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Censorship Government United Kingdom News Your Rights Online

UK Government Changes Tack and Demands Default Porn Block 163

Posted by timothy from the but-predictably-so dept.
judgecorp writes "British Prime Minister David Cameron is set to reverse a policy announced last week, and demand that ISPs filter adult content by default. This system would require users to actively opt out of a filter designed to block adult content and material about self-harm. Last week, after consultation with parents, the Department for Education had said that an opt-in system would be sufficient and no default porn block would be required, but the Daily Mail has announced triumphantly that Cameron will be presenting the policy in the paper. MP Claire Perry, who has argued for the block, will be in charge — and freedom of speech campaigners have branded the sudden change of mind as 'chaotic.'"
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UK Government Changes Tack and Demands Default Porn Block More

UK Government Changes Tack and Demands Default Porn Block

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  • "Will announce later today..." (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vanders ( 110092 ) on Thursday December 20, 2012 @09:53AM (#42346885) Homepage
    Perhaps we could, I don't know, wait until David Cameron actually announces this policy, rather than just believing everything you read in the Daily Mail, particularly as the Daily Mail are so hilariously biased on this subject in the place. Not to mention it's the Daily Mail.

    This is like this news stories you see where they tell you what someone is going to "announce" later. If we already know what they're going to say, why are you telling me before they've said it?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

      Why does the Daily Mail get so much press on the internet?

      You never see slashdot quoting the Weekly World News about the latest exploits of Batboy.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Jiro ( 131519 )

        The fact that the Weekly World News ceased publication in 2007 could also have something to do with it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

          You will be glad to know their website is still in operation. It appears to be update regularly.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xtifr ( 1323 )

          The fact that the Weekly World News ceased publication in 2007 could also have something to do with it.

          Was that an answer to his first question or his second, or both? I think it works as an answer to both. :)

      • Why does the Daily Mail get so much press on the internet?

        You never see slashdot quoting the Weekly World News about the latest exploits of Batboy.

        Not quite sure, probably because they're batshit crazy right wing hypocrites who love to make up sensational headlines. They also like to pretend they're 'for the people', they are in fact are made up of the same set of Tory toffs that would take away every-ones rights and freedoms as long as it didn't affect them too much, as long as they get to make a little profit along the way.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rts008 ( 812749 )

          So, it's similar to Fox News in the USA.....

          What is truly scary, is the number of people that are susceptible to this flavor of shit.

      • Sadly, it's actually the most visited online news site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16746785 [bbc.co.uk]

        It's not surprising it gets a lot of press - a lot of people "read" it.

      • Why does the Daily Mail get so much press on the internet?

        You never see slashdot quoting the Weekly World News about the latest exploits of Batboy.

        Maybe because it's the most visited newspaper website there is? Not that that legitimizes their reporting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_Online [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by shilly ( 142940 )

      This is a truly dipshitted comment. Cameron wrote the fucking article in the fucking Mail announcing the policy change. He's a twat.
      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2250809/Victory-Mail-Children-WILL-protected-online-porn-Cameron-orders-sites-blocked-automatically.html [dailymail.co.uk]

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dintech ( 998802 )
        Interestingly, the Daily Mail is a paper aimed predominantly at women and is the only newspaper in the UK with a majority female readership. Just look at the right hand row of images for proof. Women in general are more 'think of the children' than 'think of your rights' (or porn).

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by FBeans ( 2201802 )
      Further to this, the article hints at Cameron making a mandatory, default filter, however in the original article this is never stated. So arguing about the source is kind of a moot point as the original source never mentions any mandatory filtering. Waiting is a great idea here, this should not have made it to submission.

  • As in, the government will ask about what the people think and then prettend to listen... Of course then they will do whatever the hell they want anyway.

    I'd rather not be asked in the fucking first place, it's like teasing a child with a cookie it can never have, all they do is piss people off AND ignore the majority view.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jawnn ( 445279 )

      As in, the government will ask about what the people think and then prettend to listen...

      Uhm..., don't the Brits elect their "government"? So, just like here in the U.S., they keep electing the same lousy people to represent them. Imagine that.

      • It's almost exactly like the US yes, ie basically nothing important really changes no matter who's in power. Even when you vote for the "other side" (or in our case a coalition of 2 parties), "democratic" government is "democratic".

      • There are three major parties (discounting UKIP, who may or may not come to something in the next General Election), and two of them coalesced to form this government. The other party has not voiced strong opposition to this policy. So of a choice of 3 parties, two are implementing it and one doesn't seem to care overly. So not much of a choice there.

        For what it's worth, the government launched a public consultation, which came back overwhelmingly against this policy. So you can't vote against it, and can't

  • RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 20, 2012 @10:01AM (#42346959)

    none of this is true....

    • The only RAs in the story were to the previous announcement that has allegedly been overturned. The Daily Mail article that the story is about is here [dailymail.co.uk], though as it's the Daily Mail I take it with an emetic-scale pinch of salt.
  • If parents want to protect their children for things that they consider objectionable they could use a government proxy to block what the government think that is objectionable or ask their isp for filtering (to avoid messing with i.e. browser configuration), but must be the parents option.
    • Or they could just use one of the many commercial products available that do this sort of filtering for you. But no, of course we need the government to do it for everyone.
    • Given that parents didn't have an equivalent to an ISP filter for books that I read and television that I watched when I was growing up, why would they need their kids to have a professional babysitter now? If the kids must have a computer in their room and not the family room, surely there's a simple way to configure a router / firewall PC to show all web pages going into the house in real time. Also, if it's basically a censorship blacklist, I wonder:
      1) What else might end up on it "by accident" and th

  • how about (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rufty_tufty ( 888596 ) on Thursday December 20, 2012 @10:13AM (#42347055) Homepage

    Can I get a default block on things I find offensive to children please?
    * Violence
    * Religion
    * Telephone Scams
    * Adverts to tacky products
    * politicians
    * The Daily Mail

    Seriously why the focus on this one thing that some people think is bad for some other people? If you have a problem with receiving something, you fix it, the tools are out there and free! Don't make your problem my problem because of your ignorance and laziness.

    • Most of all, it goes this way: 1. I don't want to be marked as "the guy who requested switching the adult filter on" by the government or ISP. 2. It's better to have it this way by default, and not have to resort to proxies. 3. YMMV highly about what is or isn't offensive.

    • Re:how about (Score:4, Interesting)

      by VortexCortex ( 1117377 ) <VortexCortex AT ... trograde DOT com> on Thursday December 20, 2012 @10:27AM (#42347209)

      Seriously why the focus on this one thing that some people think is bad for some other people?

      Agreed, but didn't they already do this once? Think about it. If you ask everyone then eventually you'll find that everything on the Internet is offensive in some way to someone. They group all of this "offensive" content under one umbrella and opt you out of the Internet by default. If you want access to the Internet you have to opt in, and even pay for it!

      The whole cycle is starting again. IMHO, it's just another way to increase the price of Internet access. Once everyone's paying the additional "opt it to everything" fee the process will start again.

    • Once you define one filter and have a functioning censorship system,
      adding another filter is trivial and *NOBODY WILL NOTICE* until it's too late.

      Religion is a form of control of the people.
      Now that it's going away, they need something new and quick!

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 20, 2012 @10:17AM (#42347093)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Morons (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Archibald Buttle ( 536586 ) <steve_sims7@yah o o .co.uk> on Thursday December 20, 2012 @10:24AM (#42347171)

    Speaking as a British citizen, one with two small children (aged 7 and 8), my take is that my government is acting like a bunch of morons. They're allowing themselves to be led by the Daily Mail - a newspaper that has a long track record of spouting an ultra-conservative line that includes rabid xenophobia and plain and simple hatred of a significant proportion of the UK population. This move is not about making a rational choice, it's simply all about securing votes - the Daily Mail's readership are exclusively Conservative party voters, David Cameron's party.

    I'm strongly against net filtering. Implementing mandatory filtering is the thin end of the wedge. It will not be long before there's complaints and campaigns by the likes of the Daily Mail complaining about inappropriate material that is not being filtered. How long will it be before Wikipedia gets banned? That site is packed full of very adult material that some will find objectionable. And what about the BBC News covering stories about pedophilia? And all the swearing in YouTube videos? Google searches can link through to objectionable material, complete with previews, so shouldn't that be banned too? Even without such encroachment into areas that rational people can see as being innocuous, filtering still ends up being a blunt weapon, filtering out sites that deal with issues such as contraception and abortion since they fall under the label of "sex". If kids can't do research into such things then the problems we have in this country of teenage pregnancy can only get worse.

    As an example of such blunt filtering, I recently used a wifi network at a local church that had filtering enabled on their connection. They wanted to prevent childrens groups that met there from accessing things they deemed as being objectionable material. The end result was that almost every single link off of the church's own website was blocked. They saw the light after a few weeks and disabled the filtering.

    If this move happens I will be opting out of the filtering. That in itself makes me nervous - some people will assume that because I've done that I must be a bad parent. That sadly is exactly the kind of false conclusion that an average Daily Mail reader will reach.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Walterk ( 124748 )

      If only we could use this against the Daily Mail website.
      It's filled [dailymail.co.uk] with [dailymail.co.uk] things [dailymail.co.uk] that [dailymail.co.uk] could be deemed porn [google.co.uk].

      • Well, quite. This "policy" is being driven by the most shrill of Mail Mums. But Daily Dad does like to drink of the beer and look at teh boobies, so - like all pulpit pounders, ever - the rag and its site is rank with hypocrisy.

        Similarly, I recall the Sun running its usual "Find the paedos, spill their blood" stuff in the same issue where they ran a "Phwoar, Charlotte Church wins rear of the rear" wankpiece, using a photo taken when she was 15.

        • "Similarly, I recall the Sun running its usual "Find the paedos, spill their blood" stuff in the same issue where they ran a "Phwoar, Charlotte Church wins rear of the rear" wankpiece, using a photo taken when she was 15."

          It was the Daily Star - there was a piece decrying the depravity of Chris Morris's Brass Eye paedophile special, and in the next column had the pic of Miss Church (15) with the heading of "She's a big girl now ... chest swell!"

          http://screenagers.me/2010/07/21/tabloid-hypocrisy-charlot

      • Re:Morons (Score:4, Insightful)

        by wildstoo ( 835450 ) on Thursday December 20, 2012 @12:37PM (#42348945)

        Nail. Head.

        The very MINUTE a celebrity turns 18 (sometimes even earlier), they're hung on the Daily Mail's wall of shame, often with a headline in the vein of: "Ooh! Look! Celebrity X is all grown up! Here's some hawt pix!!!".

        You can practically hear the heavy breathing in articles like this [dailymail.co.uk] where the young age of the actress is the focus of the article. Seems odd for a newspaper that claims to campaign against the sexualization and commercialization of childhood, right?

        Then there's the straight up porn stories. I mean.. wtf? [dailymail.co.uk]

        Just have a scroll down the "FEMAIL" column on the right of any page. The "articles" listed there really say it all.

        They're hypocritical bastards of the worst kind.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gutnor ( 872759 )

      And what about the BBC News covering stories about pedophilia? And all the swearing in YouTube videos? Google searches can link through to objectionable material, complete with previews, so shouldn't that be banned too?

      It does not work that way. It is much worse - big player are not filtered because of the outcry they produce. Instead random small website that have pissed either connected people or an obsessed joe calling customer service 10 times an hour, get filtered. Most of them would never even realise that they are filtered because, if this filter is implemented as all the others, the list of blocked website is considered confidential.

      That is the danger. And yes, even Google could get along and filtering its searc

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      If they did introduce such filtering it would generate endless complaints from parents finding sites that somehow got through. If the government wants to be every child's nanny they will have to be effective, which is impossible.

    • i think a substantial group of of DM readers are are probably Ukip or in extreme cases BNP

  • Title is WRONG (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So there are two issues here:
    1) As others have mentioned, using the Daily Mail as the definitive source for anything ridiculous
    2) No matter the source, it would be nice if the submitter/editor actually read the content of the article and not just link blindly to it.

    The article quite clearly states:

    The Prime Minister says the Mothers’ Union, which has advised the Government on how to shield children from adult and violent internet content, is backing alternative proposals to allow parents to tailor exa

  • If you guys were a bit more sensible about free speech and stuff, you might still own India and North America! Oh! Ok, that was a little mean... I'm sure it was just because running the ENTIRE PLANET was just too much of a bother...

    Aah seriously though, setting up Tor isn't that hard and might be an option for those countries in which "Freedom" comes with dickish air quotes. At least until such time as your government decides to ban it. It should be good for another decade or so, though, until someone rea

  • ... what can we learn from this political flip flop?

  • Opt Out David Cameron Filter?
  • If you read the Daily Mail article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2250809/Victory-Mail-Children-WILL-protected-online-porn-Cameron-orders-sites-blocked-automatically.html [dailymail.co.uk] you will find that the truth is that David Cameron "is backing alternative proposals to allow parents to tailor exactly what they can and cannot see". Sadly due to the continuing illiterate editing by the Daily Mail this was somehow equated to "Victory for the Mail! Children WILL be protected from online porn after Cameron orders
  • "Last week after consultation with parents" Which parents? How many? What was their political makeup? This whole story screams censorship.

  • Will the Sun (UK paper) have to put a "warning filter" on its front page (ok, slashkiddies, google Page 3 girl")?

                        mark

  • After this is introduced other so called "questionable content" websites will slowly start appearing in the blacklist. Want to know more about drugs / safety / etc? Too bad, you're too young to know anything and have an opinion.
  • but I read that as "UK Government Changes Tack and Demands Porn".

  • Welcome to Politics (Score:3)

    by Crypto Gnome ( 651401 ) on Thursday December 20, 2012 @04:13PM (#42351937) Homepage Journal
    Irrespective of what is good for whom, PoliticianA agrees to support some policy of PoliticianB in return for vice-versa and suddenly legislation is passed.

    A sudden reversal of announced policy within a week is absolutely someone whoring out their principles to get what they want elsewhere.

    Most (but not all) Politicians have the morals, ethics, and integrity of pondscum.

  • I demand the Internet to have a default David Cameron block. I think that might be more useful.

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