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Sun Advice Columnist Advised MPs On UK Porn-Block Plans
nk497 writes "The first official expert witness in an inquiry into network-level filtering of porn was a Sun advice columnist called Dear Deidre. A group of MPs has been pushing to censor the UK web to prevent children from seeing porn, but reading the full report reveals the weakness of the evidence. It also features Dear Deidre defending the topless model on Page 3 of her own newspaper, saying, 'the Editor of The Sun thinks it's okay' and 'nine million people read it.'"
Sun royal editor Duncan Larcombe arrested in payments probe.
The Sun is perhaps the last place to ask about possible censorship of the web as it's part of Murdoch's empire which includes paywalls in places such as the Times. Dierdre must be about a million years old now.
It also features Dear Deidre defending the topless model on Page 3 of her own newspaper saying "the Editor of The Sun thinks it's okay" and "nine million people read it".
Well, gee, this internet thing is smalltime compared to those numbers. It's a pity cablemodems don't burn as well as books or newspapers, we could do with a good old fashioned bookburning, especially with those oil prices... Oh well...
The fucking hypocrisy. The same newspaper that uses the third page as a beacon of nudity. Why do our MP's even want to hear what she has to say? Britain is screwed.
If the plan is to censor everything that somebody, somewhere finds offensive then we might as well just pull the plug and be done with it.
Besides, kids have cellphones these days and are quite capable of making their own porn. Is that better than seeing what's on the internet?
If we're worried about kids emulating what they see on the internet then what about the sites with videos of the Taliban cutting people's heads off? Porn=bad. Violence=good. Got it.
No sig today...
Clearly the Sun is the bastion of good morals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBh2oAvsSSc
The nudity isn't on the front page of the newspaper. It's "protected" from viewing by children by being on page 3, which means it is obscured by page 1. I expect any internet schemes to be equally technically effective and equally difficult to circumvent (i.e. as difficult as turning the page).
Don't take what these muppets say too seriously. The Sun and its ilk (the UK's so called "red tops") are read by people of a reading age of about 9 -- about the bottom quartile of the population. And the people who write for these papers aren't the brightest bunnies either.
The trouble with living in an open society, is that people of very low intelligence and moral character are also citizens, and are also entitled to exercise their freedom of speech. Brighter minds should (but often don't) discount what they say and think accordingly.
I want that by default, my childrens cannot see violence on the media or on the internet.
What's ? Not important at all ? Ah! Only the human sexuality is to be forbidden ? Ouch...
It's a bit like some religions when controlled by extremists: sex pleasure is prohibited but you can massacre all the guy that don't think like you.
I don't want my ISP doing DNS filtering.
I don't want my free and open Internet controlled that way.
I don't want a Great British Firewall
Because all of that shit is going to make my ISP want to charge me more money for the same services.
If I don't want my kids to see porn then I'll either a) sit behind them when they're using the computer, b) ban them from using it or c) install some shitty net nanny software and let them figure out how to crack it or how to bypass it.
It's the parent's responsibility.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Really, I had a good laugh, then I noticed that the 1st had already passed and that this is supposed to be, like, for real.
First, page 3. 'nuff said.
Second, their generally, shall we say, shady reporting practice? I would call it "sensationalist", but I fear the outcry of sensationalist newspapers getting pissed of being lumped in the same category as the Sun.
The Sun as the moral guide. That's akin to electing a pimp as pope.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hope to god you are trying to be funny.
...and some smaller ISPs don't use it. Major ones do use it because of some "gentleman's agreement"- so screw them. I'm a happy customer of AAISP- they have usage limits which annoy me, but other than that service has been great so far. It looks like an ISP run by IT guys for IT guys.
If you are thinking about switching and want to check which ISPs are available in your area, check http://www.samknows.com/ It doesn't have all ISPs though and the smaller ones aren't listed.
--Coder
As usual, it's all about money. This "censorship call" and "opt-out by default" is all about establishing porn as premium content. If this change occurs, soon after the ISPs will charge extra to opt-in.
what I was most surprised to come across in my investigation was the availability, with no age restriction and free on the internet, of pornography including group sex, anal sex, double penetration, apparently having sex with strangers, women in the middle of a group of men who were masturbating over their face.
Has she (MP Jacqui Smith) been watching more porn at taxpayers expense?
If only there were some way to stop children from being able to view porn on the internet. You know, apart from parenting and web-filters obviously.
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
Oracle will probably sell her column off anyway, or at least take someone to court over it.
Her own section of The Sun features weekly picture stories featuring women posing seductively in sexual situations while dressed only in their underwear to "illustrate" an agony aunt style story.
The Sun is Rupert "Iraq/Afghanistan War" Murdoch's social/political engineering tool for ensuring that a sizeable chunk of the "not too educated", and likely school-dropout British Working Class votes "Right/Conservative" in elections, regardless of what Britain's Conservatives may actually be up to, politicially speaking, at that particular point in time. It is a cheap, cheap "Celebrity-Sports-WeirdNews" type "tabloid newspaper" that deliberately sensationalizes things like celebrity-scandals, dumbs everything newsworthy down intentionally, and only uses very simple English sentences and vocabulary, so even the most stupid person can understand it. A favorite trick of the Sun is using working-class slang words in a targeted way, with a supposed "wink-wink" to Blue Collar working class Brits who read it (The Sun always calls Scientists "Boffins" in articles about science for example, never actually "Scientists"). The Sun has been known to report completely made-up and untrue idiocy like "Windturbine hit by UFO" or "One of our readers has found Atlantis on Google Maps" on its front page. It regularly features voluptuous topless Page 3 "titty girls" picked from British hinterland stock, Mystic Meg (who looks into the Universe, to tell you what your Stars/Zodiac have in store for you today), and other assorted stupidities that target the undereducated and gullible. Oh, funny coincidence, the same Rupert Murdoch who publishes naked Page 3 "titty girls" in the Sun in Britain every day, also publishes hardcore-conservative Christian books in the U.S., under the publishing label "Zondervan". Who'd have thought something like that was possible? =) For those who don't know "the Sun" at all (do look it up on the web... its often unintenionally hilarious), it is roughly what would happen if you dumbed-down FoxNews U.S.'s news reporting by another factor-of-five, added strippers & pornstars, but also sports betting, astrologists, UFO/supernatural conspiracy crap, daily celebrity scandals, papparazzi pictures of famous nude people on beach holliday and such into the mix, and published this mix-o'-crap as a tabloid newspaper each day. Actually, come to think of it, the Sun has a toned-down sister-newspaper in the U.S.. Its the almost equally crappy New York DailyNews, which is kind of like "the Sun America", but without the Page 3 titty girls, Dear Deidre and Mystic Meg, and with a more American layout. The Sun is widely recognized as being one of the most dumbed-down reading experiences in news journalism anywhere in the World. But, very sadly, it also sells more copies a day (several million) than just about any other newspaper in the world.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I suppose, if you want to censor the net, a networking company like Sun is the one to go to. But their advice columnist doesn't seem very, well, technically oriented.
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Its not the internet the kids need protecting from its the predictor sun grooming 15 year children and having countdown till in their 16 when they can take topless photos of them The Sun and other British tabloids also provoked controversy by featuring girls as young as 16 as topless models, when it was legal to do so. Samantha Fox, Maria Whittaker, Debee Ashby, and others began their topless modelling careers in The Sun at the age of 16, while the Daily Sport was even known to count down the days until it could feature a teenage girl topless on her 16th birthday, as it did with Linsey Dawn McKenzie in 1994, amongst others. In 2003, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 raised the minimum legal age for topless modelling to 18.
the only reason i read through that crap...
If any of my fellow Americans are confused about British newspapers, I found this documentary particularly helpful. Skip to the 1 minute mark.
They have tits on page 3, within easy access to any child and they thing porn should be censored from the net? Oh yeah, I forgot 9 million people read the sun. That's obviously like 10 times the people that on the internet.
It has a pretty good horse racing section, or so I'm told.
I see it's been a while since you read a copy. Some of what you say is true, the rest is very dated.
First, 90% of their stories are carried by all the other news agencies.
OK, I have the paper in front of me now. The first science story in on page 22 (in my regional version). The topic is "X-rays on a mobile". The last word on the first paragraph is "scientists", not boffins. A quote from one of the "boffins" is "The terahertz range is full of unlimited potential...". Something we've covered on Slashdot before.
Page 3 is great. Chloe, 22, from Leeds, gives an interesting editorial on the price of petrol. It's funny, so laugh before you cry. She's got nice tits too. Bang tidy. It make me want to wash the windows.
The whole paper is light hearted, if you skip today's main stories about extradition of Qatada, fuel prices, BBC strike, Queen's Jubilee, Breivik... If you get all your news from The Sun, you are silly, but other news channels say pretty much the same.
Of all the papers in this highly educated office, only mine is read by others. People come to my desk, look at Page 3, flick through the pages until the sport appears, and then we chat. It's 30p well spent.
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