Slashdot Mirror
British MPs Propose Censoring Internet By Default
judgecorp writes "An all-party inquiry by British MPs has proposed the Internet should be censored to prevent children seeing 'adult' content. Users would have to opt in to see adult content. The proposal is similar to that already used by mobile operators."
From the article: "The move, first suggested in 2010, has been firmed up , after a cross-party Parliamentary inquiry examined the state of online child protection. The current proposal is a 'network-level "Opt-In" system,' going beyond the 'active choice' model launched by ISPs ... last October. ... They also want the Government to 'consider a new regulatory structure for online content, with one regulator given a lead role in the oversight and monitoring of Internet content distribution and the promotion of Internet safety initiatives.'"
When the parent opts in, how does that prevent a child from using his PC or iPod Touch from using the same connection?
Finally, a good reason for ipv6 NAT :)
America has dibs on taking away liberties in the name of child safety, sorry UK, find your own thing.
This would be a better world if we just shot all politicians who used the instinct to protect children to push agendas.
I thought the Internet already had an opt-in. It's called getting on the Internet. There's already plenty of solutions for parents to limit what children can see on the Internet (including technological solutions and good parenting). Why fuck it up for the rest of us by adding yet another layer of complexity that can go wrong and block everything?
"Teacher, I couldn't do my homework because the government required an opt-in for Wikipedia because there could be a link to a link to an article with citations that might contain a penis."
"Opt-in by default" makes no sense. I believe they mean "Opt-out"
... hasn't been paying attention.
They won't quit until all 'net speech is controlled, censored and regulated.
Check your premises.
How will the system distinguish between children and adults? At a guess, I'm thinking you would need some sort of login system, where known adults would have a login they could use to access "uncensored" Internet (oh and yeah I'm guessing torrents would be censored by default too, since of course you can use that for porn also), which means they will be able to track anyone accessing "undesirable" content. Oh but of course the government would never do such a thing... right? Only people who access illegal things need to worry about the government watching you! Just think of the children!
And anyways it'll never work, new sites spring up way to fast for a censor to keep track of them all, unless you use a white-list for approved content, so again, if you browse "unapproved" content, you will need to log-in to the system, which allows for tracking. Paranoid? Maybe. You can bet many governments would absolutely love such a system, though.
And of course, if you decry the system as restrictive, you must be a pedophile who hates children and wants them to see porn. Obviously.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
What to protect the children from the internet? Disconnect from it.
Bam! No porn, no children being hurt, no annoying/expensive laws needed.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
There are already protections in place - very similar to the most basic ones for alcohol that existed before the government had to regulate them. It's called "don't go to places where stuff is that you don't want to be around". Don't want to be around booze, stay out of bars and liquor stores. Don't want to be around porn, keep the default safe search on when you use Google and don't put naughtyasiantrannieswithanappetiteforexcrement.org in your address bar.
They can pass laws regarding "obscene" content.
Love sees no species.
Fine by me too, but here's an idea: Why don't they opt-in?
People who don't want to see 'objectionable material' or who don't want their children to see the same can opt-in to a filtering system, that ISPs are required to provide at no charge and notify all their customers of, and anyone who doesn't gets the same internet they always have, warts and all.
Because you see, the internet is what it is. It has pornography, hate speech, and even illegal materials. Those are facts of life. But when I ask to get 'the internet', I want the internet, not some filtered subset of it. So the default should be an unfiltered connection, and those who want filtering should have to ask for it. I'm perfectly willing to make it easier for those who want filtering to have access to it, that is their choice. But it should be their responsibility to ask for such things, not my responsibility to ask for them to be removed.
Also, should this 'opt-in' filtering come into effect on my ISP (Sky Broadband, I believe they haven't started yet, please inform me now if I'm mistaken because they haven't told me anything) then I am taking my 'opt-in' rights, and if someone should say "So you're opting-in to pornography then?" I tell them "No, I'm opting-out of your stupid, unnecessary filter that I did not ask for and do not need".
How about the opposite? Filter everything that isn't porn.
"And I believe that if they removed all the porn from the internet, there would only be one web page, and it would be "Bring back the porn!"
I don't see the point in filtering that web page.
it is about time we protect our children and others who don't want to see this kind of stuff.
I don't want to read your ideas ever again.
What do you think it's the correct behaviour:
A - I stop reading you.
B - I ask slashdot to block all your posts for everyone unless they opt-in.
This is not something the Slashdot crowd wants to hear, but i like this idea. Really, it is about time we protect our children and others who don't want to see this kind of stuff. Objectionable material should not be seen by minors and there are many others who prefer not to be subjected to this stuff. Like cigarettes or alcohol, basic protections need to be put in place. Like it or not, this is the way the internet will go.
You are missing the point because you are taking the politicals at their word.
This isn't about blocking porn to protect children, it's about the government having a system to block anything they don't like the look of. Such things might include evidence of their own misdeeds or alternative political views. The UK government has been blocking newspapers from printing things they consider inconvenient for many years and they want the same power over the web.
Disclaimer: Maybe I was trolled into this.
Completely agree, we should protect the children from porn, tobacco, alcohol, violence, horrible pictures, tragic events, homicides, pictures of naked people, people kissing, everything you think is not good, everything I think is not good, and last, but possibly most important we need to protect them from stupid posts that think that the best way to grow children into responsible, thinking adults is to protect them from everything that tells them that life is not all pink colored, sugar coated happy endings.
Reading the report, all parties consulted were either child protection special interest groups or the ISPs (whose arguments could be dismissed as just them trying to save money). No-one from any civil liberties groups were asked to testify. This is the archetype of the Nanny State infantilising its electorate. And would (as pointed out upthread) require people to sign into their ISP and enable personalised tracking of web browsing.
Fuck that.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
this is the UK. the UK is NOT EUROPE.
even europeans don't want to be mixed in with the UK riffraff.
sorry brits, but you truly have fallen. a once great culture, you have fallen so fully and completely.
so sad.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I think the fact that you posting on slashdot is clear evidence that your mind was tainted at a young age.
Knowing what the brits are capable of inventing to legally steal money (congestion charge anyone?), I give it 2 years before the activation for adult content is a privilege you must pay for.
JigJag
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Clearly these British MP's can all be trusted and have no ulterior motive for such censorship. Why, if they'd had their way, we'd never know about the great corruption exposure of the summer of 2009 where MP's from every party were variously fiddling their duck houses, moats and yes, even the noble Home Secretary was at it fiddling her (yes, her!) porn.
That's the thing about censorship and control freakery. You have to trust the people doing it 100% or you are screwed.
to silence all politicians!
What will fall under the "basic protections" in 10 years?
Got examples in the last 2 decades where obscene content was censored by the U.S. Congress? I'm trying to think of some, but came up with nothing.
Probably because Congress doesn't handle censorship of "obscene" content, the FCC does.
To that end: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_show_controversy#Aftermath_and_effects
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/sep/07/transport.ukcrime
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
The UK government has been blocking newspapers from printing things they consider inconvenient for many years and they want the same power over the web.
I assume you mean DA-Notices?
These don't actually block a newspaper from publishing anything - they basically say "Dear editor, be an awfully good chap and don't publish that."
Of course, you could be talking about the super-mega-injunctions which anyone can get (provided they can afford the right law firm) to stifle inconvenient facts from being published. And as Ryan Giggs knows, those are really effective.
You can tell that most of the comments on this posting are from outside the UK, because they all assume that the net filter will be effective. It will not. The UK has a long track record of egregious and laughable failure wherever any form of computing device is involved in government. The previous government spend twelve billion pounds (roughly $18 000 000 000 US) on a healthcare computer system which to date has not delivered ANY working product. Indeed this NHS computer system was so dire, so doomed to failure that one of the participant companies recently bought their way out of the original contract.
UK ministers are computer-illiterate morons almost to a man. They are also utterly incapable of running a project successfully, and the companies which prey upon these dullards know this, expect it and exploit it. Any normal project will run via one of the many project management organisational systems, going from initiation through problem capture, solution design, build and implementation phases. Once out of problem capture phases, any good project manager will tell any interfering PHB that amendments to the project will be added to the wishlist for Project 2.0 and will not be acted upon at that time.
This does not happen with most UK Government IT projects; ministerial interference is expected (and indeed hoped for) since it gives the outsourcing companies a very good excuse for why the project is not functioning and producing the expected deliverable. Interference also allows them to push up costs and milk the boondoggle for all it is worth before it gets canned. To summarise, there are companies in the UK which make a point of getting paid for not producing working results.
To date in this parliament we have already had a proposal to build a vast Internet spying system to try to incriminate as many UK citizens as possible, whilst conspicuously ignoring such minor and unimportant inventions as Tor Onion routing and VPNs to neutral countries. Now we're getting another similar internet control scheme, once again conceived by utter morons and to be implemented by exploitative outsourcers. All this in the current economic climate, too.
At present the UK has a structural deficit. It is spending more money per year than it can find in taxes, and is borrowing the remainder by selling bonds and by magicking more money into existence with quantitative easing. The main bank interest rate is being held at 0.5% to try to force people to spend rather than save, and none of these supposed remedies are working. The government is also deeply wedded to the EU project, despite this entity's slow and inevitable fiscal collapse, and seems to want to carry on feeding this beast too. The aforementioned spying projects can therefore be viewed as the actions of scared fools trying to do something, because they don't know how to solve the looming crisis that is about to hit them.
What is "objectionable"? I have kids and I don't really have a problem with them seeing pictures of naked people or even people having sex as long as it's not degrading or exploitative. On the other hand, I find much of the content on public TV (violent shows, for example) quite objectionable.
I think parents should decide for themselves what is "objectionable" and what isn't.
FTFY. This is really the issue at hand. It's not that the people proposing the law don't want to see porn, it's that they don't want anyone else seeing it. Err, I mean, they don't want the children to see it. Adults should have the right to, of course. Just opt-in by putting your name on this list titled "Probable Sex Offenders" and you can look at your porn again. You perv.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
And nothing else, ever. Especially the unbreakable, distopian police state they will inherit.
This is just a report from a parliamentary inquiry and is not being proposed as a new law. Personally, I can't see it making it through the system even if it does get proposed at some point. There are many more important things that are actually in the process of being made law that we should concentrate on.