experience of them had come in her early teens, as her parents were developers on the project and had brought four holobots home, one for each member of the household. So even Lena’s baby brother had one: a hovering, bright white orb which followed him everywhere, octoscopically semreccing his every breath and all that he saw.

Tom tried a different tack.

Look, he said, Your relgrade was a B, right? So why complain? You’ve passed the module, and you’ve aced pretty much everything else this year, so as long as you don’t stiff in the exams next month, you’re almost sure to get a distinction. What’s more, you’ve learned something valuable for next time.

I know, said Lena, But I thought I’d done everything I needed to. I looked everything up, I interpread all the primary and secondary sources…

Not all the primary sources, interrupted Tom.

Jeez, why d’you have to rub it in? Anyway, I thought I had interpread them all. And than Alicia beats me to the punch and gets the top relgrade, by going to the library! Ugh! That’s, like… words failed her temporarily. … like, it shouldn’t be needed any more. I should be able to do the work no matter where I’m located, and still get an A. It’s Cooper’s first principle of information technology: ‘the physical location of data should be transparent to the end-user’. But it wasn’t. Cambridge’s IT systems suck.

They may not be perfect, thought Tom, but she’s passing the buck.

We’re not in Cooper’s future yet, he said. He was a visionary, but there are other principles working against his. The privacy laws here are important to a lot of people, and the filters haven’t been evaluated fully yet. Remember, a couple of decades ago, there was a glut of problems with the first ID cards, and people in the UK aren’t so trusting any more.

If the filters pass the tests then maybe we’ll get holobots in Cambridge, but until then, Cooper’s fourth principle won’t be fulfilled here, and you’ve just got to accept it. A bit like the hundreds of generations of scholars who’ve studied here before you, he added.

Lena was scowling at him, but he pressed on.

Anyway, I think it’s great Alicia found the new manuscript. That’s valuable for everyone, because now it will be semrecced, and people all over the world will be able to use it. So she’s done a service for the community, not just for herself. Besides, everyone knows she’s a luddite, so you should hardly be surprised she wanted to visit the archive in person. She got enough stick for that side of her personality in the HC class, so maybe it’s only fair she gets one up on the rest of us this time. And most of us didn’t even interpread as many of the recommended sources as you did. In fact, besides you and Alicia, I don’t thing anyone got a relgrade higher than a C.

Damn it, Lena swore, It’s just not the world my parents prepared me for – at least, not yet. I don’t want to accept that, but maybe I have to.

The primary sources module Tom, Lena and Alicia had been attending was a compulsory part of the History and Philosophy of Science degree they were studying for. Other modules, especially the humanities computing module, tended to be more suited to the modern temperament, which viewed information as being necessarily comprehensible to computers, and assumed that everything from the past that was important had already been digitised, transcribed and semantically interpreted: semrecced. The students were used to comparing philosophical interpretations much as accountants compare balance sheets: an excess of anti-realism here, an obvious case of whiggism there. The tools they used to ‘interpread’ their sources drew out linguistic subtleties that were too painstaking for the previous centuries’ scholars to process in toto.

But Alicia harkened to a different age. She used paper whenever she could, and practically had a fetish for pens and ink. Unlike the rest of the class, when she had seen the assignment for the primary sources module, instead of using the semrecced manuscripts online, she made her way to manuscripts reading room at the university library. Like all the reading rooms it was small and on the ground floor near the library entrance, the vaulted reading rooms of old having been given over to storage and semrec stations in the previous decade. But it was secure, climate controlled, and had a helpful caretaker staff who were surprised and happy to see an undergraduate coming in.

Alicia requested the box containing the manuscripts whose classmarks were on the module’s reading list. She’d read somewhere, once, that this was acceptable practice if you didn’t know precisely which sheets you needed. So she bluffed, and the staff were happy to oblige.

It was only while she was fingering a corner of the slim box, made of acid-free cardboard, that she noticed something sticking out gently from within its folded corner-leaves. A sliver of paper. She eased it out delicately, her back to the staff desk, and tried not to shriek with delight.

There was no number on it! That meant it hadn’t been catalogued. And if it hadn’t been catalogued, it probably hadn’t been semrecced during the mass-semreccing the library had undertaken at the end of the national digital switch-over.

The hand-writing was hard to make out, but she mimicked the letters with her fingertip on the desk, and gradually they became comprehensible to her. Quietly, ecstatically, she picked up her silver pencil and began to resume her essay.

There was a minor furore afterwards. A decade before, the library staff had supposedly semrecced the entire collection, and now questions were being asked at the university’s senate house about the cost of having all the archive boxes examined for missed sheets. What’s more, with the aid of her find, Alicia had been able to show that some of the secondary sources were wrong. There was a silver lining, though: Prof Schuman, who ran the primary sources course, had given her an A and, out of sight of the rest of the class, a bottle of vintage port and a box of chocolates.

His eccentric relative grading system came into its own in odd situations like these. A student who had submitted essays at the highest expected quality received a B, and everyone else was likewise downgraded by one letter; Alicia got an A, and Prof Schuman gained the cachet of having a student who had usurped some of the accepted knowledge of the discipline.

The Ivy League universities might have holobots, Prof Schuman had thought as he finished marking the essays, but a holobot wouldn’t have been able to spot that crucial manuscript sheet. Alicia had assured him in the email to which her essay had been attached that it was only the subtle change in texture that had given away the hidden manuscript’s position. Unless it had been instructed to spread them, even a holobot – with all its hi-res holographic cameras - wouldn’t have distinguished the infinitesimal protrusion of the manuscript from the edges of the cardboard leaves either side of it.

Perhaps, he thought to himself, the Americans would begin adding feelers and sniffers, and maybe even tongues, to the next generation of holobots. Why not? The aim was to port-forward as many senses as possible. That’s the future, he mused to himself, But in the present, we still can’t even port-forward a library.

A couple of days ago, I blogged about the fact that my internet connection was being censored. A spokeswoman of the Internet Watch Foundation, which was, along with my ISP, responsible for the censorship, claimed that on the 9 December, it would update its official statement. That date has been and gone, so what of the update, and what of the censorship?

First, the good news. The update was made, and it says that despite having concluded that the image was possibly illegal, the IWF's board has considered [its] findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list. I can confirm that both the censored article and the controversial image it featured are now visible to me over my internet connection, and I can once again edit Wikipedia without logging in if I wish to. In short, my internet connection to Wikipedia is working again, and I am glad about this not only because I believe the censorship was illegal and unwarranted, nor simply because I pay my ISP for that connection and wasn't being provided with it, but for both these reasons and also because I like some of the Scorpions' music and do occasionally look up their discography on Wikipedia to learn about the tracks that I'm listening to.

Unfortunately, other parts of the IWF's statement still leave huge room for concern, in particular the phrase, Any further reported instances of this image which are hosted in the UK will be assessed in line with IWF procedures. Given that:

1. the IWF has already concluded that the image is possibly illegal, and
2. the IWF blacklists all content it concludes to be possibly illegal (except the Wikipedia page and image, as noted above), and
3. my ISP and many others block access to content blacklisted by the IWF, under a well-meaning but ultimately inadequate government initiative that appears to have little or no provision (that I can find) for addressing the IWF's ability to abuse its all-powerful blacklist,

this amounts to the IWF saying, If you put that image online in the UK, you will be censored.

So, the image is legal to have on display in shops and at home (e.g. in your record collection), but you cannot use it on your online record shop, or your music blog, or indeed on the web generally, if you are hosting it in the UK, without risking censorship (and, as the Wikipedia incident demonstrated, probably cack-handed censorship that will destroy much of the rest of your site's functionality and, if it is an e-tailing site, maybe even ruin your business). And this, even though no UK court has decreed that the image cannot be hosted or transmitted online within the UK.

That is oppressive, and a deep infringment of the freedom of the press and of citizens. It imposes a guilty until proven innocent burden on people who have not been - and may well never be - charged with any crime.

§

One effect of this intimidatory behaviour by the IWF is that Amazon no longer displays the album cover artwork in question, although it had previously hosted it without undue consequence. I noticed this yesterday, when I checked to see if the album was still on sale through Amazon, and found that Amazon.co.uk pages which had previously shown the image showed a dishonest No image available placeholder instead. I hope this does not mark the beginning of a return within our society to the state of which George Orwell said, The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

However, although a Google image search for the album still shows that a great many sites host the image, I could not, as of yesterday, spot among those results, a single one from a .co.uk domain. It is implausible that all sites hosting the image in the UK could have voluntarily removed it from their servers at such short notice (and indeed, they haven't), which makes me think that more sites may have been censored in the UK for hosting this image than Wikipedia alone; or else Google's image search is being censored in some way, or both. This is sinister enough.

§

Elsewhere on the web, I've just noticed that Ethan Zuckerman has written about the issue as eloquently as ever (Seth Finkelstein's comment on Zuckerman's post is especially enlightening), and that The Register also has some good coverage, with a devil's advocate opinion piece arguing that the block was justified and a more standard article discussing the issue and its wider implications.

The devil's advocate piece contained several factual errors, leaving the credibility of a view favouring the block severely undermined - hardly surprising, in my view. The other article in much better, and I have, so far, only one quibble with it. That quibble is this: the article states, It [the IWF] does not determine the legality of sites, which is true; but the IWF's director of communications suggested in my interview with her that the IWF could and did determine the content it blacklisted on Wikipedia to be illegal (The IWF found the image to be illegal. … [We] have absolutely no doubt that we made the right decision.). I would have been happier if the Register piece had mentioned this, and pointed out that the IWF itself seems not to be consistent in communicating what its limits are.

As The Register says of the IWF,

Gone is its record for 100 per cent undisputed blocking. Gone, too, is its reputation for being the undisputed good guy.

And you know what? I think that in some ways, this sums up the greatest pity: that the IWF, which was founded with such laudable intentions, should have been set up in a way that allows it to abuse its power, that it did so, and that it is claiming the right to do so in the future. That's damaging for freedom, and it's damaging for the IWF's credibility, which in turn is damaging for attempts to stem the transmission and publicaton of images of real child abuse online.

Let's hope the needed reforms emerge. But if they don't, how should we prompt them to? Should we report to the IWF the fact that Nirvana's Nevermind album, which also features a naked child on the cover (but with genitals exposed OMG genitals it must be a case of abuse! unlike the child on the Scorpions cover) is widely available in UK web shops and is also visible on Wikipedia? I used to enjoy running under the garden sprinkler with no clothes on when I was little, and my parents took a couple of photos because they thought that a child enraptured by the pleasure of basking in the warmth of the sun and trying to touch the rainbows its light produced as it passed through the droplets was a beautiful, free, joyous sight to behold. Should I, for this, take my parents to a police station and claim they are pornographers who abused me? In short, can we the public, or Wikimedia UK, or Liberty, or Reporters Without Borders, or the EFF, or indeed any group active in the UK with an interest in freedom of information make a test case that will likely result in a ruling binding on bodies like the IWF and the ISPs who implement its blacklist, whose over-zealous approach to protecting the rights of children to grow up free of abuse now exceeds the prevention of that abuse and has extended into a violation of other basic human rights?

An advocate of free software, Ken Starks, yesterday posted on his blog a communication he had received from a teacher at a middle school that is part of the Austin Independent Schools District. In the communication, the teacher wrote, No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful … the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods.

Not only is this factually inaccurate, it is offensive to an entire community: the free software community, which echoes some if not all of Starks’s claims about the benefits of free software. That community spans a broad spectrum of people including consumers, corporate employees, hobbyists, activists, entrepreneurs. Are all those people, when they say, With free software, you can do things that you can’t do with proprietary software, lying or making gross over-statements? No, they are not, and there is an extensive body of legal opinion and factual evidence to confirm this.

There is some discussion of the incident over on the debian-user mailing list.

Dear David,  

2008/11/25 David Plouffe, BarackObama.com <info@barackobama.com>

Today and yesterday, President-elect Barack Obama announced key members of an economic team tasked with creating jobs, stabilizing the economy, and getting our country back on track.

I’m concerned that Barack’s economic team may be flawed. In particular, I feel that it may be setting out to address the current economic crisis with approaches that worked in the 1990s but are not entirely appropriate now.

I hope you will be able to feed back to Obama that, as this article in the Guardian indicates, association with Robert Rubin’s protégés may be politically risky at a time when Citigroup’s reputation is deteriorating sharply. I hope, also, that Obama will focus on the medium to long term. The short-termist approach of the Bush government, and of Republican policies in general, must go. In particular, the national debt must be addressed, as reducing this will improve the economic outlook regardless of other factors.

Yours sincerely,

Sam Kuper
US Citizen and Obama for America supporter.