Slashdot Mirror
BT Blocks 10,000 Child-Porn Site Visits A Day
jb.hl.com writes "The BBC is reporting that British Telecom, the predominant telecommunications company in the UK, is blocking 10,000 attempts to access child pornography a day. In the first three weeks of the system being operational, BT allegedly blocked 250,000 attempts to view such pages. They apparently have no idea how many of these hits were accidental, or caused by malware. The block affects 2.5m of BT's customers. Pierre Danon, chief executive of BT Retail, said with regards to privacy concerns that "we don't know their motives or who does it and honestly we don't want to know"." onion2k reminds us that we first mentioned the block in June.
The Malware one is harder, but I would have thought some fairly clever traffic analysis would throw up a good guide as to how much of the traffic is from Malware.
Big problem here is 'child pornography' is being used as a stepping stone to censorship on the Internet (as was 9/11 a stepping stone to the Big Brother approach to tagging/wathcing/montoring everybody in the name of terror we have now), and although BT is _not_ a Government owned Company, it is to a certain extent controlled by Billyliars Government.
This to me, although maybe done in good faith, is not the way to go.
What is needed is the sites/ISPs running this stuff shut down - and I cannot see how the FBI/CIA/Scotland cannot find them!
The idea is that if you create a good self-regulating industry body, you prevent govt. interference.
Knowing British censorship laws, and the attitude of UK governments to consenting porn in the past, if the IWF hadn't been set up, they'd have passed laws to get ISPs to block ALL porn including consenting and non-consenting.
It depends on how you define children.
People don't understand what paedophillia is. Paedophillia is the specific and sole (or overwhelmingly primary) attraction to children who have _not_ entered puberty. Puberlescent physical features as much of a turn off to them as females having beards and bald spots are to the average teenage male.
Many are so misguided that they cry "paedophile" if a 20 year old so much as holds hands with a 15 year old. Paedophiles largely don't care for teenagers. People like that famous Belgian sociopath who raped those teenage girls aren't paedophiles, they just treat young people like this because they're easier to abuse.
One little fact is that males are attracted to females at much younger ages than society accepts. Back in 19th century England, it was socially recognised that no morallistic female could want sex. We now know this isn't true, but there were strong social taboos on the matter and females wouldn't speak up about it, and males dominated public debate. Today, any adult male is terrified to admit he may find an under 18 year old attractive. Yet most do. The social taboos on the issue are made very strong by hysterical media stories. Another factor is that females are so influential now, and as they are usually unable to find males younger than themselves attractive, they're far less understanding that males do, and become more ridged on the subject.
According to scientific studies performed by psychologists, the ages females are at their _peak_ of physically attractivenss to adult males is 14 to 24. This is a severe contradiction with social perceptions. It also doesn't take a genius to figure out that 12 is alot closer to 14 than 45 is to 24. Historically puberty happened later (and we still don't know why), while children were psychologically very grown up by age 13 because of the lack of modern society's failings. We have today the double negative of children entering puberty too early (and confusing males' attractions) on the one hand, while young people mentally grow up far too late on the other. We also seperate different age groups from social contact because of schools and workplaces. If these three factors didn't exist, then we'd think nothing of a 30 year old dating a 16 year old, which is exactly how it used to be since the dawn of time. Girls regularly got married in their mid teens. This was almost the case where I live only a generation ago.
Also, paedophillia is a rare thing. Mathematically, there aren't many of them. Statistically, most child abuse is committed by hetrosexual parents and other close family figures. Sexual abuse by paedophiles only makes up a very small percentage of sexual abuse. One recent survey of prisons where I live found that only a very small minority of prisoners convicted of sexual offenses against children were paedophiles, and most committed these crimes on impulse and because the children were accessable.
Some European countries have such a different attitude about children and sexuality from English speakers that 12 year old girls may literally take their clothes off in a public park on a hot day while playing, and nobody thinks anything of it.
Ultimately, sexual abuse happens because people don't care for others. You have to either lack empathy or be delusional to treat a child in this way. If you want to save the children from these horrible things, have a more caring and open society. Knee-jeck social taboos don't help, no matter how certain you are of the subject.
in fact if you were 17 and you had a gf who was 15, taking pictures is kiddie pr0n while hittin' it is perfectly legal. that's what he's trying to say - the age of consent and the age for pics is not the same. think twice, type once...