ISPs To Censor Porn By Default In the UK By 2014 310
An anonymous reader writes "Parental filters for pornographic content will come as a default setting for all homes in the UK by the end of 2013, says David Cameron's special advisor on preventing the sexualization and commercialization of childhood, Claire Perry MP. Internet service providers will be expected to provide filtering technology to new and existing customers with an emphasis on opting out, rather than opting in."
so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Paintings and sculptures? Photography of nude people? Literature that has sections with with erotic or sexual topics (e.g. the Bible?)
But violent media is just fine.....
Re:so what is porn? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares 'what is porn'? Question is, 'How do you work around the blockage'?
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Question is, 'How do you work around the blockage'?
You can opt out (according to summary)
And I am sure that the helpful "suspected pervert/pedophile" investigative team will be very polite. You have nothing to worry about.
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Other than your family. Because some day Mother is going to come round to visit, and just to test if you are being a good little boy quickly check if she can see sex.com. Then you have to endure an hour-long lecture about how the 'didn't raise you this way.'
I'd say the same applies to girlfriends, but... slashdot.
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There will also be a very long list of perfectly unacceptable pages that won't get blocked. That, or they block everything.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Good luck trying to get a teaching job after your decision to opt out of the censorship goes on record.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
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what people don't understand is that porn is a bad thing when there is too much exposure, so it does a lot of good for people to block their access or at least make it harder to access... too bad they'll never get any appreciation for it...
People don't understand that because it isn't true.
I don't know, sometimes my writs gets rather sore
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what people don't understand is that porn is a bad thing when there is too much exposure, so it does a lot of good for people to block their access or at least make it harder to access... too bad they'll never get any appreciation for it...
People don't understand that because it isn't true.
I don't know, sometimes my writs gets rather sore
The chafing man, don't forget the chafing!
Re:so what is porn? (Score:4, Insightful)
What YOU don't understand is that adults should be making these decisions for themselves. They don't need laws to regulate their exposure.
Freedom includes the right to live an out-of-balance life, if one chooses.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
then pictures of ankles become porn.
or pinup girls.
pretty soon you'll be blocking all photography.
alcohol and tobacco are regulated because they have ill effects on health.. unlike porn.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people are predisposed to hoarding cats. Some people end up with 37 cats in their apartment. But who would say cats can (not always, or possibly even often) cause people to become cat hoarders. I mean technically it's true, in that it's a trigger for a certain type of person, but it's quite clear the person was already crazy.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you think we should block access to religion before blocking access to porn? It seems to me religion is way more harmful than porn.
Of course, too bad people who still believe in fairy tales will never get any appreciation for this.
Re: so what is porn? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well that's rather the point. Once you start blocking access to things, because someone is of the opinion you're not to be trusted to control yourself, or fully understand its limitations and dangers, then where do you draw the line?
Follow this line of thinking and ultimately you are advocating keeping people ignorant, because information, (any information) can be a dangerous thing.
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By your reasoning we should ban science too, it correlates terribly fine with social unequalty!
Would you care to back your utter bullshit with some data?
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You are looking at just wealth and wages. In terms of the variation between the quality of abode, the standard of healthcare and the life expectancy of the poorest and the richest things have been improving. Thatcher and Regan did a lot of damage but the baseline is still way above where it was 100 years ago.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
that was my point, the blockage is between politicians ears.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Informative)
Who cares 'what is porn'? Question is, 'How do you work around the blockage'?
I imagine in much the same way that water "works it's way around the blockage" when you drop a pebble in the Colorado river.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh, you actually think this is something to do with porn.
This is being used to get the censorship infrastructure in place, so it can then be expanded to cover any kind of 'bad data' in the future.
Oh, sorry, the Slippery Slope Mafia will be along in a minute to tell me that's a logical fallacy and, yes, it really is all just about stopping kids seeing naked people.
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..This is being used to get the censorship infrastructure in place, so it can then be expanded to cover any kind of 'bad data' in the future.
I hate to break it to you, but the infrastructure is already in place, and has been so for a number of years.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. When we get to cut 1000 and your door is being kicked in for whatever undesirable thing you are or are doing, at least we can feel smug because we knew the infrastructure for kicking in doors has been in place since the invention of doors and kicking.
It's not that the infrastructure is in place that's wrong, it's that it's being used, and excused, and justified and made into the new normal. It's not so much scary that they're doing it, it's scary that they're not even bothering to hide it anymore.
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It is lot worse. People believe this reason and accept it as the truth. Censoring of porn is just the start, next it is going to be something else. Like criticism of corrupt politicians that is active in congress. U.K is sounding more like a dictatorship every year that passes.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't the start.
The start was the de-facto compulsory imposition of child porn filtering. No-one dared object to that - it was filtering child porn, after all - but it still results in every ISP operating a filter system fed by a secret blacklist produced by an organisation with no transparency, accountability or oversight.
The second step was to then broaden the definition of child porn - something politicians at the time described as 'closing a loophole' - to include not just actual child porn but also artistic depictions of children, or things that look like children in some way (a condition put in to make sure fantasy creatures were covered), in sexual situations. Again, no-one dared oppose, for the public were told that this was needed to lock up some filthy nonce scum.
The third step was the 'extreme porn' law, creating a new legal class of pornography which is illegal to possess. The 'extreme' wide enough that an exception was required for material classified by our film board, to avoid inadvertantly banning a James Bond film which meets the definition for one scene.
This is step four.
I can only speculate on step five, but if I were a moral crusader in government I would look into setting very high penalties for showing pornography to a minor, and make sure ignorance of age or best-effort age checking is no defense - that way the internet porn industry would be driven entirely offshore, because no site operator would want to run the risk of a ten year sentence and life on the sex offender register after a child sneaks onto the family computer with a browser window still open.
Re:so what is porn? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are mistaken on one thing. It is the political right, or mix of many factors that is the source of this. As such there is no central source for this, with the exception of current government in the U.K.
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The mistake is to divide politics in 2 directions, left and right or liberal and conservative. You can have fiscally conservative, socially liberal people and the opposite so left vs right isn't clear cut. Then you also have the 2 directions of authoritarian vs libertarian. Either can be left or right. Currently almost all politicians are authoritarian. See http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2 [politicalcompass.org]
About political correct speech. Both sides play that card, here in Canada it is currently very politically inco
Re:so what is porn? (Score:4, Informative)
I also heard there are Muslamic Ray guns!
You do know these courts have no legal standing in the UK?
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The UK already operates 85 Sharia courts. They have limited power, for now. .
I found this hard to believe, so looked. It's true...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/10011260/Panorama-Inside-Britains-Sharia-Courts-BBC-One-review.html [telegraph.co.uk]
(One of many references)
A depressing extract from the undercover researcher/journalist who went to get advice on a (fictional) abusive husband:
“He hits me,” she maintained. Should she leave her home? Should she go to the police?
“The police, that is the very last resort,” said Dr Hasan. Instead, apparently, she should ask her husband: “Is it because of my cooking? Is it because I see my friends? So I can correct myself.”
Right. "Correct yourself"
Rather than continuing to undermine the hard-won universal values and freedoms on which our western democracies are (supposed to be) based, with crap like
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Then teach them that the Internet is a precious commodity and that not everything is kid friendly but as they grow older they can start using it more to their appropriate ages. Its not that tough but stop trying to off shore parenting to your fucking government.
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Its not that tough but stop trying to off shore parenting to your fucking government.
Is that the same government that provides and runs the schools, as well as providing all manner of health and safety guidance?
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Is easy, any page with the keyword "prism" surely is porn and must be blocked.
Or a physics/optics site or a Pink Floyd fan site.
well, the man's penis goes in the lady's vagina (Score:5, Funny)
also sometimes a guys penis goes in a guys mouth, or a guys anus, or sometimes a womans anus has a penis going in it and another penis going in her vagina at the same time, thats called double penetration
also there is uhm, bukkake, where a bunch of guys jerk off onto a woman and/or man.
then there is fetish porn, like, you know, some people are really into casts. like casts like you get for a broken bone. they think its sexy.
also there is like uhm, bestiality. where like people are fucking dogs and horses
then there is tentacle porn. it helps if you speak japanese.
ok then there is 'porn for women' which is a lot like other porn but with a soft lighting scheme
then there is lesbian porn. alot of them are not really lesbians.
but mostly i guess id say that porn is uhm, film production where nobody gets payed union scale.
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"I would say it is legalised prostitution allowed in a certain set of conditions."
If it's to be filmed, I'd say it's prostitution allowed in a set, full stop.
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Next time you go to an escort, carry a fancy looking camera and claim you're making a film if cops bust in.
Our rules are so stupid...
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Or a dirt cheap web cam. Either way works.
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I think ostensibly the rule is that everybody in on the action must be paid, and the payer isn't performing.
If you pay a woman for sex she's a prostitute and you're a john. If you pay a man and woman to have sex in front of you while you film it, they're actors and you're a producer.
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Re:so what is porn? (Score:5, Insightful)
Am confused. Doesn't this mean that youtube/dailymotion/tumblr and many other top sites would have to be put on the porn filter by default?
And what defines porn exactly? Sure, there's the obvious stuff, but people get off on anything. Would smoking fetish sites be classed as porn even tho the partipants are fully clothed? What about Gilbert Gottfried's epic 50 Shades of Gray reading (go on, look it up, is brilliant)?
Surely the UK government then has to porn-block the Sun/Star for the topless girls and put a ban on the jailbait-obsessed Daily Mail and its 'side panel of shame'? But as those papers are run by assorted right-wing business interest pals of said government I have a feeling they'd be immune.
If the sex serves a characterization purpose (Score:2)
Literature that has sections with with erotic or sexual topics (e.g. the Bible?)
I'd be inclined to agree with the interpretation given in the article "Porn with Plot" from TV Tropes [tvtropes.org]. It's literature if the sexual content serves a characterization purpose. It's porn if the plot is predominantly an excuse to get the characters together for sexual contact. The Bible, for example, uses sex (and in some cases, denial of sex) to show particular characters as not caring about following Jehovah's express wishes. It also has "The Song of Solomon",
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On the violent media thing, the logic there is that kids are more likely to have sex than go on violent rampages, which is not totally crazy. The crazy part is that kids are going to be brainwashed by media out there,
what're they doing on the commercialization part? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an interesting job title:
Special advisor on preventing the sexualization and commercialization of childhood
Will she also be proposing that UK homes have AdBlock on by default by 2014, to ensure that kids don't get too many ads targeted at them?
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No, but you can bet this won't stop at "porn". It will be "hate sites" (basically anything not PC) and sites that they claim are copyright infringing too.
Re:what're they doing on the commercialization par (Score:5, Funny)
""hate sites" (basically anything not PC)"
Like Apple?
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Re:what're they doing on the commercialization par (Score:5, Insightful)
And TV ads... are not those commercialization of childhood? What about an opt-out for those? (I personally would like that).
the irony - BBC covered up child abuse (Score:3)
in the jimmy savile case, and there are numerous, and i do mean numerous, cases of government corruption in covering up massive child abuse in "care homes" (homes for orphans, etc) in Great Britain, but also in its pseudo-attached islands of Guernsey, Jersey, etc.
how about (Score:2, Insightful)
how about the ISPs focus on merely PROVIDING THE INTERNET SERVICE rather than POLICING IT.
seriously.
fucking brits
"government effort to force ISPs" (Score:5, Insightful)
government effort to force ISPs
Anonymous Coward wrote:
how about the ISPs focus on merely PROVIDING THE INTERNET SERVICE rather than POLICING IT.
ISPs in Britain aren't free to provide Internet service without policing it. To do so they would have to move their operations out of Britain. How exactly is that feasible?
Re:how about (Score:4, Funny)
fucking brits
Beg your pardon, but allow me to correct you, chap. That would be "bloody brits", if you don't mind.
Re:how about (Score:5, Funny)
fucking brits
Sorry, not allowed to see those.
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And give up the chance to eventually become a state service, complete with bailouts and government protection from crimes? Surely not! There's a waiting list of companies who are trying to get into that fabled situation...where they are considered so important (i.e. well-known, popular) that the state must come to the rescue and nationalize them for all that is good. And in doing so, all former and future crimes become an issue of sovereign immunity, complete with taxpayer-funded defense.
Internet is for Porn (Score:2)
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The internet is for Porn [wikia.com]?
Why not block other things by default, too? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can request to get around the filters, after all, so why not block other things as well? Religious websites would be a decent start. What's wrong...? Suddenly blocking things by default is bad because you don't like what's being blocked this time around?
If 51% want it blocked (Score:2)
Suddenly blocking things by default is bad because you don't like what's being blocked this time around?
In theory, through elections to Parliament, the people decide who decides what to block by default.
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Because people are apparently too stupid to invest five minutes in deciding whether or not they want to censor information for themselves.
How about this, all who want to wear blinders may do so, they get no say over whether their neighbor should wear them.
People who don't even know what exists (Score:2)
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Has that ever worked? You'll get to elections 3 years after the fact, and people will either have forgotten, or the opponent will have even fewer things in common with you, that you end up voting for the lesser of two evils, though it might be the one that instituted censorship. Multiply this process by everyone that votes, district shenanigans, etc, and that theory is so diluted, that it might as well be a fallacy.
Re:If 51% want it blocked (Score:5, Informative)
No, this is the UK.
We get a choice of three parties, none of which represent our opinions on most issues.
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Block the whole internet by default. Customers have to submit a list of checkmarks letting the ISP know what they would like to have unblocked.
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Companies that provide both internet and television service in the same package would fight that one for sure; slippery slope to a la carte cable!
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Indeed. It'll be wonderful when they start charging extra for this service because *ding * ding* ding* censorship is, surprisingly, not free, so the costs will need to be offloaded somewhere, either in the form of a rate hike for customers, or money from the taxpayers. But I'm sure the UK has loads of money to spare, won't miss a few pouinds here and there, right? Doing well this global recession, right?
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Religious websites would be a decent start.
Will we have to blanket block them all? Or can we design a filter to select only certain theologies? Can this be extended to individual prophecies of a particular religion with which I disagree and do not wish my children exposed?
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Can I get anything from the PRISM IP address block censored? I just don't want my kids getting involved in government spy business.
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Well, since it's apparently okay to block things just because you don't like them, sure.
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Apples and oranges. SPAM is sending information to people who are not looking for it, whereas this is preventing people from finding information when they are looking for it (unless they call their ISP and presumably say something to the effect of 'yes, please turn on the wank service for me, I need some TLC from Fiona and her five friends.')
Dangerous ideas (Score:3)
"That said, restrictions on the content available (Score:2)
"That said, restrictions on the content available to young people via mobile networks have been in place for a number of years."
That shit blocked ICQ and the facebook chat for me. Gonna be fun times when they apply this to the whole internet.
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Enjoy.
Censoring porn is easy (Score:5, Insightful)
Censoring porn is easy.
Not censoring non-porn is easy.
Doing both at the same time is virtually impossible.
Who'll decide what porn actually is? (Score:3)
I guess there will be plenty of folks who will say something to the effect, "I know what porn is when I see it."
Question is: Whose eyes will decide this question?
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I believe it involes your mother...
Perfect Match (Score:5, Funny)
Question is: Whose eyes will decide this question?
Finally, we have found the perfect use for Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Join the Open Rights Group (Score:4, Informative)
All that said now is still a great time to join the Open Rights Group [openrightsgroup.org] - just to make sure.
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Actually, Claire Perry is pretty much a laughing stock even inside her own party.
As are several others including the minister for Health (who believes in homoeopathy) and the minister for work and pensions (who faked his own CV) and the minister for local government (who looks as though he has eaten his way through the output of a pie factory). But all of the ministers in this government simply ignore any evidence which runs counter to their ideology.
This should be fun (Score:2)
Wait till the porn industry sues the government/ISP's for blocking their perfectly legal content and losing them business.
and those who are incorrectly blocked.
Better that than IPv6 (Score:2, Funny)
Privacy is a sham (Score:2)
Opt out? (Score:3)
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Is this opt-in policy applied to phone-sex lines? (Score:3)
Sue them whenever they fail to censor anything (Score:4, Interesting)
Anybody with children. Please, the moment they start the censorship, sue them whenever you discover that your child has found any porn at all. If they start censoring, make them liable for their failure to censor well. With some luck they will have to quit trying.
opt out (Score:2)
i will definitely be opting out david cameron at the next election
Read between the lines... (Score:2)
You cannot censor Internet porn- and this is the whole point. Tony Blair (these actions are actually his, just like the declaration of war against Syria by the USA and EU) knows this, so what is the real game?
1) filters are activated at the ISP level, actually representing the widest and most repressive Internet censorship regime on the planet
2) every other third-world hell hole immediately justifies its acts of censorship by quoting the UK
3) the porn censor 'fails' and the UK tabloid press goes into over-d
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No Sex, Please. (Score:3)
We're British.
Coming soon to every UK ISP's FAQ page (Score:2)
#1: "How do I enable porn?"
And, because I don't see that anyone else has posted it yet, my favorite quote: "I'm fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be called ``Bring back the porn!'' "
http://www.coxisms.com/229/ [coxisms.com]
Is the sarcasm detector on? (Score:3, Funny)
You want to what? Opt out?
You fucking pervert!
People like you don't deserve to be on the Internet!
Censoring would probably appear next to billing (Score:2)
How do we opt out?
Probably through the same web-based interface that the customer uses to pay his Internet bill.
They have your date of birth on file (Score:2)
I would have guessed mailing a form with a notarized signature to affirm that you are of legal age
No need. They have the householder's date of birth on file since he showed ID when signing up for service.
that you have no parties within your household who are not of legal age
The article implies that this is not a condition. It mentions "time-limited deactivation of filtering": parents can have the filtering turn on during hours when the kids are expected to be in bed.
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In involves a time machine and contraceptive...the Time Lords are presumably working on the solution.
Wait, your question was 'how do we opt out,' not 'how do we keep the stupid from spreading.'
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I have no problem with that, as long as its Boston Cream.
Then she licks it off..
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unless she's really double-jointed in the back, that'll be hard. unless you have a 2nd woman for the festivities, and it's all good as far as I'm concerned
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Because sex is unnatural.
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Because it's something that tends to arouse strong emotions in people...who wants to explain to their 8 year old son or daughter why dad is pitching a tent, or why mom doesn't let the plumber slap her ass like in the movies? Like it or not, people are more de-sensitized to violence than they are to sexual situations; and that makes some people uncomfortable. They seek not to understand their emotions, and come to some peace with them, but to wall them off or control them; their final plan is a human race th
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Hmm, we'll see. Their house of Lords is always worth a quick read, and could probably read between the lines of this proposal and quash it faster than our Senate could.
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Well, it's an attempt at population control, albeit in the name of morality. Kind of silly once you throw some science into things, and take a closer look at the current state of the human genome (one more major war / enough minor wars, all future descendent of mankind will genetically...interesting (said the way House says something when he comes across a patient with several genetic diseases all co-morbid in the same individual)). But then this is politics, where science, let alone truth, is a secondary o
Re:This is already being done (Score:4, Insightful)
It's worse than that. During the wikipedia block incident, it was noticed that many ISPs 'block' sites by intercepting the HTTP request and returning a false 404 error.
They are so secretive that even when they block a site, they deliberately make it look like there was a technical error. They could be blocking thousands of innocent sites right now, and no-one would notice. The internet is full of 404s, a few more won't raise any attention.