Violent Hamlet 'bard' by British Library Wi-Fi filters British author HM Forsyth was working on a book in the British Library last week when he needed to read Shakespeare's Hamlet, so he did what anyone would do these days: he Googled it, safe in the knowledge that MIT has put the Bard's entire output online. And that's when something nasty happened: The Library's WiFi denied him …
But they didn't. IT said "not our problem", the library staff said "it's the WiFi, not us". it was only when it went public on blog/Twitter that the library saw fit to stop censoring books.
So he's sat in the British Library, but trying to access a book on the MIT website, he didn't think about getting off his arse and fetching a real dead tree copy of the book off their shelves
Well ... he's sat at the British Library, at a computer with internet access, and the text of the play is available on the internet (dumb filters permitting). Perhaps he chose not to make a fetish of inconveniencing himself.
"So he's sat in the British Library, but trying to access a book on the MIT website, he didn't think about getting off his arse and fetching a real dead tree copy of the book off their shelves"
You wouldn't even have had to get off your arse to follow the prominent link to Mark Forsyth's blog entry. If you had, you would have read (in the first paragraph):
"It takes 70 mins to order a physical book".
"So he's sat in the British Library, but trying to access a book on the MIT website, he didn't think about getting off his arse and fetching a real dead tree copy of the book off their shelves"
Others have already said, but the British Library doesn't work like that. Like other research libraries, you have to order a book and it's delivered to you in the reading room. The trend nowadays is to encourage the use of digital copies, as the physical books in collections such as the BL or Bodleian are often so valuable. After all, if you asked for Hamlet in the BL they would probably assume you wanted to see their First Folio, or other rare copies...
> We must protect the children from culture!
Well, you might want to "protect" then from Titus Andronicus. Death, rape, killing the rape victim for being raped, cooking and eating one of the character's children and most of the cast meet a gory and violent end.
"Culture", like the maturity of people (not just children) covers a very, very wide spectrum. And what is fit and proper for one individual may be completely unacceptable to another (whether older or younger).
"I believe that sort of fiction is now illegal in the UK, or is it just pictorial representation (for the moment)?"
It was the Tory Baroness O'Cathain who actually *did* propose a "Dangerous Writings Act" to go along with the "Dangerous Pictures Act" which would have criminalised anything written that would have been classed as "Extreme Pornography"!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/06/dangerous_writings_endangered/
In fairness, the rape victim isn't killed for being raped so much as for being left blind, deaf, mute, limbless and generally unable to live any kind of life.
The really nasty bit is that the right to do these things to her was the payoff that Titus' enemy gave to her own sons for their help kidnapping her in the first place. Shakespeare had a bit of a Tarantino period.
" Also note that a smiley face at the end of a tweet more than compensates for any amount of inconvenience, cluelessness, incompetence and bureaucratic idiocy."
whereas if you only need to compensate for an amazing amount of idiocy, just use an
"note that a smiley face at the end of a tweet more than compensates for any amount of inconvenience..."
I sense sarcasm. Perhaps a different emoticon would have suited the situation better:
- We've made adjustments to the filtering software :|
- We've made adjustments to the filtering software :D
- We've made adjustments to the filtering software :P
- We've made adjustments to the filtering software :Q
- We've made adjustments to the filtering software (.)(.)
Maybe not...
I won't have nuffink to do wiv it 'nless its that stuff that makes me cheese blue!
On a more serious note; filtering is the same as censorship.
What is or is not appropriate for anyone, children or otherwise, should not be down to the software running a filter.
Education, starting with parents and continuing at school is where filtering and the reasons for it should occur, simply closing off access to anything a little shaky is ridiculous and without making it clear to a child or individual why something is unsuitable for them is a failing in their education.
Sound judgement is learned by being able to look at the good and bad things in life; not acquired through the denial of the 'bad' things. Without them there is no means to achieve balance.
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1) He can't be bothered to wait for a book to be pulled up
2) He has, however, the time to hassle library staff because a site he wants to get to is incorrectly blocked (rather than just pointing it out and then getting the information from another site)
3) He quite unfairly paints the person at the information desk as downright ignorant for not having heard of MIT
4) He takes a totally unwarranted swing at the IT guys for checking the right spelling of Shakespeare. The library has millions of books, going back centuries - and Shakespeare himself famously didn't spell his name consistently. Checking spellings, rather than making assumptions, is almost certainly standard procedure
I haven't read any of his books. After seeing this, frankly I don't feel inclined to either.
"1) He can't be bothered to wait for a book to be pulled up"
As he points out in his blog entry (prominently linked to in TFA) it takes 70 minutes to do that. Maybe he thought that 7 seconds on the Web would be a more efficient use of his time.
"2) He has, however, the time to hassle library staff because a site he wants to get to is incorrectly blocked (rather than just pointing it out and then getting the information from another site)"
Maybe he imagined they would, or could, do something to help him. After he drew their attention to the fact that the institution for which they worked was doing something absurdly moronic on the grandest of scales. Moreover, the filter would have blocked the text he wanted wherever it came from.
"3) He quite unfairly paints the person at the information desk as downright ignorant for not having heard of MIT"
A "librarian" who hasn't heard of MIT is like a programmer who has never heard of Bjarne Stroustrup. (And if the person at the desk wasn't a qualified librarian... well, nowadays anything is possible).
"4) He takes a totally unwarranted swing at the IT guys for checking the right spelling of Shakespeare. The library has millions of books, going back centuries - and Shakespeare himself famously didn't spell his name consistently. Checking spellings, rather than making assumptions, is almost certainly standard procedure"
He said he wanted to download Hamlet, by Shakespeare. And they wanted to check the right spelling. People working for the British Library.
"I haven't read any of his books. After seeing this, frankly I don't feel inclined to either."
After reading your post, I'm not surprised.
Sounds like you haven't read the fucking article, the accompanying links, or the previous comments by your fellow readers, yet feel the need to pass judgemental comment for the rest of us to suffer your own idiocy.
> I haven't read any of his books. After seeing this, frankly I don't feel inclined to either.
And frankly, I could not give a flying shit what you feel inclined or not to read.
The British Library are providing the public with a WiFI service. Being the establishment that it is it has to protect itself and it's networks. So yes, internet filters are flawed. But I wonder how the comments would go if the story was about how people in the Library were viewing violent pornograph on their networks or causing service outages by downloading all the malware that is out there onto their public networks?
This is a filtering system provided by the 3rd party WiFi suppliers. Climb of your high horses and come back to the real world/
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That last bit of the article ("to thine own self be true...") was written by Will (or Francis :-), but the words were put in the mouth of Polonius, and were intended (AFAIK) to lampoon the sort of pretentious twaddle dished out by self-help gurus then as now. The fact that they are _still_ quoted, without irony, but such folks just proves the bard's point. But I would have expected Brit journos to have actually seen, or read, the play they are quoting.
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