The NSPCC is one of those charities that I often feel like I want to support (because who doesn't want to help children have a better life, right?) but then I see how they act or something they say in reality and I wonder whether we really see the world the same way at all.

This is sad, because maybe somewhere there is a child losing out because of it. However, I have to think not just of what might happen to unlucky children in terrible cases today but also what kind of world I think all children deserve to live in both today and tomorrow.

I want to believe that organisations like the NSPCC and for that matter government-run social services are working towards a better world for those children. I also don't doubt that the overwhelming majority of people working in those roles have good intentions. But the obvious fear-mongering and nanny state tendencies really concern me and make me very wary of lending any active support to this kind of organisation.

It's actually disturbingly similar to the debate about terrorism. There are bad people in the world, and good people really do get hurt by them. No-one disputes this, or the desirability of keeping everyone safe. But there is no such thing as 100% safety in the world, if you let rhetoric and fear created by outlying cases, however horrific, overtake logic and reason in policy-making, you can wind up doing more harm than good because of the other consequences.

Parenting 101: Stuff is going to happen with your kid. Your goal isn't to magically prevent it, because you can't. Your goal is to keep it to a level where you can support your kid until they can cope with it independently, and stop anything disastrous from happening along the way.

All valid points, and it certainly doesn't help when politics defeats reasonable proposals like creating a dedicated .xxx TLD that would allow most of the heavy stuff to be blocked in practice for most kids most of the time. I imagine the porn industry, at least the legitimate/legal parts of it, would have supported such a measure in practice, and it makes it relatively simple to block that content objectively by opting in to whatever child-friendly access plan your ISP offers with minimal risk of false positives.

But for younger kids it's much simpler. In the UK, a child aged 12 has normally just moved up into secondary school. No child that age needs their own smartphone, or unsupervised Internet access in their own room at home. Get them a feature phone if they need one. Set up a computer they can use in the family room at home. Show them that there is more to life than being on-line 24/7 anyway. Such simple and (one would think) obvious steps instantly reduce the problem to primarily one of peer pressure and what they can get via their friends. That will obviously be more than nothing in the real world, but probably far less than if they can spend several hours a night curiously looking around the whole Internet to find stuff they really don't understand yet.

I couldn't agree more, but I'd also add that helping them to find good information when they're ready for it is probably the best thing a parent can do to support a child of that age.

On the evidence so far, the problem with older, sexually active teenage kids and Internet porn is more the unrealistic expectations that the porn creates. This can lead to peer pressure to do a lot more, potentially with more dangerous, distressing and/or permanent consequences, than previous generations did when they fooled around at the same age.

That makes it more important than ever for kids to understand STIs, contraception, the right to say no at any time, and the importance of respecting others' wishes. These aren't exactly the first priority in most porn.

Oh, I've seen it with plenty of people who otherwise exhibit much greater than average intelligence and capacity for critical thinking too. Becoming a parent seems to create a reality distortion field around a surprising number of people.

However, this failing certainly isn't universal among parents, nor does it mean that people with more rational and reasoned positions should not challenge this kind of foolishness. It is, after all, likely to be better for all children if their parents act responsibly, supervise them properly when they are younger, and support them as they do grow up and become young adults.

Which surely brings us to the next question, which is why any 12-year-old has unsupervised access to systems where they could receive such images regularly enough to be concerned about being addicted (whatever that actually means if it's judged from the perspective of a 12-year-old). There is no law that says the moment a child is old enough to go to school on their own they also need an iPhone, a laptop in their own room at home, and an unrestricted data plan in each case.

Sure, it seems inevitable that any child will be somewhat exposed to these things. If nothing else, the kid who does have access because they're a bit older or their parents are a bit more generous is going to be everyone's new best friend. Still, it doesn't look like we're talking about incidental or exceptional exposure to things they don't fully understand here, it looks like we're talking about a sustained pattern and direct access.

In other news, around 10% of parents apparently have no idea how to supervise their 12-13 year old children when they go on-line. Maybe we should treat the problem, not one particular symptom? Age-checks on porn sites aren't going to stop those same inadequately supervised children from being groomed for other things, or subject to hate attacks by classmates at school, or any number of other threats that come with an open communication system like the Internet.

Probability of causing life-changing damage to victims: 100%.

Probability that as a result he would sooner or later be charged with serious financial and/or sexual crimes: close to 100%.

Probability that such crimes would result in a multi-year jail term on conviction: close to 100%.

Probability of achieving life-changing profits for self even under idealised conditions: close to 0%.

Even from a ruthless profit-making perspective, his odds of success were always negligible. This guy is a failure any way you look at it.

It seems what he was actually on trial for was the identity theft and extortion side of his behaviour rather than the act of leaking (or helping to leak) the personal photos. So in that sense, maybe the punishment was on the harsh side, though given the number of victims I don't think it was entirely unreasonable, and apparently neither did the legal system if the theoretical maximum sentence would have been significantly longer (or, as others have pointed out, life on a three-strikes rule had he been tried for multiple felony offences successively).

As it happens, I would hold him morally responsible for the leaks and the resulting distress as well, so I have little sympathy in this case. But yes, we should separate personal feelings from hopefully more objective legal rulings, so let's do that.

This guy seems to have a pattern of damaging behaviour, and has reportedly shown no remorse at any stage in the proceedings. That means if he gets out of jail before being sufficiently rehabilitated, assuming that such rehabilitation is even possible in his case, it is extremely likely that he will reoffend. As the law does increasingly recognise the damage caused by revenge porn itself, and in general has long recognised that sexual crimes have serious consequences for their victims that go beyond mere monetary loss, we should consider the likelihood that he will commit such crimes if released too soon and the preventable damage those crimes would cause. This is a person who destroys lives.

In that context, a sentence of just a couple of years, so he's probably out in maybe a year in reality, does little to protect society against his future actions. Any level of monetary fine seems unlikely to have much effect at all in terms of either avoiding future criminal behaviour on his part or protecting the rest of society from him. So this seems like a case where he probably does need to be in prison, or otherwise contained, for a considerable period for the protection of others.

Given what a horrible personal violation this must feel like for the victims, both the original act of disclosure and then using it as leverage for financial gain, and given how many victims he seems to have had and the sustained and systematic way in which he seems to have exploited them over a long period, I have no sympathy in this case.

Also, this guy made $30K, but if he actually serves anything like his full sentence will be spending over 150,000 hours "earning" it, for an hourly rate of pay of about 20 cents. Apparently as well as failing at being a human being, this guy also fails at business.

I doubt that will be much consolation to anyone who was a victim here, but I hope they will at least get some sense of closure and of justice being done as much as it can be under the circumstances.

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints, and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own regard. Energise the demolition beams! God, I don't know⦠apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at allâ¦

Now, let's be fair here. Big Media need all the help I can get. I mean, how many movies we think of as blockbusters never actually make a profit?

Sadly, no. While MP4 has effectively won the battle to be the de facto standard video format, support for it still isn't completely universal and probably never will be until the patent issues are irrelevant. And of course there are numerous different variations that all typically end in .mp4 so you're also stuck with either inefficient encoding for widest possible support or smaller files but limited range.

As for controls, I have lost track of how many times even the same browser has changed its controls within the past 2 years. There is basically no standardisation across browsers at all. It doesn't matter much if you're building YouTube or Vimeo, when it's obvious which parts of the page are videos. However, if you want to integrate video content into a more general page the same way you'd use an image, having no idea whether your visitors will even get any indication that it actually is a video, or where that indication will be if so, makes it absurdly difficult to present the content well across browsers without going 100% custom controls and ignoring the built-in browser ones entirely (which then runs into numerous JS bugs, causing problems of their own).

What is this "regular HTML video" you're talking about? I'm talking about the new HTML5 media elements, things like <video>.

And Flash has been a viable technology for implementing these kinds of features for a very long time, and still would be had it not been deliberately sabotaged by the likes of Apple and Google for their own purposes. Ignoring your apparent personal prejudice, why objectively should I as a professional web developer not have been using such tools if they get the best results for my clients?

Exactly. Sites now have to provide the same functionality twice, because the browsers have made such a mess of standardisation that you can't rely on a single implementation to actually work portably.

Unfortunately, in the real world, that is often not an option. If your client wants multimedia elements on their site, you're going to need HTML5 multimedia elements despite the fact that numerous aspects of how they work aren't standardised. And just to be clear, this is stuff that has been available in browsers for 5+ years now. It's hardly some new development, and failure to standardise effectively after such a long period is just a demonstration of how worthless some of these standardisation processes have become.

Ultimately, what matters is whether your site works in visitors' browsers. Standards are only a means to that end, and validation in turn is only useful if you have useful standards to validate against. Since a lot of the web standards today are borderline worthless due to their instability and/or their failure to specify so many aspects that make a difference in practice, validation doesn't really give you the assurance you seek of compatibility either across today's browsers or with future browsers.

Once again, I'm not saying the world wouldn't be a better place if you did have that assurance or that I agree with the path the browser makers and standards bodies have chosen to follow. I'm just saying that as a web developer you have to play the cards you've been dealt, and I don't see formal validation as improving your chances to any useful degree today.