I worked late tonight, and when I got home I locked myself in a room with my computer. So it was that I learnt today’s fantastic news from Michael Jennings, who couldn’t have put it better.

I’m off to crack open a beer in celebration.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, Civil Liberties, News at 10:40 PM EST

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Perry de Havilland comments on the arrest of the leader of the BNP who said that Islam was a, “vicious, wicked faith”.

For one thing, religion is an idea and ideas should be open to criticism, even outright mocking. For another thing, Nick Griffin was arrested for incitement to racial hatred, and Islam is not a race. For yet another thing, how is criticising someone incitement to anything? For one more thing: incitement?! What kind of crime is incitement anyway? Go and jump off a cliff. There. I just incited you to jump off a cliff. Naughty me.

Amazingly, a man has been arrested for making a speech. But the really astonishing thing is the point Perry himself made:

But please note he was not arrested for ‘incitement to violence’ against some racial group, he was arrested for inciting hate. He was arrested for trying to get people to think and feel, not act, a certain way. He was arrested for leading people into thought crimes.

It also helped that he was unpopular — unpopular enough that the BBC went after him — otherwise he might not have been noticed. Churchill once said:

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties at 10:32 PM EST

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Paul Graham writes insightful, entertaining essays. In The Word “Hacker” he begins by de-mystifying the term:

To the popular press, “hacker” means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer.

He goes on to explain why the two meanings are connected: hackers like to tinker with things, and by doing this they learn about them and come up with ways to improve them, or they come up with completely new ideas. This playful experimentation does not lend itself to strict rule following, and so hackers tend to be somewhat disobedient and uninclined to respect authority.

There have been various laws passed lately that make tinkering with things rather dangerous. The Authorities don’t want you to do it any more, and to stop you they’re more than happy to come up with laws like the DMCA. Edward W. Felten keeps a blog on the subject, meanwhile Paul Graham hits on the crux of the matter:

Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint American tradition. Civil liberties make countries rich. If you made a graph of GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you’d notice a definite trend. Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather than just an effect? I think so. I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than those sponsored by the most influential people. Authoritarian countries become corrupt; corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.

So reacting to problems by cracking down on individuals with ever more powerful government is not only cause for concern from the point of view of preserving freedom, but is also a prime example of the law of unintended consequences: the whole thing ends up backfiring on the government as well.

Read the whole article, then read the rest of Paul Graham’s articles, then buy the book.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties at 9:48 PM EST

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Lately some not very nice people have been trespassing all over my private property by posting advertisments in the comments section of this blog. Several hundred a week, in fact, and they were very annoying.

Today I decided to Do Something About It. No, I did not write to my MP.

First, I upgraded to Wordpress 1.2.1. This was long overdue anyway and this new version has a bulk comment editing mode in which you can delete whole swathes of comments with a single click. Or at least you can once you have fixed the bug. This is all well and good, but still quite slow. Then I decided to use my web host’s handily provided phpMyAdmin feature to run SQL queries that deleted vast chunks of comments in a single click. For instance, this command will delete all comments whose author contains the word “poker”:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE LOCATE(’poker’, comment_author) > 0;

That’s 368 comments gone in one go! Overall this evening I deleted well over 2000 spam comments.

The final step was to keep the vermin out forever. There are dozens of solutions to this problem. You can filter out certain words and phrases, block people who are using open http proxies, block people who send several comments in a short space of time, require users to register and display Turing test graphics that prove the commenter is a human. Many of the solutions seem quite fiddly and complicated, although people heartily vouch for their efficacy. The problem with any kind of blacklist is that it has to be kept up to date, and I’m lazy. The problem with most Turing tests is that some users can’t use them.

Then I found the ultimate Turing test. Its simplicity is beautiful. Its genius is that because each blog can ask a different question, the spammers will never be able to write software to automatically answer such questions.

My question is rather dull, though. Suggestions for more interesting questions with obvious answers are welcome!

Posted by Rob Fisher as General at 2:31 AM EST

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