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UK Gov't Wants To Block Internet Porn By Default
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."
Reading the article, the idiot MP for Devizes (itself a byword for UK backwardness) thinks that this will stop children in bad homes from seeing nasty things. The dimwit doesn't seem to realise that those are exactly the places where the parents will have opted in.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
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.
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.
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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Oh, kids can see murder every day in a lot of gruesome ways on TV and movies - but a naked human is, gasp, indecent and it is justified to trample every human right to prevent *anyone* be seeing or thinking about this, just think of the children!
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Where do you find this porn with well-proportioned human forms?
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).