Nominet have published an issues paper asking whether there are circumstances in which it might be appropriate to rapidly suspend a DNS domain involved in criminal activity, and the processes that would be needed to ensure such action did not create too great a risk of unfairness.
Nominet have published an interesting analysis of the legal issues around any possible process for suspending domains associated with criminal activity. This raises the rather worrying issue that the legal position is not clear if a registry is informed of unlawful conduct somewhere in their domain and decides that the evidence is not strong enough to justify them acting.
October 24th is the annual Internet Watch Foundation awareness day. Discussion of the IWF often highlights, and rightly so, its success in reducing the availability of indecent images of children on the internet. But the most important result of reporting images to the IWF is when the police, notified by the IWF and its peer hotlines in other countries, are able to rescue real children from real abuse.
Earlier in the year I wrote about the German ISP Association's scheme to remove the economic disincentive for ISPs to inform their customers of botnet infections on their PCs by providing a centrally-funded helpdesk. In Latvia a different approach has been taken: providing a "responsible ISP" mark that consumer networks can use on their websites and other promotional materials. To be entitled to use the mark an ISP must satisfy three conditions:
The annual report of the Internet Watch Foundation was published yesterday. The highlight is news that through closer collaboration with hotlines and Internet industries in other countries, the average time for removal of an illegal indecent image of a child from the Internet has dropped from over a month to twelve days. That is the average world-wide: in the UK such images are removed in hours.
I've been reminded that section 62 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, passed last November, created a new offence of possessing non-photographic images of children that are pornographic and fall into one of a number of sexual categories. When the section is brought into force such images will be classed in the same way as indecent photographs and pseudo-photographs of children, already illegal to possess under the amended Protection of Children Act 1972.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published its annual report yesterday, including information on the use of the Internet to distribute indecent images of children. There is quite a lot of good news to report.
As the BBC are pointing out, there has been a lot to celebrate on Twitter recently. However there have also been quite a few instances of tweeters (the French refer to us/them as "twittos") getting it badly wrong. We should all know that "email is like a postcard", but sometimes it seems that "Twitter is like a megaphone" might be as useful a reminder.
