Slashdot Mirror
No Porn From Public WiFi Hotspots In the UK Proposed
whoever57 writes "Prime Minister David Cameron is proposing that porn should not be available through WiFi hotspots in public areas. Exactly how this will be implemented has not been identified, even to the extent of whether the ISP or the hotspot operator should implement the blocking. From the article: '
The Prime Minister said: “We are promoting good, clean, WiFi in local cafes and elsewhere to make sure that people have confidence in public WiFi systems so that they are not going to see things they shouldn’t.”
His intervention comes after a long-running campaign from children’s charities to ensure a blanket ban on unacceptable sites on public WiFi networks.'"
Who exactly is paying/or promoting this? This seems to be a shady manoeuvre to put out free competitions to ISP.
In general, you shouldn't try to solve social problems with technical solutions.
And in this case, it's not even possible unless you also forbid encryped sessions, which would mean people can't access their VPNs. And nobody in his right mind would surf from a public hotspot without a VPN or at least an SSL/TLS encrpyted session.
And as if that's not enough proof for you: a determined person can still use steganography to embed an encrypted stream inside a regular port 80 HTTP session. Therefore you cannot prevent people from accessing porn over public wifi. All you can do is make it more inconvenient for everyone to browse securely.
Conclusion: You can't stop it, so don't even try.
His intervention comes after a long-running campaign from children’s charities to ensure a blanket ban on unacceptable sites on public WiFi networks.
Because when I donate money to a children's charity, that's exactly what I'm hoping the money will be spent on. Think of all the children saved by these campaigns.