UK Internet Porn Blocking Rejected 101
Gordonjcp writes "The BBC are reporting that the proposed automatic blocking of porn websites by UK ISPs has been rejected by the government. Only 35% of the parents who responded to a survey on filtering wanted an automatic block. The report (PDF), drawn from over 3500 responses, found that 80% of all those who responded were in favour of no filtering of any kind."
The Internet is not a babysitter (Score:5, Insightful)
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What's a 'disagree'? When can I buy one?
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Yeah, and if a kid comes into a store and wants to buy a porn magazine with his allowance then clearly the parents are just coasting on the law instead of parenting, so we should just take away the law. No matter how much you parent, kids will sometimes refuse to comply. If they don't want to brush their teeth before they go to bed, explaining it and leaving the choice up to them isn't good parenting. Sometimes you just have to hit that override switch and say either you're brushing your teeth or I'm brushi
Re:The Internet is not a babysitter (Score:5, Insightful)
A filtering tool should at least be something for each to set up or opt in to, if they feel they need it. If it's supposed to be good parenting, it needs to be something they actively involve themselves with in some form.
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holy shit! ... stop using logic
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Then install a filtering tool on your own network and leave the rest of the country alone.
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FTFY. (Praise Bob)
Re:The Internet is not a babysitter (Score:5, Informative)
IMHO that is not even the biggest issue here. It has already been proved in Finland, that the (child)porn filtering is
- Used to block local websites that tell people the truth about the porn filtering (e.g. by providing a list of websites that are blocked and don't contain information that according to the law should be blocked)
- The websites that are blocked, have absolutely no way to get out of the list (the owner of the website has tried for over a 4 years now)
- Already discussions have started about extending the block (e.g. the pirate bay is already blocked)
- It was not written into the law, but the creators of the law explained that it should be used only on foreign websites, yet right from the start a local website (mentioned above) was blocked.
This is absolutely insane.
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Get rid of children?
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Dude, child porn is illegal in pretty much any country and even simply possessing such images (which, one could argue, is harmless) would mean prison sentence.
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Dude, child porn is illegal in pretty much any country and even simply possessing such images (which, one could argue, is harmless) would mean prison sentence.
So why allow people to possess it at all? Block the bits.
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There are many countries with Internet Blacklists "to block child porn". Every damn one of them has put opposing political party websites on the list within a year. Slashdot has had several articles about this over the years.
Create a tool for tyranny and you always create a tyrant.
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Nononono.
Never block anything. Get a court order, watch the bits and arrest the miscreant that has them. Track the bits back to the originator and haul their asses away. Do this often and in a public manner.
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Nononono.
Never block anything. Get a court order, watch the bits and arrest the miscreant that has them. Track the bits back to the originator and haul their asses away. Do this often and in a public manner.
Your idea isn't actually bad. I think there should be a way for people to report the bits if they discover it without getting arrested though.
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simply possessing such images (which, one could argue, is harmless) would mean prison sentence.
Not in my country. Here we argued and decided it was harmless...
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It already is blocked. That's one of the arguments that proponents of the blocking are using: ISPs have blocked child porn, which proves that they do have the ability to block things, thus they should have no reason to refuse.
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It already is blocked. That's one of the arguments that proponents of the blocking are using: ISPs have blocked child porn, which proves that they do have the ability to block things, thus they should have no reason to refuse.
If all ISPs and search engines agree to block anything flagged as child porn then wouldn't this solve the problem of child porn distribution? Then we wouldn't have to arrest thousands of people a year.
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If all ISPs and search engines agree to block anything flagged as child porn then wouldn't this solve the problem of child porn distribution?
Unfortunately sometimes people forget to set the Evil Bit (RFC 3514) when they transmit child port. Therefore the filters sometimes fail to block.
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If all ISPs and search engines agree to block anything flagged as child porn then wouldn't this solve the problem of child porn distribution? Then we wouldn't have to arrest thousands of people a year.
Doesn't work. How would you flag something as child porn - or not choild porn? There is no way of doing this automatically.
The users can flag it.
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a: doesn't actually prevent access
b: costs money
c: allows the government to ignore the fact that the material exists rather than trying to put the creator/distributor in jail
d: fucks with my internet
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because blocking:
a: doesn't actually prevent access
b: costs money
c: allows the government to ignore the fact that the material exists rather than trying to put the creator/distributor in jail
d: fucks with my internet
A. It does make access hard enough that no one who isn't actively looking for it can stumble upon it by accident.
B. It costs even more money to arrest people on possession charges.
C. The material isn't the issue, the harm to children during the production is the issue.
D. I think our internet is fucked with more when we have to worry about tinyurl and other random links infecting us with child porn.
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C. So why are we blocking it? Why is there a problem with people stumbling upon it by accident (A)? Why should possession be illegal (B)?
If the problem isn't the material but the harm but the damage caused by production, surely the trick is to make production illegal. Or even better, make actual child abuse illegal, and then try to stop it from happening? The resources put into filtering, blocking and pursuing people for possession could be better spent on prevention and helping victims, perhaps.
For the rec
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D. I think our internet is fucked with more when we have to worry about tinyurl and other random links infecting us with child porn.
The existence of the child porn filter in the UK proved to UK courts that ISP's are capable of cheaply filtering Pirate Bay, and as a consequence various non-child porn sites are now blocked. Hopefully the mission creep to regular porn will be avoided this time, but it seems likely that our luck will run out sooner or later.
Once we get another terrorist attack (it is bound to happen sooner or later), "glorifying terrorism" is likely to go in the filter too, and that could end access to Roj TV and Al Jazeera
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If you believe in any of the basic tenets of democracy, the case to answer is always for the "why" side not the "why not" when it comes to censorship. Simply asking "hey, why not just introduce a repressive censorship regime?" is not valid by itself if you want to call your country a democracy.
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In other news, 35% of parents are clueless about how the Internet works.
Cumming to their senses...? (Score:1, Funny)
Sorry, could not help myself... :)
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Re:How is there overlap? (Score:4, Informative)
80% of [i]all those who responded[/i] wanted no filtering of any kind.
Re:The numbers don't make sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The numbers don't make sense (Score:5, Informative)
There's no overlap. You just didn't comprehend what was written in the summary. 35% was of parents. 80% was of all people responding to the survey.
Hardly surprising that the subset of parents were slightly more in favour of filtering than the entire group, which included non-parents.
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Comprehension fail.
Consider that the set of people who are parents and the set of people who responded in total are not be the same set...
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Yeah, I missed that small detail, looks like I wasn't the only one, should have RTFA before commenting.
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"3,500 responses to the 10-week consultation - which included those from members of the public, academics, charities and communication firms as well as 757 from parents."
Indeed.
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So parents made up less than 20% of the total respondents, and some parents were in favor of no filtering of any kind. Even in the UK, people understand that government shouldn't be in the business of filtering lawful material, and tha
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Maybe some of them were Russians.
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I think you mean
tits
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Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in other words, 2/3 of parents actually don't want government to think of their children all the time and instead want it to stay the hell out? Who would have thought...
Who would have thought that the majority of parents do NOT want government to take over raising their kids and instead want to hand down their own values instead of letting government dictate what values they should have?
I'm surprised. For a change, it's a positive surprise.
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Although I agree porn is not necessarily bad I don't know If it is a good teaching aid either. I think most porn is not a realistic portrayal of sex, and really doesn't excuse parents from explaining sex to their children.
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Who would have thought that the majority of parents do NOT want government to take over raising their kids and instead want to hand down their own values instead of letting government dictate what values they should have?
The article states that 50% of parents wanted some form of content filtering. Besides which, I'm not sure what part of the world you're from, but the parents I've been around do try to protect their children from pornography... It's not one of the values they hand down.
I would wager that the reluctance is due in part to: 1. the parents actually wanting access to porn for themselves, but not their children (hypocrisy); and, 2. the parents weighing the consequences of accidental blocking content, such as sexu
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A public consultation found 35% of parents wanted an automatic bar while 15% wanted some content filtered, and an option to block other material.
and then,
The report found that, taking respondents as a whole, the majority were against all forms of control with more than 80% answering no to each of the three questions.
These two figures don't add up.
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35% of parents. 80% of all respondents, which included non-parents, academics, industry reps, etc.
It is notable that while more parents wanted blocking than the rest of the respondents (proportionally), it was still not a majorit yin favour. That's a pretty sound rejection.
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That doesn't need to be hypocrisy. It might also just be them considering their children still too young for porn.
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I can see the parents' wish to keep kids from watching content they do not deem suitable for them (personally, I'd make sure they never have to endure a second of those Teletubbies), but consider this: ONE of their friends WILL have unfiltered access. Either because his parents don't care, because he knows how to outsmart the filter or because his parents use insecure passwords. And kids have a LOT of time for guessing...
And then he'll get his sex ed from his friends and their computers. Is that what you wa
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I believe the opt-in approach was supposed to take this into account... but yes, it would be possible to circumvent the system. The idea is that it is made at least somewhat difficult to do so, such as filtering at the ISP level. This would remove the convenience factor, which I think would eliminate a good deal of the problem, and is something that parents could not do without government intervention.
Though, like I said, the heavy handed approach of blocking at ISP through content sniffing will cause other
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I work at a school. We block all TCP and UDP traffic except port 80, which transparently redirects to a filter proxy. We use one of the best network filters on the market (Smoothwall). We have DNS filtered, HTTPS blocked. The stations are locked down, the list constantly updated, and on a semi-regular basis a technician (me) rummages through every image in every student area.
And guess what? I still find porn.
Yup, (Score:1)
that's what the internet is for.
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Nothing wrong with porn, anyone here not knowing at the very least one page that contains it?
I just want to be as certain as possible to be there (instead of, say, a school friend) when my kids stumble upon it. If they're at home, I can. if they can only access it outside of our home, I cannot.
Doesn't matter... (Score:1)
The UK government doesn't care what ordinary people think. You can be sure this or something like it will be back in the near future. It is a small comfort that the general public isn't as much brainwashed sheeple as I might have expected, but it will make no difference in the long run.
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The current UK government doesn't want this. So they will be using the figures to support their position.
The government doesn't want it as it is imposing excessive regulation on industry. The only reason they looked at it in the first place was a backbench MP got together with the Daily Mail (yes, the Mail of all people was complaining about access sexualised content on the internet, I guess they want a monopoly...) and caused a lot of fuss.
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The UK government was only doing this as a response to a vocal (and typically vicious) campaign from the Daily Mail and other members of the right-wing gutter press. They didn't really want to implement anything like this (being expensive and difficult), but they couldn't afford to have their usual support base turning against them.
This consultation lets them drop it while saving face. "We tried our best, but the people have spoken- sorry grass-root supporters!".
Hooray!!! Some sense!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Censorship (imho) is when the state tells you you can't talk about something.
Privacy is when you tell other people you don't want them talking about your personal stuff.
While there can be some overlap (the state telling you not to talk about someone else's personal stuff), they are two different things. Bank details come under privacy. Web-blocking comes under Censorship.
I think it would be great if we lived in a society mature enough to not need privacy, but for now we are stuck with it. Same with censorsh
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Agreed. Now let's get the Americans to stop bleeping out supposedly "bad" words for religitard reasons.
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Well done to all who responded (Score:2)
As someone who responded, my 14 families are all grateful that the MP's have listened to reason.
Now, back to redtube.
but when it came to torrents... (Score:2)
...no survey, just an order to the ISPs to block it. No real threat to people, just big money heading towards politicians pockets...
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That was a court, not politicians. The law was introduced by the EU in the early 2000s, so Labour was behind it, not the Tories. Labour love interfering and nannying (and cosying up to has-been musicians). The Conservatives don't like interfering with businesses unless its to make other businesses they prefer richer, so were against this web-blocking proposal from the beginning (and only looked into it because a backbench MP and the Daily Mail kicked up a fuss) - the survey was to give them an excuse to she
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Blocking torrents was targeted at blocking people from accessing outright illegal material.
Porn (most of it at least) is afaik not illegal in the UK.
And that is a key difference. Also the torrent block is non-optional: it applies to all subscribers. The porn block would be optional (albeit probably on an opt-out basis).
And yes I know those blocks are generally ineffective, but that's not the point here.
Correction (Score:1)
Blocking Child Pornography (Score:2)
- In practice when they talk about filtering "the internet" they mean filtering HTTP (and HTTPS) access ONLY.
- That means that OTHER distribution means (HTTP over VPN, TOR, encrypted files over P2P, URLS to FTP servers, private email servers, etc) will not be filtered.
Functionally it's just sweeping the problem und
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This was not about Child Pornography. It was about blocking children from viewing otherwise legal pornography (consensual adults etc.).
The Government already automatically blocks Child Pornography web pages, where known.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation [wikipedia.org]
The People Who Know Best love this, don't they? (Score:3)
For "community [ ] organisations" they don't seem very much in tune with "the community", do they?
Nothing new there then, the NSPCC [nspcc.org.uk] et al have to keep the pressure on or their State Funding might dry up.
Policymaking with the aid of government funded pressure groups - more incest than you'll ever find online!
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They are idealists, have their opinion, and will seek as much publicity as they can with that opinion. Now they certainly will do good work within their niche, those strong opinions are not usually a reflection of the overall community.
And that's not about government funding (which they normally get for their real activities such as manning a child abuse report hotline), those remarks are to get private funding, which comes from people that have the same strong opinions, and think that by donating to like-m
Surely it should be opt-in? (Score:2)
Automatic porn blocking is wrong on so many levels. Firstly, it should be opt-in so "concerned parents" are probably the only ones using it. Secondly, it's very likely to block non-porn sites as false positives and yet there will never be a porn list you can check publicly check against (because a) it'll be a good source for your porn bookmarks and b) it's done in "secret" to avoid a rival org taking the list and putting it in their porn filter list for free). Thirdly, it *will* be use as stepping stone to
It's okay, though. (Score:1)
pssst (Score:1)