UK Gov't Wants To Block Internet Porn By Default 642
airfoobar writes "Yet another country wants to 'protect the children' by blocking all internet porn — not just child porn, all porn. The British gov will talk with ISPs next month to ask them to make porn blocking mandatory (and they appear more than happy to comply). As an effect, adults who want to access pornography through their internet connections will have to 'opt in.' Their rationale is that if ISPs have managed to block all child porn, they'll also be able to block all other porn as well."
cp (Score:5, Funny)
o-+-[
You just looked at ASCII Child porn. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Re:cp (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not about porn.
It is about using porn to get people to roll back the advances and advantages that they acquired with the advent of wide-spread Internet communications access.
"Back in your cage, you!"
Re:cp (Score:5, Insightful)
After porn, it will be other harmful content, then wikileaks, then anyother site the government doesnt want you to get to. And as they have to sniff you traffic to see if it's porn, they may as well keep all those logs on you, and get to them without any need for a pesky warrant, or due process.
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After porn, it will be other harmful content
No, I firmly believe that they'll target more things which they are personally offended by, but not because they're harmful. These people just want everyone else to live in their little bubbles.
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Easy, they do exactly what they are now, but silent;y, through filters, killing off US access to all the mirrors as they are detected.
To add to this, they will make sure their money supply is cut off. Cant process credit payment, no bank accounts to cash cheques or take money orders.
It's the final thing that killed allofmp3.com. They could have kept on trading if it wernt for not being able to actually pay them for content that was completely legal in their own country.
Re:cp (Score:4, Insightful)
When the child porn filter was introduced in Denmark, people were using the same arguments.
"It's a slippery slope. Soon it will be expanded to include sites like allofmp3.com and TPB".
Other people were using arguments like yours, calling the first group tinfoil hats, etc.
Then allofmp3.com was added to the list.
"It's a slippery slope. Soon it will be expanded to include sites like TPB".
"Of course not, take off your tinfoil hat. allofmp3 was included because it's outside the civilized world, TPB is in Sweden".
Then they blocked TPB.
So far, the people with the tinfoil hats and slippery slope arguments have been correct every time.
At least we haven't yet gone as far as filtering regular porn.
Re:cp (Score:5, Insightful)
Please define porn first. A two adults sharing a dirty voip (internet call) porn, how about when it is a video call.
So will companies that sell porn have to identify themselves as such in and then why would they. Porn has an international supply so how are foreign companies targeted.
The reality of this is 24/7 monitoring and censorship of all internet communications, including phone calls, otherwise how can you block porn.
The same old lie spread again and again, to protect children. So is the government saying that content suitable for a 16 year old is suitable for a 6 year old how about a 5 year old and a seventeen teen year old. The reality is if you want an internet suitable for children is has to be a children only internet, one that has been censored of all unhealthy commercial content, one where content is approved, so no commercial, no junk food, no raunch targeted at minors. Everything other than this for children is a lie.
Re:cp (Score:5, Funny)
o-+-[
You just looked at ASCII Child porn. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I'm sorry if this bursts the fantasy bubble of some readers, but... ASCII was born in 1963.
But man, Unicode porn... And it's already legal in many jurisdictions!
Re: (Score:3)
Re:cp (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you got any evidence to back up that statement? More likely there wasn't tons of it to begin with, and most of the blocked sites are legitimate. Recently there was news about a group that audited the sites in the Danish and Norwegian lists, and of the hundreds of sites they audited only three were found to have illegal content. They managed to get those three sites taken down in a couple of days. They were not just filtered, they were completely taken down. (Which would then leave the filter in a state where everything filtered was legitimate content).
That is true. Instead of filtering, they could work on getting every one of those sites taken down, that would bring them one step closer to the source. Even better would be to prosecute the site operators. The best would be to go after the people who produce it in the first place.
Sometimes you have to stop and wonder why they are fighting it to begin with. Are they fighting it because they think it is distasteful? If that is the only reason to fight it, then it is nothing but censorship. But that of course isn't the reason we should fight against it, the reason we should fight against it is to stop the abuse of children which is happening to produce it.
If you accept that the real crime we want to prevent is child abuse, then distribution of child pornography is really not a major crime. The child porn however is evidence of a major crime. Seen in that light, fighting distribution of child porn is really just hiding the problem. Even if they succeed in stopping all distribution of child porn on the internet, it still means they have done nothing to stop the real problem, they have just hidden it very well.
Now go back and think about some of the moves that have been done in the fight against child pornography. How many of the moves suggest the fight is because people find it distasteful? How many of the moves suggest the fight is to stop child abuse?
Oh wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
and if they do want to block porn, then why not start with the photos on page 3 of our biggest selling newspaper?
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not saying I agree with this, but they're not trying to block porn, they're trying to make it opt-in. Buying a newspaper is definitely opt-in.
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it not opt-in the way it is already? Nobody forces you to look at porn when you open a web browser. They very act of going to specific sites to look at pornography is opt-in by itself.
Re:Oh wow. (Score:4, Informative)
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Children watch porn. At least everyone I ever talked with honestly said they did. They did so in the 60s, 70, 80s, 90s, 00s.., and probably before that too.
It's just that they don't understand it, so get tired of it after 5 minutes. Until they become teens of course...
Why is this a problem again?
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, they are attracted to it because adults try to hide it from them.
Having full access to anything I wanted to read[*] as a kid, and parents who would explain whatever I asked about (or provide more books if they didn't know), I was frequently the only source of information for my friends who came from more restrictive homes.
Which was wrong; their parents should have explained things before they went to friends for information. Cause even though what I knew wasn't far off the mark, I was still a kid without any grasp of just what was important information, how to teach, or what the other kids didn't know but should have been told first.
So there were probably some kids who knew about semen, menses, orgasms and syphilis, but not about foreplay or foreskins, or that intercourse didn't have to lead to either orgasm, pregnancy, or being sold to the gypsies. Blame their parents.
Sex ed in school was OK, but too little, too late. By then, a good part of the class were already past their virginity (mostly those from prudish homes were "active"), some girls were on the pill, absolutely all of us were masturbating, and many were well into watching 8mm porn movies and experimenting with more or less successful and sometimes dangerous toys. Mostly because they weren't allowed to, and had to find out on their own.
[*] One thousand and one nights in six huge volumes with non-censored pictures was challenging reading for a four year old, the biblical Canticles even more so for a five year old, and Lady Chatterley's Lover didn't make much sense to an eight year old. Thankfully, I had parents who could explain sex, moral views of other cultures, Victorian values and the strength of carnal desires in adults (anyone past puberty, i.e. old people).
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That's a good excuse to not raise your children but let government discipline them later.
An adult would try and make it hard for the kid to accidentally view such images but kids are resilient; if it's not the game or information they were looking for they close the window and go elsewhere. If they are curious they come and ask their parents who if they are adults don't freak out and scream at them or other histrionics but have a suitable explaination which is not derogatory or insulting to the child, isn't
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Many pornographic sites are named in such a way that children could come across them by mistyping a website they were trying to go to.
I don't particularly wan't my children to accidentally come across a prothestilizing site either, can we please make those opt in as well?
My children's minds are mine to indoctrinate with the ideas that I choose !!!!
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Re:Oh wow. (Score:4, Funny)
There's money in hijacking typo domains. A few years ago I meant to go to www.gamefaqs.com, accidentally typed www.gamefaws.com and ended up on a gay porn site.
Damn those www.gamefaws.com hijackers... always trying to steal users from my www.gamefags.com domain!!!
Faster World (Score:3)
We Old Fogies forget how smart kids are. I first learned about computer viruses when I was 13, from a 10 year old who was playing with them on Mac System 6.
And have we seriously forgotten Lunch Period? Every school has a "Johnny Rogue" whose big brother shows him stuff, and within a week it's all over the inside gossip at Lunch.
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Having it right in your face in the canteen, on public transport and everywhere around definitely isn't opt-in.
In the days when I was standing in for IT manager in my previous company I had a fantastic conversation with our new HR manager which tried to make our company look the same as her previous job at a telecom operator. So she insisted that I put netnanny software, filters, censorware, limit staff access to the internet, account how much time they browse and so on. I told her that I have _NO_ objectio
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Makes good business sense. The sex industry there might suffer.
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you nuts? The porn industry is one of the biggest driving forces behind the "fight against online porn".
Think about it: Internet gives you free porn without the embarrassing trip to your local porn shop. Who do you think is the biggest loser in this?
Re:Oh wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
My kids will have access to all the porn they want. As long as they don't try to hide their download folders.
Re:Oh wow. (Score:4, Funny)
You mean that the kids risk tennis elbows.
Re:Oh wow. (Score:4, Interesting)
Your sense of history needs work. Please grab any book on child psychology, or just google it. Read why exposure to porn by children is both detrimental, and the cause of a lot of harm. It's real, and it has an effect on both sexes. Porn is entertainment. Kids don't understand the context of this entertainment. Understanding sex, birth control, STD prevention, relationships, and deviations need to be understood. A lot of kids just mime what they see.
Then you get teen pregnancy or worse, STDs, abuse, and dysfunctional relationships. Some survive it unscathed, it's true. But there are enough that don't/can't make informed choices that it's a big problem.
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I kinda wonder how they found that out. Did they conduct lengthy studies, like exposing some kids to porn at an early age and other were not exposed and they checked how they turned out eventually?
Or are they just examining the cases where sexual "deviants" get caught and then asked about their early childhood experiences? If so, then you're probably also someone arguing that playing "killing games" causes killing sprees.
In other words, when was your first exposure to porn?
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Yeah, and they'll get that from porn.
If you let the bluenoses get their hands on the controls, then, yes, they will define any site containing information about how to avoid pregnancies, STDs, etc. as porn.
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently they don't actually want to block all porn: [thisissomerset.co.uk]
Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has refused a request from a West MP for the Government to take action to stop children being able to access internet pornography.
Devizes Tory MP Claire Perry raised the issue at a special Commons debate, because as a mother-of-three she knew how difficult it was to keep youngsters from seeing inappropriate material.
But Mr Vaizey made it clear ministers will not take any steps to force internet service providers (ISPs) to tackle the problem.
He said: "We believe in an open, lightly regulated internet. The internet is by and large a force for good, it is central to our lives and to our economy and Government has to be wary about regulating or passing legislation."
The minister suggested it was for parents to take responsibility for what their children see online, rather than the ISPs that make money from pornography.
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Informative)
For perhaps the only time in living memory, the Daily Mail has one of the more measured articles about this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339926/Internet-pornography-Parents-allowed-block-sexual-imagery.html [dailymail.co.uk]
'The plan is to allow parents to 'opt out' of the sites and they will then be blocked at the source, rather than using conventional parental controls...Adults who wish to view the material would have to choose to 'opt in'.'
The Metro is even clearer:
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/850896-new-porn-controls-for-children-on-internet-planned-by-government [metro.co.uk]
'He hopes to introduce a system that would enable parents to ask internet service providers (ISPs) to block adult sites at source, rather than relying on parental controls that they need to set themselves...Adults using the internet connection would then have to specifically 'opt in' if they want to view pornography.'
So Vaizey (and right now it's just him having a chat with the IPSs, not government policy) wants a scheme where parents can REQUEST a default filter for their connection, but Dad can opt back in when he's 'working late' at the PC.
Why is porn bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Devizes Tory MP Claire Perry raised the issue at a special Commons debate, because as a mother-of-three she knew how difficult it was to keep youngsters from seeing inappropriate material.
I was raised in a small village with several farms around. By the age of ten I had seen all sorts of animals having sex, cattle, horses, dogs, birds, snakes, the rule is: if it moves it fucks.
Why should children be "protected" from seeing sex?
Re:Why is porn bad? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why is porn bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Murder in real life makes 99.9% people want to vomit. If you watch a horror movie and start fantasizing about being the killer, there's something incredibly wrong with you.
Squirting DNA at other people in real life is virtually irresistible and damn near the meaning of life. If you watch porn and DON'T want to have sex, you either recently had sex (with zero or more partners) or there's something incredibly wrong with you.
I don't understand why people even compare the two. They're nothing alike, except that they can both be seen on TV if you film them and put them on TV.
But my usual disclaimer when I say that: I don't support censorship of it. Kids will learn to screw. I watched a bunch of porn as a kid, and it was only a minor contributor to why I'm a miserable piece of crap adult. Just teach kids how condoms work so it doesn't destroy them when they figure out how to con their classmates into scratching their itches.
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According to the OFLC (Australian censorship board) squirting (female ejaculation) is a myth and it's actually urination - and is therefore refused classification.
These are the same people who think women who have small breasts in porn promote CP
Re:Oh wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, if pictures of nude women with their breasts on show but genitals covered are considered pornography, then perhaps we should be keeping children out of art galleries.
The well-proportioned human form is a thing of beauty. The sight of it is not something that corrupts anyone.
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When did the British become more uptight about sex than the USA?
We brits have always been a bunch of prudes.. or at least those who make the laws seem to think they are (when they're not involved in sex scandals).
Our adult channels are basically breasts and dry humping. As the comment below me states.. we think a topless woman is porn.
Their rationale is that if ISPs have managed to block all child porn.....
They have? I know they blocked wikipedo a while back for an album cover but are they really claiming
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Re:Oh wow. (Score:4, Informative)
Don't be so sure. As of yet, the security at airports in the UK hasn't sunk to the depths of public molestation that the US TSA system has.
http://thedailypatdown.com/ [thedailypatdown.com]
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You are now cleared MAGINOT BLUE STARS and SCORPION STARE - further discussion of the system is authorised only with cleared personnel. You are not cleared CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN (You'll thank me for that later when you die still technically human). GBTW and STFU.
Tilting at windmills (Score:5, Insightful)
Claire Perry, the Tory MP for Devizes and a keen lobbyist for more restrictions, said: "Unless we show leadership, the internet industry is not going to self-regulate. The minister has said he will get the ISPs together and say, 'Either you clean out your stables or we are going to do it for you'."
Equating that to "the government" is like saying the US government is going to assasinate Assange because of the rantings of one hypre-ventilating congressman. This proposal will get even less traction than Australia's "great firewall" which (as I predicted several years ago) has gone nowhere, and never will.
TFA is dishonest and written in a way that feeds the parinoia of many slashdotters, which I suspect is the main reason that tripe like this makes it to the front page..
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And... (Score:2)
Re:ask obama and the fbi (Score:4, Funny)
after all they pulled kids off missing children cases so they can go after IP issues.
They were using kids to investigate missing child cases? Is this why nothing ever gets done in government?
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after all they pulled kids off missing children cases so they can go after IP issues.
They were using kids to investigate missing child cases? Is this why nothing ever gets done in government?
I'm sure you've heard the childhood retort "it takes one to know one"? Well, now we know where it came from.
Opting in (Score:5, Insightful)
"Opting in" will likely place customers on a permanent record that will be "accidentally" leaked to a "citizens for decency" movement to publish.
Re:Opting in (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like to point out, Virgin Media already do this (they have it as a "Parental filter" that is on by default, but can be turned off very easily by editing your account settings (which are linked to by the "this material is blocked" placeholder page).
I turned it off immediately due to the horrendous number of false positives- ever YouTube clips with the "log in to watch" adult flag were being blocked. If this were rolled out accross the ISP landscape I'm sure most people would turn it off for a similar reason, once they find their iPlayer videos and certificate 18 films on iTunes getting nixed.
Re:Opting in (Score:4, Informative)
Just like to point out, Virgin Media already do this
They do? They didn't for this home connection.
It looks like it's some software you install on your PC (see here [virginmedia.com]). I don't know what the defaults are, since I didn't install it.
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I have had the same thing with Orange and T-Mobile internet access in the past, their 'adult' filter is on until you call customer services and get them to turn it off. Weirdly I hit false positives right away on such things as slashdot articles, BBC news pages, and a page referring to EU legislation about boats as I recall and I hadn't even started looking up adult stuff..
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You forgot to mention that customer services will be a call you have to pay for. They will have worked it out such that implementing the censorship and turning it off for some will turn a profit - you will be giving them that profit when you jump through the hoops they want you to.
Recently t-mobile spammed my phone with some new fucking feature that I don't want - they will send you a text if someone phones you and you don't answer. Well, fuck that! The phone already says if there is a missed call, I don't
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Re:Opting in (Score:5, Insightful)
> If your ashamed of what you are doing you should not be doing it.
There are plenty of things people do that they are not ashamed of, but that other people who have the power to make other peoples lives miserable/difficult/whatever might find objectionable.
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There are plenty of things people do that they are not ashamed of, but that other people who have the power to make other peoples lives miserable/difficult/whatever might find objectionable.
For example, I'm not at all ashamed of espousing an ideology that calls for eventual overthrow of my country's government, but I'd sure rather said government not keep a list of such people with my name on it.
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If your ashamed of what you are doing you should not be doing it.
You should be ashamed.
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Just when you thought the Middle Ages were over... (Score:2)
...
Page Three (Score:2)
There is some sort of logical disconnect where the UK wants to block porn on the internet, but any idiot with some change change can buy a copy of the Sun and get glamour models IN THE F&@KING NEWSPAPER.
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Although, to be fair, the Sun is barely a newspaper so much as it's just newsprint.
Re:Page Three (Score:4, Funny)
Why do Sun readers have black penises?
Because the print comes off on their hands.
- Jasper Carrott
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"Porn" in the UK is defined as "erections, ejaculations and penetrations".
VPN? (Score:2)
Re:VPN? (Score:5, Informative)
Next up, Wikileaks. (Score:2)
Poor Assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Their rationale is that if ISPs have managed to block all child porn, they'll also be able to block all other porn as well.
Except, they haven't...not even close.
So lets start. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. How are you going to block porn? Would you like me to register a new domain in 2 minutes and bypass your blacklist?
2. What about porn which comes from filesharing - such as torrents or upload-services? Oh right, they're the next step. *Marks*
3. This is going to backfire horribly. 18 year old kiddy living with his mom can't get her to opt in. Married Man with very controlling wife can't get to opt in. So lets visit the bowels of the internet to get porn - and get a virus collection while we're there.
4. If you want to think of the children, you could like - give away free child-control software or something? Yes? No? Maybe?
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Not once in the history of the internet have i heard that phrase used in conjunction with some proposal that would ACTUALLY protect children.
Dupe (Score:2)
Won't work because (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm ambivalent... (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand... er, let's just say the other hand is busy right now.
Default != mandatory (Score:3)
Now for the record I consider this to be a bad idea; but I can see why they think it's a good one. Parents are generally considered to be less technically literate than their kids (on average) so you end up with a common situation where any on-computer filtering is likely to be easily removed or bypassed by the children. Putting default porn blocking on internet connections (with an easy opt out) would prevent this problem (to an extent) without the 'concerned parents' having to do anything. This is already the situation with mobile internet in the UK (I don't know whether the cellcos did this themselves, or the government told them to). By default 'adult content' is blocked on cellphones, and a phone call to the provider removes the block.
Why this isn't a good idea is that there is so much porn (or other potentially objectionable material) out there that a 'blacklist' cannot possibly be comprehensive; and of course there are proxies, mirrors etc etc so that if little Johnny really wants to see boobs he can. Ideally, sufficiently concerned parents should directly supervise their kids' access, but a lot of kids these days use their own computers in their room, and Joe Sixpack has 'better things to do'.
What would be a better solution would be for internet connections to be 'open'/unfiltered by default, but the telcos provide the option of blocking on signup, and also information about 3rd party software (blacklist/whitelist) and also information about how any block isn't completely reliable, and if you are that concerned about what the little'uns are doing online then parhaps you should keep an eye on them. Default blocking is not the answer.
Whitelisting (Score:3)
Seriously, the ONLY solution that is reasonable for parents who think hiding things from their kids will be good for them is to implement whitelisting at home. No link can be followed until/unless mommy or daddy approves it. This both allows the kids to surf alone at home, and encourages mommy and/or daddy to spend time with little johnny and jane.
Also, this way, the kids will be motivated to get out more and visit homes that aren't breeding grounds for stone-age ideas about sexuality, and we'll all benefit
So pick a different DNS provider (Score:2)
Bandwidth costs. (Score:3)
Revenue opportunity for ISPs? Or am I too cynical? (Score:4, Insightful)
With .XXX this won't be hard (Score:3)
Claire Perry, Conservative MP (Score:2)
Discussed last month on Slashdot. [slashdot.org]
The Conservatives railed against the "Nanny State" and "Big Government" when they were out of power, and now they want to block every single web site with "adult content" by default, forcing ISPs to pay millions for upgraded filtering systems? The problem is, the filtering systems they want the ISPs to use are the same ones that they already use to enforce the IWF block list [wikipedia.org]. But the IWF block list is only a few thousand URLs; to block all adult content they will have to blo
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Orwell peered into the UK soul when he wrote 1984 (Score:2)
Their rationale is that if ISPs have managed to block all child porn, they'll also be able to block all other porn as well.
Good thing this is actually just made up by the submitter, because if someone seriously said they had blocked all child porn I'd call them up and say I have the London Bridge for sale and ask if they wanted to buy. The actual article just says there's a block list for child porn sites, why can't we make one for regular porn sites as well? And they're right, that's what all kind of parental control software do already. This is about moving that list one step up from the parental control software up to the IS
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
likely to have the opposite effect (Score:4, Insightful)
This is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect.
They claim that they've succeeded in preventing people from inadvertently viewing child porn. This doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I live in the US, where there is no such law in place, and I've never inadvertently viewed child porn. Presumably this is because child porn is illegal, so nobody just puts it up on a publicly accessible web site. I'm sure people who want to get child porn can get it, and presumably they do it using various workarounds, such as encryption, anonymization, and file-sharing on darknets, so that they don't end up in jail. However, most people who arent chil-porn users aren't going to bother learning how to use the complicated workarounds, because it would be a lot of work and they don't need it.
Now let's imagine what happens with this new setup they're proposing to protect boys from seeing naked ladies. Adolescent boys are generally extremely interested in seeing naked ladies. So now you've taken a large chunk of the population and given them a strong motivation to route around censorship. Every adolescent boy in Britain now wants to know how to use workarounds in order to evade the controls put in place by their parents and their parents' ISP. Learning to use these workarounds will be some work, but these fine young British boys are highly motivated to do that work because they've got Big Ben in their pants aching like a bad tooth.
So the net result is to take anti-censorship workarounds that are currently used by a tiny population of child-porn users and ensure their widespread adoption by every horny kid in England, Scotland, and Wales. Congratulations.
Re:likely to have the opposite effect (Score:5, Funny)
I can't believe you just implied that Northern Irish children are too stupid to use a VPN.
Shame on you! It's people like you that cause Troubles!
Terrible journalism (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Wrong.
Ed Vaizey is the minister responsible for this proposal: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/850896-new-porn-controls-for-children-on-internet-planned-by-government [metro.co.uk]
Good summary and comment at http://www.longrider.co.uk/blog/2010/12/19/its-all-for-the-children/ [longrider.co.uk] - of course, once there is the precedent for blocking porn by default, it's then easy to block all sorts of 'undesirable' content, including Wikileaks etc.
No good when DIY is in vogue (Score:3)
I live with a teacher, and have worked in local schools myself.
I know for a fact that at least two of the schools in my area have discovered that their kids are busy making their own porn, which they cheerfully send each other via their phones.
Maybe our nanny.. I mean, government.. could do better by insisting that parenting children be the job of their parents, instead of insisting that it be done for them by teachers and corporations?
throw the baby out with the bathwater (Score:4, Interesting)
In this case I think that "Throwing the baby out with the bathwater" is appropriate in describing exactly what is going on. The only difference is that there's a wet pedophile now standing outside the window with a baby to boot.
Find and punish the offenders, not the rest of society.
I actually have a story to go along with this. When my wife was pregnant with out 2nd child, she posted a sonogram of our daughter on her Facebook page. Someone actually reported the sonogram (all black and orange of course) because it contained a picture of her "naughty bits" with a line and the words "girl". If we want to continue down this slippery road, they'll find other things to block besides pornography to "protect" our children. How about we educate parents on how to both block content on their end while we also educate them how to talk to their children about subjects they deem sensitive? If this were to come to fruition, I can't even imagine what's next.
Blocking legal material (Score:5, Insightful)
Most pornography is legal.
The blocking of material should be decided on a legal / illegal basis. Blocking a subset of legal material will, you would hope, violate some trade regulation. The law-abiding producers of legal pornography have as much right to do business, without government interference, as the charity shop selling home-made cakes.
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The Government. What you thought that it was going to be a fair answer or something?
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Probably the IWF, the same group that currently defines child porn. Note that this is a non-government organisation that has somehow gained a mandate to look at child porn online and see if it's really child porn. Anything on their watch list is blacklisted by the major ISPs.
They managed to get this done the same way that they are proposing to do this time. Don't actually enact a law, just threaten to unless the major ISPs 'voluntarily' agree to censor. This has the delightful side effect that it's not
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Justice Potter Stewart. He knew it when he saw it.
Pornography is fundamentally a religious concept, as is the notion that seeing it is harmful to children.
Re:What in the heck?? (Score:5, Insightful)
... Banning all torrents, usernet access, or file shareing sites such as Rapidshare, Uploading, DepositFiles, etc??? How would they do this without killing almost all of the internet??
I think that is their plan, both in method and intent.
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This is the first step to making the internet a whitelist. You don't think its possible to block all porn, but they'll try, and the first thing to do will be to block anything that isn't proven NOT to be porn.
Re:What in the heck?? (Score:5, Insightful)
In order to block pornography by default, what they'll have to do is put the entire country on its own network and erect some kind of great firewall between citizens and the world-wide Internet. At the firewall level, filters would then be easily implemented to block any content that the government might find objectionable.
The good news is that there several other countries who have successfully deployed such technology to their citizenship, so the U.K. should be able to seek technical and political advice from them:
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They won't because most ISPs are already blocking child porn (and this was done some years ago with very little fuss, largely because nobody has yet invented a way to fuss about these things without coming across as a kiddie-fiddling pervert).
It's down to the ISP how they actually implement the block, but they get information about what to block from an organisation calling itself the Internet Watch Foundation. AFAICT, almost every ISP simply puts an invisible proxy in place on port 80. Most block access
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This has got nothing to do with socialism.
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They have! All the child porn is gone!
And if you're smart and don't want them to come up with more harebrained ideas, you keep telling everyone that, too!