A Benchmark Of Sorts: Steam's First Fully Uncensored Adult Novel-Game To Be Released In Coming Weeks

Culture

from the hands-off dept

So, it’s been nearly three months since Valve announced that it was going with a new policy for the Steam gaming platform that was supposed to basically be hands off, with only “illegal” and “trolling” games being disallowed from the Steam store. As with all things Steam, the end result of what was supposed to be a transparent and simple policy turned into a shitshow, with developers having no idea whether once-banned games would suddenly be allowed, and some developers that were contacting Valve to get their games included were being told that their bans were still in place. There must have been a fair amount of frustration in the developer community, because Steam last week attempted to clear up its vague language in its policy. This attempt to clear things up, of course, cleared up basically nothing.

And, yet, the policy marches on. For all of the frustration on the part of developers, it appears as though we have our very first real tangible result, so let’s all celebrate the first 100% uncensored adult visual novel title making it to Steam in the coming week or so.

Things were looking dicey for a little while, but it seems like Valve is set to start allowing uncensored adult games onto Steam. Well, some of them, anyway—starting with Dharker Studio’s lingerie-centric visual novel, Negligee: Love Stories.

Today Dharker announced that the game—previously stuck in limbo while Valve sorted out tools that’d allow users to filter objectionable content—will be coming to Steam on Friday. The developer says it’ll be its “first ever 100% uncensored game on Steam” and added that there’s “no patch needed.”

Whatever you might think of the adult visual novel genre of games, it must be said that this is progress along the road that Valve laid out. A game that once would have been banned no longer is, while the platform has indeed finally begun to put more filtering tools in place, and has also begun requiring that developers be more explicit about which parts of its game are controversial and in what ways. So, unless you want Steam to babysit your sensibilities, this is progress of a kind.

Still, getting only to this benchmark after three months doesn’t fell all that impressive. Add to that the fact that this is all still a mess for much of the developer community and it’s hard to give Valve glowing marks right now.

I reached out to other developers I’ve spoken to in the past about this issue, and they reported mixed results. Boobs Saga, a “satirical 3D action” game about escaping from a dungeon and probably also boobs, hasn’t been approved yet, but developer Georgiy Kukhtenkov told me in a DM that he was asked to fill out the mature content survey, too.

Things aren’t going so smoothly for James Cox, developer of You Must Be 18 Or Older To Enter, a lo-fi horror game about porn that’s not actually porn itself. His game got booted from Steam last year, and he said in an email that he hasn’t been able to resubmit it yet.

Anyone who has paid attention to how this story has evolved over the past few months knows that what developers and game makers want more than anything is clarity on what Steam will and will not allow. Perhaps we can write off some of the current struggles to growing pains within the policy, but we certainly don’t have clarity just yet.

Filed Under: adult content, content moderation, games, steam, uncensored
Companies: valve

Police Officers At A Tactical Disadvantage Bravely Tase 87-Year-Old Woman Into Submission

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the when-u-gain-the-high-ground-just-by-showing-up dept

No police department should ever have to explain why they tased an 87-year-old woman. It’s not that the public doesn’t deserve an explanation. It’s that there is seldom any reason to deploy force against 5’2″ 87-year-old. But that’s what Chatsworth Police Chief Josh Etheridge had to do after one of his officers tased the woman during a “confrontation” behind the local Boys and Girls Club.

The police chief of a small Georgia town is defending an officer who deployed a stun gun on a “smiling” 87-year-old woman, saying she refused to comply with numerous commands to put down a kitchen knife she was using to cut dandelions.

Perhaps we civilians just don’t appreciate the danger presented by a smiling 87-year-old woman — in this case, Martha al-Bishara, who lived across the street from the Boys and Girls Club. I mean, she was carrying a kitchen knife and “refused” to put it down. If we could just see the recordings…

He said there is police body-camera footage of the incident, but he has yet to release it because charges against al-Bishara are pending.

Oh.

Because we civilians probably can’t imagine a situation where we might have to use a stun gun against an octogenarian, here’s some helpful statements by the PD to help us visualize how a 5’2″ 87-year-old got the drop on responding officers.

“We were able to contain her to the back area. She was in an elevated position above both myself and the other officer that was there on scene. She did have a knife in her right hand.”

I understand the only way out of this debacle is going straight through it, but it’s astounding the chief is actually trying to present this as a dynamic situation in which officers were at a tactical disadvantage. It was two (2) officers against a 5’2″ 87-year-old woman who didn’t speak English. It seems they could have regained the high ground by walking at a normal rate of speed around her. And if it looked like she might charge them, they could have walked slightly faster. (And it’s your own damn fault you “contained” her on the high ground.)

But we’re supposed to be grateful she was only tased. Chief Etheridge twice suggests she could have been shot. First, she might have been “accidentally” shot because an officer might have pulled a gun for god knows what reason…

Etheridge said he realizes that some people might ask why the officer didn’t just retreat. But he said had the officer backed up down the sloping terrain, he could have fallen and accidentally shot the woman.

Go ahead and click through to view the gently sloping terrain for yourself. I guess this explanation is plausible. But that doesn’t make it any less stupid. And the only plausible part is the “accidental” part. As we know, officers never shoot citizens. Their weapons “discharge” magically and fill citizens with bullet wounds. The only way an officer could “fall” and “accidentally” shoot someone is if the officer already has a gun out and pointing at the person. This is Chief Etheridge admitting he would have escalated to deadly force to “resolve” the situation.

Second, if the elderly woman had changed her grip on her kitchen knife in any way during the incident, she’d probably be dead right now.

“Lord help us if she had tried to stop the officer and held the knife in an aggressive manner, and then deadly force would have been used.”

There are many problems with this statement, including the fact that “aggressive manner” is in the eye of the gun-wielding, badge-wearing beholder, but here’s just one of them: for many people, knives are tools, not weapons. Its police officers who insist every tool is a weapon that keep situations like these from being de-escalated.

When an 87-year-old walks down a hill towards officers carrying a kitchen knife, she’s not taking advantage of the high ground to overpower officers. She just wants to know why cops are yelling and pointing weapons at her. But these cops didn’t want to know what she was doing. They just wanted her to stop walking around with a knife. So they tased her. And then they charged her. Here’s one final detail from the story which indicates how little these officers actually care about the people they serve.

The grandmother was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor criminal trespass and obstruction of an officer and held at the police station for about three hours, Douhne said. Police refused to allow his mother and sister to interpret for al-Bishara while she was being booked and having her mugshot taken.

At the end of the day, I guess we’re supposed to be grateful officers showed up, took control of the situation, and got this 87-year-old miscreant off the street, if only for a few hours. I’m sure we’ll see these same defensive statements again in the eventual civil rights lawsuit. When that happens, the cops will have to convince an actual court the force deployment wasn’t excessive. Unfortunately for this woman, that court is far more easily persuaded than the court of public opinion.

Filed Under: martha al-bishara, police, police brutality, tasers

Manafort's Daughter's Lawyer Wants Twitter To Vanish Tweets Linking To Text Message Database

Free Speech

from the man-wields-hammer,-demands-Twitter-produce-nails dept

The leak of text messages sent and received by Paul Manafort’s daughter might be old news, but new wrinkles keep appearing. Originally obtained by hackers, the texts have been perused by journalists, resulting in articles discussing Manafort’s apparent complicity in violence in Ukraine. The full set of texts has been around since at least early 2017, but no searchable database of the texts themselves existed publicly.

Apparently, Wikileaks had the full dataset in searchable form but refused to release it. FOIA/transparency activist Emma Best decided to call out Wikileaks on its perceived duplicity (the dumping of the Podesta/DNC emails but not the release of the Manafort text messages) and made the database publicly available. As she wrote then, the likelihood of the text message dump leading to further issues for Manafort’s daughter was minimal, given that it had been more than a year since it became public knowledge their phones had been hacked.

Now, more than two months after Emma Best made the texts available in searchable form, a lawyer representing Manafort’s daughter is demanding the removal of Best’s tweets linking to her post about the text message database. This summary of events comes from Joseph Cox at Motherboard:

Shortly after that publication and Best’s tweet, Shand’s lawyer, Matthew Crowl from law firm RSHC, flagged the tweet to Twitter through its normal reporting mechanisms, judging by the letter Crowl sent to the company days later. Twitter said the tweet did not violate its policy on distributing private information, according to the letter.

“That response is unacceptable,” Crowl wrote. “After these private, stolen messages were linked in the offending Tweet, several members of my client’s family have received harassing and threatening messages.” Crowl highlights Twitter has various options to “protect Ms. Shand’s privacy,” including suspending or terminating an offending account, and points to how Twitter’s rules say users “may not publish or post other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission.” The tweet itself did not contain any of the hacked text messages, but contained a link that went to a page which led to the text cache.

Emma Best posted screenshots of the threat letter to Twitter, noting she is not going to voluntarily delete the tweets targeted by Matthew Crowl. Twitter apparently isn’t going to delete them either, leaving Crowl with little more than a blustery threat on law firm letterhead. Crowl intends to pursue “all legal remedies” to get the tweets removed, which will probably include a lawsuit he has little chance of winning.

The publication of the texts is clearly in the public’s interest, even if a vast majority of them are not newsworthy. Prior to this publication, people were dependent on journalists to sift through the mass of texts to surface those deemed newsworthy. Independent investigations of the messages’ content was all but impossible before Best published a searchable database.

While there may be some privacy implications in the released texts, those relating directly to Paul Manafort and his actions — especially those discussing his relationship with Russian entities — carry minimal privacy concerns, at least when weighed against the public’s interest in the content of those messages. Best’s upload simply made it easier to find newsworthy text messages, even if the unavoidable side effect was the easy perusal of texts containing nothing of public interest.

Any legal action undertaken by Crowl will have to go head-to-head with the First Amendment. Even if Crowl finds a judge willing to buy his arguments, the dissemination of the database ensures the burial of Best’s article/tweets will do nothing to prevent the public from continuing to dig through the 285,000 messages obtained by hackers. While it’s understandable his client is unhappy this has happened, a lawsuit victory would be about as effective as hanging Emma Best in effigy. It might make a few people feel better, but it won’t turn back the clock. The only thing it’s guaranteed to do is create a chilling effect that will deter future publications of newsworthy data obtained from third parties.

Filed Under: emma best, paul manafort, transparency, whistleblowing
Companies: twitter

European Court Of Human Rights: UK Surveillance Revealed By Snowden Violates Human Rights

Privacy

from the well-of-course-it-does dept

Yet another vindication of Ed Snowden. Soon after some of the documents he leaked as a whistleblower revealed that the UK’s GCHQ was conducting mass surveillance, a variety of human rights groups filed complaints with the European Court of Human Rights. It’s taken quite some time, but earlier today the court ruled that the surveillance violated human rights, though perhaps in a more limited way than many people had hoped.

At issue were three specific types of surveillance: bulk interception of communications, sharing what was collected with foreign intelligence agencies, and obtaining communications data (metadata) from telcos. The key part of the ruling was to find that the bulk interception of communications violated Article 8 of the Human Rights Act (roughly, but not exactly, analogous to the US 4th Amendment). It was not a complete victory, as the court didn’t say that bulk interception by itself violated human rights, but that the lack of oversight over how this was done made the surveillance “inadequate.” The court also rejected any claims around GCHQ sharing the data with foreign intelligence agencies.

In short, the court found that bulk interception could fit within a human rights framework if there was better oversight, and that obtaining data from telcos could be acceptable if there were safeguards to protect certain information, such as journalist sources. But the lack of such oversight and safeguards doomed the surveillance activity that Snowden revealed.

Operating a bulk interception scheme was not per se in violation of the Convention and Governments had wide discretion (?a wide margin of appreciation?) in deciding what kind of surveillance scheme was necessary to protect national security. However, the operation of such systems had to meet six basic requirements, as set out in Weber and Saravia v. Germany. The Court rejected a request by the applicants to update the Weber requirements, which they had said was necessary owing to advances in technology.

The Court then noted that there were four stages of an operation under section 8(4): the interception of communications being transmitted across selected Internet bearers; the using of selectors to filter and discard ? in near real time ? those intercepted communications that had little or no intelligence value; the application of searches to the remaining intercepted communications; and the examination of some or all of the retained material by an analyst.

While the Court was satisfied that the intelligence services of the United Kingdom take their Convention obligations seriously and are not abusing their powers, it found that there was inadequate independent oversight of the selection and search processes involved in the operation, in particular when it came to selecting the Internet bearers for interception and choosing the selectors and search criteria used to filter and select intercepted communications for examination. Furthermore, there were no real safeguards applicable to the selection of related communications data for examination, even though this data could reveal a great deal about a person?s habits and contacts.

Such failings meant section 8(4) did not meet the ?quality of law? requirement of the Convention and could not keep any interference to that which was ?necessary in a democratic society?. There had therefore been a violation of Article 8 of the Convention.

The court also found that acquiring data from telcos violated Article 8 as well, for similar reasons.

It first rejected a Government argument that the applicants? application was inadmissible, finding that as investigative journalists their communications could have been targeted by the procedures in question. It then went on to focus on the Convention concept that any interference with rights had to be ?in accordance with the law?.

It noted that European Union law required that any regime allowing access to data held by communications service providers had to be limited to the purpose of combating ?serious crime?, and that access be subject to prior review by a court or independent administrative body. As the EU legal order is integrated into that of the UK and has primacy where there is a conflict with domestic law, the Government had conceded in a recent domestic case that a very similar scheme introduced by the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 was incompatible with fundamental rights in EU law because it did not include these safeguards. Following this concession, the High Court ordered the Government to amend the relevant provisions of the Act. The Court therefore found that as the Chapter II regime also lacked these safeguards, it was not in accordance with domestic law as interpreted by the domestic authorities in light of EU law. As such, there had been a violation of Article 8.

Both of those elements also ran afoul of Article 10’s protection of free expression because journalists’ communications had been swept up in the bulk data collection:

In respect of the bulk interception regime, the Court expressed particular concern about the absence of any published safeguards relating both to the circumstances in which confidential journalistic material could be selected intentionally for examination, and to the protection of confidentiality where it had been selected, either intentionally or otherwise, for examination. In view of the potential chilling effect that any perceived interference with the confidentiality of journalists? communications and, in particular, their sources might have on the freedom of the press, the Court found that the bulk interception regime was also in violation of Article 10.

When it came to requests for data from communications service providers under Chapter II, the Court noted that the relevant safeguards only applied when the purpose of such a request was to uncover the identity of a journalist?s source. They did not apply in every case where there was a request for a journalist?s communications data, or where collateral intrusion was likely. In addition, there were no special provisions restricting access to the purpose of combating ?serious crime?. As a consequence, the Court also found a violation of Article 10 in respect of the Chapter II regime.

On the final issue of passing on the info to foreign intelligence agencies, the court didn’t find any human rights issues there:

The Court found that the procedure for requesting either the interception or the conveyance of intercept material from foreign intelligence agencies was set out with sufficient clarity in the domestic law and relevant code of practice. In particular, material from foreign agencies could only be searched if all the requirements for searching material obtained by the UK security services were fulfilled. The Court further observed that there was no evidence of any significant shortcomings in the application and operation of the regime, or indeed evidence of any abuse.

It would have been nice if there was more of a blanket recognition of the problems of bulk interception and mass surveillance. Unfortunately the court didn’t go that far. But at the very least this has to be seen as a pretty massive vindication of Snowden whistleblowing on the lack of oversight to protect privacy and the lack of safeguards to prevent telcos from sharing information with the government that should have been protected.

Filed Under: bulk collection, echr, ed snowden, european court of human rights, gchq, human rights, mass surveillance, suveillance

Daily Deal: The 2019 Interactive Coding Bootcamp

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

With expert instructors, and real-world projects that you can add to your portfolio, the 2019 Interactive Coding Bootcamp gives you something worth showing off at your next interview. Jump in, and you’ll go from zero to hero with the essentials, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as you make your way through 60 hours of content. You’ll take a deep dive into full-stack web development by building a number of projects from scratch, including a tic-tac-toe game and expense tracker. Plus, this training even has you create your own practice startup, showing you how to build a page with features found in sites like Facebook, Dropbox, and Salesforce. It’s on sale for $39.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Actual Research On Political Bias In Search Results Would Be Useful, But So Far It Doesn't Show Anything

Studies

from the not-how-it-works dept

A few weeks back, we explained why claims of political bias in moderation by tech companies was not accurate at all. I recognize this has upset people who seem to have staked their personal identity on the idea that big internet companies are clearly out to get them, but we like to deal in facts around here. Of course, soon after that post went up, PJ Media editor Paula Bolyard put out an article — using what she admits isn’t anything close to a scientific study — to make dubious claims of bias in Google searches for Trump news.

There were all sorts of problems with her methodology (including using Google search, rather than Google News, and using an extraordinarily sketchy ranking of how liberal or conservative certain publications were). But the bigger issue, as we noted in another post this week was that it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of how search engines work. It was not — as some commenters who clearly did not read the article claimed — that algorithms are perfect and show no bias (because they obviously do). But that the search algorithm boosts sites that are more popular, and if you looked at the sites that Bolyard’s test showed as appearing in her search results were… larger sites. And those included typically “conservative” news sites such as the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. In other words, Google wasn’t biasing based on political viewpoint, but on popularity of the news site itself. Which… is how Google has worked since basically the beginning.

Unfortunately, our President did what our President does, and took Bolyard’s confusing mess (as amplified by Lou Dobbs on Fox News) and claimed that it was now proven that Google biases its search results against conservatives. He’s since posted a video claiming that Google didn’t link to a live stream of his state of the union address — a claim that has already been proven to be 100% false.

Of course, that is leading people to (as they should!) start to do research on whether or not there really is some political bias in search results — which is a good thing. We should investigate that, but it should be done rigorously. Digital Third Coast is pushing some research claiming to show no bias based on Google search autocomplete, but that methodology strikes me as equally dubious to Bolyard’s study.

A much more interesting, and scientifically rigorous study, however can be found at ScienceDirect, in a study by Efrat Nechustai and Seth Lewis entitled What kind of news gatekeepers do we want machines to be? Filter bubbles, fragmentation, and the normative dimensions of algorithmic recommendations. Lewis recently discussed the results on Twitter. The results don’t fully get at whether or not the algorithm is biased, but it does throw a lot of cold water on the idea that the Google News (separate from Google search) algorithm creates filter bubbles that drive people deeper and deeper into their own echo chambers.

But what the study does seem to suggest, is that Google tends to recommend big traditional news organizations most of the time. That… shouldn’t be a surprise. I am confident that Trump’s loudest supporters will argue that this is a sign of political bias on its own, because they believe whatever nonsense he spews about the NY Times and CNN being “fake news,” but that’s silly. Those publications may not be great, and I have serious concerns about the way they cover news, but the issue is not one of political bias. And the evidence again just seems to suggest that these news organizations are large and extremely popular, which is why Google recommends them.

Some others are attempting to research this topic as well, and they all seem to be coming up empty when it comes to any evidence of actual political bias on Google. The site Indivigital tried to look more closely at the sites that were analyzed in the study that Trump tweeted about and found… that the sites that were dubbed “left wing” tended to get a lot more inbound links. And, as you hopefully know, much of Google’s ranking algorithm is based on inbound links. So if there’s “bias” it’s the “bias” of basically everyone else on the internet to more frequently link to those sites. It also found that the supposedly “left wing” sites published a lot more — again, leading to more links and more attention.

In response, Google?s parent company Alphabet stated: ?Search is not used to set a political agenda and we don?t bias our results toward any political ideology?.

To address these claims, we analyzed each of the top 25 right-wing and left-wing websites listed in PJ Media?s study. We looked at the quantity of unique links pointing into each news website as well as the total content output by each news website over a 24 hour period.

The results are listed in the tables below. Overall, from the websites analyzed we discovered:

1. Left-wing news websites attract more links than right-wing news websites; and
2. Left-wing news websites create more content than right-wing news websites.

So there may be “bias” in there, but it’s not “political bias due to crazy liberal Google engineers.”

Then there’s another study by sociologist Francesca Tripodi, who looked at whether or not political bias was showing up in Google’s rankings and also found little to support the claims. Instead, she found that the wording of the search query mattered tremendously in what kinds of responses you got (which makes a lot of sense). So, some search queries might return you more “conservative” leaning stories, while others might return you more “liberal” ones.

My research demonstrates that Google can actually drive the public toward a silo of conservative thought. For example, users curious for more information on the connection between Nellie Ohr and the Department of Justice?a topic widely discussed both on the QAnon message board and Fox News?would have received predominantly conservative perspectives if they queried her name on August 6, 2018. The top result was a piece by conservative think tank the American Spectator, the second and third links are from Fox News, followed by two more links from conservative news sites.

Again, obviously there is “bias” involved in story selection on search. That’s the entire point. You want a search engine to “bias” towards what will be most relevant. The question of whether or not there is “political bias” (especially as influenced by the political leanings of the employees at a company) is a different one — and one that can and should be researched. But to just default to insisting there must be such bias, without any actual evidence showing that political bias is happening in search results, it really looks silly to keep claiming it’s a fact.

And, as multiple people have pointed out, if this really is somehow unfairly tilting things to one side of the political spectrum, there is nothing stopping anyone in this free market system from setting up their own news search that skews towards whatever it is Trump fans think is fair and balanced. Of course, it’s still worth doing more research on this topic, but so far there is little to suggest any actual political bias in search results beyond the bias of “big, popular media sites get more links.”

Filed Under: content moderation, political bias, research, social media
Companies: facebook, google, twitter, youtube

California Eyes Questionable Legislation In Bid To Fix The Internet Of Broken Things

Legal Issues

from the broken-stuff dept

If you hadn’t noticed, the much-hyped internet of things is comically broken. WiFi connected Barbies that spy on your kids, refrigerators that cough up your Gmail credentials, and “smart” televisions that watch you as often as you watch them are all now the norm. And while this has all been the focus of a lot of humor (like the Internet of shit Twitter feed), security experts have been warning for a while about how introducing millions of security flaws into millions of homes and businesses is, sooner or later, going to come back and bite us all on the ass.

As security analysts like Bruce Schneier have pointed out, few people in this dance of dysfunction really care, so things tend to not improve. Customers often aren’t even aware (or don’t care) that their device has been compromised and hijacked into a DDOS attacking botnet, and hardware vendors tend to prioritize sales of new devices over securing new (and especially older) gear.

Efforts to regulate the problem away are the option for many. That’s what California lawmakers are considering with the recent passage of SB-327, which was introduced in February of last year, passed the California Senate on August 29, and now awaits signing from California Governor Jerry Brown. If signed into law, it would take effect in early 2020, and mandates that “a manufacturer of a connected device shall equip the device with a reasonable security feature or features,” while also taking aim at things like default login credentials by requiring devices auto-prompt users to change their usernames and passwords.

But as you might expect, critics of the bill state it’s not likely to actually fix the problem, in part because Chinese gearmakers (a major source of the problem) can just ignore the law. Others state California’s solution is superficial at best, given that just “adding security features” doesn’t really help if the technology is just fundamentally unsecure on the skeletal level:

“It?s based on the misconception of adding security features. It?s like dieting, where people insist you should eat more kale, which does little to address the problem you are pigging out on potato chips. The key to dieting is not eating more but eating less. The same is true of cybersecurity, where the point is not to add ?security features? but to remove ?insecure features?. For IoT devices, that means removing listening ports and cross-site/injection issues in web management. Adding features is typical ?magic pill? or ?silver bullet? thinking that we spend much of our time in infosec fighting against.”

So if legislation isn’t the solution, what is? Some believe transparency is a better bet, as exemplified by the Princeton computer science department’s IOT Inspector, which aims to better educate users as to what their devices are actually doing on the internet. Others, like Consumer Reports, have been pushing to include privacy and security issues as standard operating procedure in hardware reviews. Both could go a long way toward making it much clearer as to what kind of product you’re actually buying and what it’s doing, since many vendors (and their user interfaces) refuse to.

Whatever the solution, it’s going to likely require a coordinated response by consumers, hardware vendors, governments, and security professionals alike. While there have been some scattered efforts around the world on this front, as a whole that’s generally not yet happening. As folks like Schneier continue to argue, it’s likely going to require IOT devices causing massive damage and a potential loss of life (say, via attacks on core infrastructure) before the willpower for such a super-union truly materializes.

Filed Under: california, iot, security

UK MP Thinks Secret Online Groups Are The Root Of All Evil Online, Promises To Regulate 'Large Online Groups'

Legal Issues

from the good-luck-with-that dept

It’s always fascinating to me when people try to condense the complex and varied reasons why people sometimes behave badly into a single factor for blame. This is especially true online. A commonly misdiagnosed “problem” is anonymity, despite the fact that studies show anonymous online users tend to be better behaved in online flame wars, than those using their real names.

British Member of Parliament Lucy Powell has come up with her own simplistic and ridiculous explanation for why people are bad online and has a plan to do something about it. In her mind, the real problem is… “large secret online groups.” She’s written a whole Guardian opinion piece on it, as well as given a Parliamentary speech on it, not to mention making the rounds to