Techdirt. Stories filed under "visits" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "visits"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:01:45 PDT Sarkozy Seeks To Criminalize 'Habitually Visiting' Websites About Violence Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120322/10541918210/sarkozy-seeks-to-criminalize-habitually-visiting-websites-about-violence.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120322/10541918210/sarkozy-seeks-to-criminalize-habitually-visiting-websites-about-violence.shtml Wizz points us to a speech that French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently gave in response to the death of the suspect in the Toulouse murders after the police shot him as he tried to escape, when they raided his apartment after a 32-hour standoff. As part of the speech, Sarkozy decided to use it as an opportunity to push for more anti-internet legislation, including a plan to criminalize visiting certain websites too often. Here's the video in French, with his comments coming around 2:20.
Translating the key line, he says:
Anyone who habitually visits Internet sites that advocate terrorism or carrying calls for hate or violence will be punished under criminal law.
It appears that there is already a law in France that similarly makes it a criminal offense to "habitually" visit child porn sites, and this is a push to expand that same law to terrorism, hate and violence sites (original French). Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this. Obviously, accessing child porn is a strict liability kind of thing, where it's clearly illegal. Merely reading about terrorism, hate or violence is not.

Also, there's a question of how do you know if someone "habitually" visits such sites, raising fears that Sarkozy wants to implement a pretty broad deep packet inspection spying system to make this work. This has, quite reasonably, raised significant concerns among human rights/free speech activists (original French) about just what Sarkozy is actually planning. Others point out that such a law almost certainly wouldn't pass French constitutional scrutiny.

Either way, just the idea is quite a dangerous leap. Criminalizing the visiting of websites because they contain information? If the content itself is illegal, go after those who create the website. Going after people for reading it reaches towards the level of establishing thought police. It also seems to greatly overestimate (as many politicians do) the power of a simple website to convince people of certain things. We see the same thing in the US with Senator Lieberman's grandstanding against terrorist content, which he wants banned and blocked in the US as well. It seems to assume that people are all complete suckers who, as soon as they read a terrorist pitch, automatically become terrorists. In reality, all they're really doing is legitimizing much of this ridiculous content, by suggesting that it really is "dangerous" and somehow must be criminalized.

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]]> thought-police http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120322/10541918210 Fri, 4 Mar 2011 17:22:00 PST Judge Says No Anonymity For Anyone Who Visited GeoHot's PS3 Hacking Website Or Watched YouTube Video Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110304/16012513367/judge-says-no-anonymity-anyone-who-visited-geohots-ps3-hacking-website-watched-youtube-video.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110304/16012513367/judge-says-no-anonymity-anyone-who-visited-geohots-ps3-hacking-website-watched-youtube-video.shtml Sony can unmask anyone who visited GeoHot's website where he had posted the jailbreak data or who viewed the YouTube video that demonstrated the jailbreak for the PS3 that allowed PS3 owners to bring back a feature that Sony had killed off. This seems pretty extreme. Why is it okay to identify people just because they visited a website or watched a video? As the EFF noted, these subpoenas seem extremely broad, and it's disappointing that the judge signed off on them.

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]]> dangerous-ruling http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110304/16012513367 Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:34:38 PDT A Visit Is Not A Visit Is Not A Visit Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090418/1715314550.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090418/1715314550.shtml block Google from scraping them so that visitors have to find those news sites via other means.

Along those lines, Fred Wilson has started exploring the value of links from different places, with a focus on "passed" or "earned" links -- basically links that someone "passed on" rather than were found via a search engine. The hypothesis was that such "passed links" were more valuable, and from a conceptual level it makes some amount of sense. If someone you know or trust sends you to a link, you're more likely to click and pay attention to that link. Fred does some investigating of this, with a limited amount of data, and isn't quite sure it's true (from what he's seen), though he admits that the data is limited.

I think this is definitely an important subject for websites to investigate -- but I find the initial suggestion (blocking one source because the "value" of those visitors is low) to be quite silly and backwards. That's deciding that because a certain type of user isn't worth that much, you should ignore them all together. I would think the smarter means would be to simply treat those visitors differently, and focus on recognizing where they come from, and then looking to provide value based on that fact. You won't capture everyone, but you can certainly do a better job of funneling people in a certain direction based on where they're coming from and what they're likely looking for based on that information. It's not something that we do here, but it's about to be added to the "things to do" queue.

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]]> rethinking-the-power-of-traffic http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20090418/1715314550