Dear Colleagues:

This week The Annual Festival of Science, i.e. the conference of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science (an annual conference
which was first held more than 150 years ago) is taking place  at the
University of Newcastle. It is as always well-attended by the media, and
gives rise to many newspaper articles.

Yesterday I attended a lecture by Prof. Harold Thimbleby, of Middlesex
University, which was described in the conference programme as being on
"Computers & Communications", with the following abstract:

  "Computers are - rightly - changing the world.  Are they doing it the
  right way and putting the right people in power? Is life getting too
  complex?" Children are being used by major computer and telecommunications
  companies as design consultants. Is it going to be safe to live in a world
  designed by them."

In actual fact, though I did not find out until afterwards, a handout
providing a late update to the printed programme indicated that the lecture
title had been changed to "Problems in the Global Village", and the
abstract to:

  "Some people see the Internet and World Wide Web as an important step
  towards democracy, education and peace, and of benefit to everyone from
  children to entire nations. They see Utopia in the "Global Electronic
  Village". The reality is rather different from the vision. The internet
  brings pornography and computer viruses; it tells you how to take drugs
  and make bombs. These things aren't necessarily what you want in Utopia."

I have known Prof. Thimbleby for some time, albeit not well - I was chiefly
aware of some, to my mind rather good, work that he had done while at the
University of York on user interface design. I thus was shocked to find
that his lecture was - to my mind - extremely ill-balanced and sensational.

I made it clear, in my remarks from the floor after his lecture, that
though I did not dispute a quite a number of his statements and expressions
of concern, I felt that his overall talk was extremely unbalanced and
sensational. (I have since read, and feel similarly, albeit not quite so
strongly, about the printed version; this is available at URL:
http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/village.html.)

Amongst the points I criticised at Prof. Thimbleby's talk were:

(i) the false picture he conveyed of the Internet by such statements (in
the lecture and in his text) as "The Internet has very little interesting
material; it needs more." His defence of this particular statement later
was that he really just meant "little good-quality British-originated
material of a recreational nature that would appeal to 18 year olds" - yet
even this is disputable to my mind.

(ii) his uncritical citation, in his talk, of the Rimm CMU study of
pornography on the Internet (this was the only published study on the topic
that he identified explicitly), and of the Time Magazine cover story on
this study - I pointed out hpw extensively Rimm's study had been
criticised, and that Time had subsequently published a whole page
apologetic article describing how they had been taken in by Rimm.

After the talk, which was attended by, I guess, about 50 people no less
than four of them, all unknown to me, came up to me independently and
thanked me for my interventions.

Today, I find that The Guardian newspaper carries exactly the sort of
newspaper article that Thimbleby's talk seemed designed to provoke - though
I do not have any right to claim that this was deliberate on his part. I
hate to think what some of the more right-wing papers or the tabloids,
contain, or will contain tomorrow, as a result of his talk.

The Guardian article is quoted below in its entirety. (My guess is that it
is based on his handout and an interview, since it makes no mention of the
various very unfavourable audience reactions at his talk.)

I might mention, by the way, that the staff of the University Computing
Service here have done an superb job, at *very* short notice, in providing
for the duration of the BA conference, a superb set of facilities (a room
full of 56 Pentiums connected via ethernet to SuperJANET) for visitors to
"surf" the Web - something that was well-written up in the Business Section
of the Newcastle Journal (the local morning paper) today. No doubt tomorrow
some newspaper will make a link between these stories under some such
headline as "Newcastle University encourages schoolkids to surf the
Internet in search of Pornography!" This will be a very poor reward for all
UCS's efforts.

Cheers

Brian

PS This message is being copied explicitly to Prof. Thimbleby, though from
my intervention and my conversation with him afterward, he is already aware
of my feelings in this matter - which, let me make clear, I would
characterize as being "more in sadness than in anger", since I know he is
capable of *much* better work and talks.

===================

>From The Guardian, 13 Sept 1995:

 Computer network is "global red-light village"


Chris Mihill and Tim Radford at the British Association meeting in
Newcastle upon Tyne.

PAEDOPHILIA, sadomasochism, bestiality and even detailed instructions on
how to trap and murder children are freely available on the Internet, a
computer expert said yesterday.

Harold Thimbleby said he was shocked at how much pornography was available
on the worldwide computer network and how easily it could be found by
children.

Professor Thimbleby, head of computing research at Middlesex university,
said half of all non-academic searches for material on the net were for
pornography. Highly graphic descriptions of every possible sexual
perversion were available and people could buy high-quality pictures using
a credit card.

Much of the material involved bestiality or paedophilia, with some
paedophiles masquerading as victim support groups giving detailed case
histories of abused children.

"They describe how you can entrap children and some give instructions on
how to kill minors. I was shocked at the material that is available. We are
not talking about just pictures of nudes. If you want to know about any
perversion you can find full details.

"My nine-year-old son could find this kind of material. This nasty material
is much more prevalent than you imagine and it is much easier to find than
you imagine."

Mr Thimbleby said parents could buy programmes which limited access to
known pornography sites on the Internet but these curbs could be easily
bypassed and new pornography sites were emerging every day.

He said that schools and parents should be aware of the potential dangers
to children from accessing such material. People will have their heads
filled with ideas they are better off without.

"I learned things - such as how to kill a child for sexual gratification -
that I wish I did not know."

He added: "Some people see the Internet and the World Wide Web as an
important step towards democracy, education and peace, and of benefit to
everyone from children to entire nations. They see Utopia in the electronic
global village. The reality is rather different from the vision.

"The Internet brings pornography and computer viruses, it tells you how to
take drugs and make bombs. These things aren't necessarily what you want in
Utopia.

"The Internet has been called a global electronic village. If so most of it
is a heavily used red-light district. Too few people are providing any
other interesting or useful services on the Internet.
"I have seen the future and it needs work."- C.M.