I don’t have the money to lobby bribe donate to the Conservative party. I’m too scared of the police attempting to kill protesters to go and stand up for my beliefs. What can I do that will make me feel smug and self-righteous yet won’t involve me having to go outside in the snow?

It is, I understand, illegal to blockade Parliament. But there’s nothing to stop us enforcing a virtual blockade, is there?

I tweeted as much on Twitter, and got the following reply.

@edent I like the sound of your #blockparliament campaign. Where do people sign up?

20/12/2010 13:33 via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@iamdanw

Dan Williams

How

So, here’s how to blockade Parliament. This guide assumes you have moderate technical ability and know what an .htaccess file is. If you are unsure, please ask a geek to help you. They will, invariably, accept payment in beer, pizza or sexual favours.

The Houses of Parliament have the following IP address range.

194.60.0.0/18

That translates to every IP address from 194.60.0.0 to 194.60.63.255 . (See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Range_blocks for details.)

In your .htaccess file, add the following

<Limit GET HEAD POST>
order allow,deny
deny from 194.60.
allow from all
</LIMIT>

That will simply block access from the Houses of Parliament. It will also catch a few other IP addresses in the same range – but that’s acceptable collateral damage.

If you want to be a bit more creative, you can redirect the users to any URL you want.

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^194\.60\.
RedirectMatch 301 ^.*$ http://www.example.com/index.htm

All we need now is for every website – from the humblest blog to the mightiest newspaper – to block Parliament from their websites and redirect them somewhere more enlightening.

Where Should I Redirect Them To?

My good friend Tom Scott has penned this rather eloquent piece for the Guardian explaining why filtering cannot work.
I would refrain from pointing at shock-sites. You’ll only give MPs something else to consider banning.

Hang On! There Are Massive Flaws In This Plan!

Yes, yes there are.

Politicians may need access to information which has been inadvertently blocked. For example, a gay MP might want help coming to terms with his or her sexuality – only to find the content unavailable.

Of course, politicians could use a proxy to get round these restrictions. They could use their phone’s web browser. They could access from a friend’s house. They could get a mate to download content onto a USB drive and hand it over in the playground.

In short, this plan is as ill-conceived as the ridiculous notion that you can ban children from access naughty images and videos.

Open Rights Group

If you care about Internet Freedom, please join the Open Rights Group.

It doesn’t matter, at this stage, whether Amzon’s deranking of LGBTQI works was a glitch, policy or the work of trolls. What matters is the action taken by the “online community” and Amazon’s reaction to it.

Firstly, why would anyone take the word of an Amazon CSR as customer policy?
I’ve worked in call centres – I guess a lot of people have – CSRs are almost universally treated as the bottom rung of the company. They have no insight into policy or how and why it’s made. They have no power to suggest changes. They will repeat any wild rumour they’ve heard from their colleagues or superiors if they think it will get an angry customer off the phone.

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

The CSR’s comments can be safely ignored.

Of course, this raises the question of whether big companies should treat their CSRs like mini-PR agents and give them a commensurate salary boost. I believe that front line staff have more of an impact on “brand perception” and “customer loyalty” than even the glitziest of advertising campaigns.

Secondly, the “online community” seems to have a shoot first, ask questions later philosophy.
I’m pro-open-source and I think that crowd-sourcing research is a highly efficient and effective way to investigate stories. But one needs to substantiate first. Imagine if there really was a completely innocuous explanation (say someone hit the wrong button on the wrong box or Amazon were hit by hackers) all of a sudden the tide is out and we can see *exactly* who is swimming naked.

Thirdly, the immediacy of cyberspace does not map well to meatspace.
A scant few hours after the storm erupted, a blogger was asking

Is there any reason why The [Liberal Democrat] Party is still supporting and promoting them via the affiliate scheme? All the ethical people are disabling theirs.

Well… Possibly because they are part of the evil conspiracy, possibly because they wanted to see if it was true, and possibly because the person who makes those decisions was enjoying a weekend away from work. Her superiors were also probably eking what pleasure they could from the British springtime.

We don’t all spend every waking moment plugged into the hyperzeitgeist that is twitter. Right now, ring your mum or ask your boss’s boss what they think of #AmazonFail. I bet it won’t even have crossed their radar.

The same is also true of Amazon. They’ve put out a press release on Tuesday – the first working day after the break.

The lesson here for big companies is that your customers are never on holiday. They expect your stores & call centres to be open at the customers’ convenience, not the company’s.

When I was Production Manager on Vodafone live! we would always ensure that someone responsible was on call to fix the site or answer questions on why a policy decision had been made. If we didn’t know the answers, we were allowed to phone someone who did – even if it meant waking them up in the middle of the night.

Of course, this means paying overtime, TOIL or a decent wage. Something Amazon doesn’t see the value in.

Finally
I honestly don’t think any side in this mini-culture skirmish emerges with much glory.

Amazon need to keeps their CSRs better informed and need to make sure that someone with authority is allowed to engage with their customer base even during the holidays.

Bloggers, twitterers, facebookers should keep fighting the good fight. They also need to keep in mind Hanlon’s Razor and, remember, it’s ok to take a deep breath & wait more than 24 hours for an answer before breaking out the placards.

Postscript
Of course, if it turns out that Amazon have as a matter of policy deranking these books, I utterly condemn them. However, I’m sure the lost sales from bestselling authors will do more to change their minds than a boycott.

Here’s some pornography for you…

Phwoar! Look at the tits on that!

Here’s some child porn.

Sickening. How could Leonardo Da Vinci bear to paint such monstrosities?

My local school is putting on a play full of under-age, pre-marital sex. With foul language, wanton violence, drug abuse and teenage suicide.

My public library has books on how to make bombs!

Won’t someone think of the children and “rate” this sick filth!?

When we look at libraries, art galleries and the theatre, there is very little appetite for censorship. Why?

It’s because such things are old and familiar to us. We understand them intimately. We grew up with them. They’re part of our everyday experiences.

The Internet – for people of Mr Burnham’s generation – is not part of the fabric of his world. It’s new, scary and dangerous.

I first got online in 1994. Compuserve was my gateway to the world at a blistering 14.4Kbps. I’ve known the net for the majority of my life – for longer than I’ve known most friends. The net is entwined in the very fibre of my being.

But I am nothing compared to the kids born in the late 1990s. I can remember the magic of my first homepage – whereas their parents blogged their pre-natal sonograms.
I was astounded the first time I illicitly downloaded a movie. For today’s kids, it’s as natural as flicking through the TV channels is for Mr Burnham.

Andy Burnham has really only ever worked in the political realm. He has never, I suspect, been exposed to the wonders of the Internet. Now that he has a staff of researchers and secretaries – I doubt he ever will. Unless the good voters of Leigh oust him in favour of someone who lives in the real world. Or at least someone who appears to know what they are talking about.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying – it’s not Andy’s fault that he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. He was born too early to fully grasp what’s going on in the world. I suspect that if he was around when mobile phones first came available, he’d ask us to rate ourselves lest children accidentally rang us.

For those interested in the history of censorship and rating in this country, I suggest the book “The Lord Chamberlain Regrets…“

The book examines the curious fact that every play performed in the UK had to be looked over and rated or rejected by the government before it was allowed to be performed.

This lasted from 1737 to 1968. That’s 231 years. Imagine how competitive the UK’s digital economy will be after 231 years in the wilderness.