Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

British Prime Minister Promises Default On Porn Blocking

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-more-rule-34 dept.

judgecorp writes "David Cameron, the British Prime Minister has promised that the UK's ISPs will be required to provide connections with 'porn blocking' filters switched on by default.. The public promise comes despite opposition from ISPs, and the near-universal acknowledgment that the system wouldn't work. Last week also saw the leak of a letter from the Department for Education which effectively told ISPs to lie — to implement their preferred 'active choice' system, and simply call it 'default-on'."

5 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. This wont end cleanly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just wait until someone hacks the list of people with "show porn" checked and joins it to the table of politician names.

    1. Re:This wont end cleanly by MrDoh! · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Plus of course the gov now has to decide what IS and is NOT classed as Pornography. Are we going to get to the point of famous works of art being flagged? It's going to happen. Or a family that assumed everything was locked down, go into little Timmy's room to find him playing with himself to a picture of The Birth of Venus, then provoke moral outrage. Destroy the art, burn the books (that describe immoral acts). Amazing stuff, it's always the political right that believe in personal responsibility (as this sort of thing should be, take the laptop away, put it in the family room, adult supervision for 'the kids' sake) that does the heavy handed censorship. Plus, every dad's going to be asking little Timmy how these 'Vee pee enns' work.

      --
      Waiting for an amusing sig.
    2. Re:This wont end cleanly by amck · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As all content transfer moves to the internet, the government has now effectively made itself responsible for it.

      This isn't a "porn filter", this is a filter for all communications the govt decides it doesn't like. Including porn.

      Questions:
      (1) Are you going to block playboy.com ?
      (2) Can I get playboy vi Amazon.com, Apple Store, Google Play, then? With a prepaid credit card? Why not?
      When all this material moves to these sites, are you going to block them ? block tumblr, imgur, etc?

      Why not block google.com?

      Why am I being expected to out-source my morality to the ISPs webfilter?

      --
      Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
  2. A complete waste of time and money by wisewellies · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whilst I have no problem with Cameron's intention to prevent undesirable material from falling into the hands of younger users, I have major issues with the fact that he seems to be pushing ahead with this despite advice from people who actually know how the Internet works. Fundamentally, he doesn't seem to understand that the Internet is merely a network - it transfers packets of data from A to B, much the same as the postal service. It does not (and should not) care what is in those packets.

    Ultimately any proposal to deploy blocking technology is doomed to fail - blocking certain DNS queries will simply lead people to use an alternative DNS server, or to share IP addresses of questionable sites. If ISPs start to filter HTTP, then people will move to a different protocol. Where does this end up? The Great Firewall of (not-so-great) Britain? Martial law? Ultimately his proposals will end in failure - the Internet community will develop new methods to access material much faster than the government can block them.

    If people really understood the full implications of what is being proposed here, they wouldn't want it. Packets on a network should be afforded the same protection as mail in transit - i.e. it requires a court order to open them. This process is transparent and well-understood - it is not left to shadowy, non-elected, non-accountable organisations to decide what gets through and what is dropped. We do not need a censored Internet - it is used for so much more than browsing the web, and these other applications will suffer with this sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut approach taken by Cameron.

    Personally, I believe the best approach to managing access to this kind of material and staying safe online is through education - something which each and every parent should discuss with their child, in the same way that they teach them to cross the road.

  3. Re:Block all? No. Block a lot? Yes by VortexCortex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The not unreasonable assumption is that if a child can find porn, then an ISP can automate the process of finding it and blocking it. To the layperson, the idea that all these clever people can come up with a way to search the internet and classify content and even rate the quality of that content but are suddenly flummoxed by coming up with a way of reliably blocking porn that kids can find sounds more like "well, we don't want to block porn, so we'll tell you it's impossible and tell you that you don't understand the internet".

    Fuck off moron. Install nanny ware for your kid if you're a concerned parent. You don't parent the fucking nation. Retard.