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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."
o-+-[
You just looked at ASCII Child porn. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Is there a better example of the slippery slope associated with any censorship?
"Opting in" will likely place customers on a permanent record that will be "accidentally" leaked to a "citizens for decency" movement to publish.
All internet blocking will do is increase the demand for VPN services, surely? Kids can just VPN out of the ISPs control and get all the porn they want, Adults will probably rather VPN for porn than officially be on a "want porn" list. What happens with false-positives? Many websites get blocked by net-nanny et al. which aren't porn. With a filter, you can just add a manual exception when that happens. What do you do with an ISP-level block? Will the Sun be blocked due to page3? What about artistic photos involving nudity which aren't erotic? This service should be opt-in rather than opt-out...
Although, to be fair, the Sun is barely a newspaper so much as it's just newsprint.
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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.
Except, they haven't...not even close.
1. How are you going to block porn? Would you like me to register a new domain in 2 minutes and bypass your blacklist?
2. What about porn which comes from filesharing - such as torrents or upload-services? Oh right, they're the next step. *Marks*
3. This is going to backfire horribly. 18 year old kiddy living with his mom can't get her to opt in. Married Man with very controlling wife can't get to opt in. So lets visit the bowels of the internet to get porn - and get a virus collection while we're there.
4. If you want to think of the children, you could like - give away free child-control software or something? Yes? No? Maybe?
Why the linked article has this in the 'breaking news' section is beyond me; this was discussed on slashdot about a month ago.
after all they pulled kids off missing children cases so they can go after IP issues.
They were using kids to investigate missing child cases? Is this why nothing ever gets done in government?
... Banning all torrents, usernet access, or file shareing sites such as Rapidshare, Uploading, DepositFiles, etc??? How would they do this without killing almost all of the internet??
I think that is their plan, both in method and intent.
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."
On one hand, something does need to be done about the corrosive, depraved, negative sexual imagery that pervades large parts of the internet - it's definitely not something I want my children exposed to.
On the other hand... er, let's just say the other hand is busy right now.
Now for the record I consider this to be a bad idea; but I can see why they think it's a good one. Parents are generally considered to be less technically literate than their kids (on average) so you end up with a common situation where any on-computer filtering is likely to be easily removed or bypassed by the children. Putting default porn blocking on internet connections (with an easy opt out) would prevent this problem (to an extent) without the 'concerned parents' having to do anything. This is already the situation with mobile internet in the UK (I don't know whether the cellcos did this themselves, or the government told them to). By default 'adult content' is blocked on cellphones, and a phone call to the provider removes the block.
Why this isn't a good idea is that there is so much porn (or other potentially objectionable material) out there that a 'blacklist' cannot possibly be comprehensive; and of course there are proxies, mirrors etc etc so that if little Johnny really wants to see boobs he can. Ideally, sufficiently concerned parents should directly supervise their kids' access, but a lot of kids these days use their own computers in their room, and Joe Sixpack has 'better things to do'.
What would be a better solution would be for internet connections to be 'open'/unfiltered by default, but the telcos provide the option of blocking on signup, and also information about 3rd party software (blacklist/whitelist) and also information about how any block isn't completely reliable, and if you are that concerned about what the little'uns are doing online then parhaps you should keep an eye on them. Default blocking is not the answer.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Could one motivation for ISPs to join be a reduction in bandwidth usage. We already hear about the massive amounts of it which streaming services such as youtube and netflix. There must be also a substantial amount dedicated to comparable adult sites. Block them by default and those who dont opt in for whatever reason wont get through so many GB each month, or each day depending on the user.
I'm sure ISPs will be happy to remove the porn block ... for a fee. Basically turning porn on the internet into a premium service.
If all porn site are forced to use .xxx, it won't be hard- the ISP could probably get away with just blocking DNS requests to it's servers for the .xxx domains. Of course, if I were British, I'd use a VPN.
tens of thousands...for porn? I'd bet money there are hundreds of thousands to millions of porn website, their list will grow by a ludicrous amount each day as well. http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/ rough guess at how many domains are our there, I could easily see at least a couple hundred thousand of the current 125 million domains at least have porn on them somewhere, even if they aren't traditional "porn sites" dedicated to it/requiring payment. in my teen years (not so long ago) I used to visit quite a few "funny video" sites that also would randomly through in some porn just for good measure :P
Probably the IWF, the same group that currently defines child porn. Note that this is a non-government organisation that has somehow gained a mandate to look at child porn online and see if it's really child porn. Anything on their watch list is blacklisted by the major ISPs.
They managed to get this done the same way that they are proposing to do this time. Don't actually enact a law, just threaten to unless the major ISPs 'voluntarily' agree to censor. This has the delightful side effect that it's not the government's responsibility, so they have no official oversight and can deny all responsibility (as happened when I wrote to my previous ISP about their blocking o Wikipedia).
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In order to block pornography by default, what they'll have to do is put the entire country on its own network and erect some kind of great firewall between citizens and the world-wide Internet. At the firewall level, filters would then be easily implemented to block any content that the government might find objectionable.
The good news is that there several other countries who have successfully deployed such technology to their citizenship, so the U.K. should be able to seek technical and political advice from them:
after all they pulled kids off missing children cases so they can go after IP issues.
They were using kids to investigate missing child cases? Is this why nothing ever gets done in government?
I'm sure you've heard the childhood retort "it takes one to know one"? Well, now we know where it came from.
This has got nothing to do with socialism.
Please tell me what porn is. Then once you are done I will come up with two things.
1) Something that you explain is porn and clearly is not.
2) Something that you explain is not porn and clearly is.
And what again is so bad about porn and what again is not bad about violence?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect.
They claim that they've succeeded in preventing people from inadvertently viewing child porn. This doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I live in the US, where there is no such law in place, and I've never inadvertently viewed child porn. Presumably this is because child porn is illegal, so nobody just puts it up on a publicly accessible web site. I'm sure people who want to get child porn can get it, and presumably they do it using various workarounds, such as encryption, anonymization, and file-sharing on darknets, so that they don't end up in jail. However, most people who arent chil-porn users aren't going to bother learning how to use the complicated workarounds, because it would be a lot of work and they don't need it.
Now let's imagine what happens with this new setup they're proposing to protect boys from seeing naked ladies. Adolescent boys are generally extremely interested in seeing naked ladies. So now you've taken a large chunk of the population and given them a strong motivation to route around censorship. Every adolescent boy in Britain now wants to know how to use workarounds in order to evade the controls put in place by their parents and their parents' ISP. Learning to use these workarounds will be some work, but these fine young British boys are highly motivated to do that work because they've got Big Ben in their pants aching like a bad tooth.
So the net result is to take anti-censorship workarounds that are currently used by a tiny population of child-porn users and ensure their widespread adoption by every horny kid in England, Scotland, and Wales. Congratulations.
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This article is completely inaccurate and hyperbolic. It's just one MP (not a minister or anyone with any real power) calling for this and there are no signs that it is gaining traction with the actual government. In fact, the minister responsible said this: "The internet is by and large a force for good, it is central to our lives and to our economy and Government has to be wary before it regulates and passes legislation". Source: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5jJiC8J_CirrU_ieNBO6oiEXvFlbw?docId=N0237401290546543448A
I live with a teacher, and have worked in local schools myself.
I know for a fact that at least two of the schools in my area have discovered that their kids are busy making their own porn, which they cheerfully send each other via their phones.
Maybe our nanny.. I mean, government.. could do better by insisting that parenting children be the job of their parents, instead of insisting that it be done for them by teachers and corporations?
So.. it has come to this
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.
Seriously, the ONLY solution that is reasonable for parents who think hiding things from their kids will be good for them is to implement whitelisting at home. No link can be followed until/unless mommy or daddy approves it. This both allows the kids to surf alone at home, and encourages mommy and/or daddy to spend time with little johnny and jane.
Also, this way, the kids will be motivated to get out more and visit homes that aren't breeding grounds for stone-age ideas about sexuality, and we'll all benefit.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They have! All the child porn is gone!
And if you're smart and don't want them to come up with more harebrained ideas, you keep telling everyone that, too!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They won't because most ISPs are already blocking child porn (and this was done some years ago with very little fuss, largely because nobody has yet invented a way to fuss about these things without coming across as a kiddie-fiddling pervert).
It's down to the ISP how they actually implement the block, but they get information about what to block from an organisation calling itself the Internet Watch Foundation. AFAICT, almost every ISP simply puts an invisible proxy in place on port 80. Most block access to the page with a generic error which looks very much like the web server you're trying to connect to is down (and I don't believe that's accidental). One or two are honest enough to flash up a page with their logo on explaining that what you're looking at is blocked, but they're very much in the minority.
I imagine the ISPs will simply extend that infrastructure to blocking porn.
Justice Potter Stewart. He knew it when he saw it.
Pornography is fundamentally a religious concept, as is the notion that seeing it is harmful to children.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Most pornography is legal.
The blocking of material should be decided on a legal / illegal basis. Blocking a subset of legal material will, you would hope, violate some trade regulation. The law-abiding producers of legal pornography have as much right to do business, without government interference, as the charity shop selling home-made cakes.
Devizes Tory MP Claire Perry raised the issue at a special Commons debate, because as a mother-of-three she knew how difficult it was to keep youngsters from seeing inappropriate material.
I was raised in a small village with several farms around. By the age of ten I had seen all sorts of animals having sex, cattle, horses, dogs, birds, snakes, the rule is: if it moves it fucks.
Why should children be "protected" from seeing sex?
Why do Sun readers have black penises?
Because the print comes off on their hands.
- Jasper Carrott
Car analogies break down.
They won't because most ISPs are already blocking child porn (and this was done some years ago with very little fuss
Apart from that time they blocked Wikipedia...
We Old Fogies forget how smart kids are. I first learned about computer viruses when I was 13, from a 10 year old who was playing with them on Mac System 6.
And have we seriously forgotten Lunch Period? Every school has a "Johnny Rogue" whose big brother shows him stuff, and within a week it's all over the inside gossip at Lunch.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Im not being serious. Its similar to quoting 1984.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Don't send your thankyou note just yet. This is just another beat up from the Murdoch crowd. If you read between the lines it is not the government but rather one MP with no power to do anything except rant...
Claire Perry, the Tory MP for Devizes and a keen lobbyist for more restrictions, said: "Unless we show leadership, the internet industry is not going to self-regulate. The minister has said he will get the ISPs together and say, 'Either you clean out your stables or we are going to do it for you'."
Equating that to "the government" is like saying the US government is going to assasinate Assange because of the rantings of one hypre-ventilating congressman. This proposal will get even less traction than Australia's "great firewall" which (as I predicted several years ago) has gone nowhere, and never will.
TFA is dishonest and written in a way that feeds the parinoia of many slashdotters, which I suspect is the main reason that tripe like this makes it to the front page..
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