More joy from YouTube and the Discovery Institute

Two related videos today, both by the same person highlighting what will become an interesting problem online: the use of cease and desist notices to take down and censor content. This is nicely tied to another irritant of mine which is creationism (now going by the name of intelligent design). This is the sort of insidious anti-science that could set us back years if it gets accepted. Firstly ID explicitly relies on a none testable hypothesis: that at some point all of life was designed at a deep level. This can only be tested if they can prove that a biological is irreducible, that is that there is no way in which it could have been produced naturally, this in itself is the definition of supernatural.

Moving away from my loathing of ID the second part that is interesting is the use of law to smash websites; especially hosting sites like youtube. These sites have to comply quickly (I expect they use automated services) as failure to do so makes them liable BUT it does mean there is an easy was to remove content that you don't like.

Luckily the internet does not forgive and it does not forget.

Here are the vids, the first is the vid that was taken down the second is a vid about that act.