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British Prime Minister Promises Default On Porn Blocking
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'."
Just wait until someone hacks the list of people with "show porn" checked and joins it to the table of politician names.
This site is sure to get blocked, there are pictures of cocks all over the place.
Still, three cheers for the first enterprising foreign VPN company to offer free VPN services (ad-supported?). I anticipate approximately every single teen male in the UK becoming aware of it within a week of its launch.
Also, the earlier Firehose articles were more complete (but that's Slashdot editors for ya): BBC News giving a good amount of political commentary, and technological implementation of the blocking by Twitter.
Now little Timmy won't be bothered by all those nasty websites he has no interest in.
Well, at least not until he comes across some of those sites that slip by the filters - as they inevitably do - or he learns how to turn the filter off (as children eventually will).
And it's not as if he will be missing anything important. Oh sure, filters have been shown to be over-zealous in their protection, often blocking non-porn sites as well but why would he be interested in reading Wikipedia or the National Geographic or any of these other disgusting websites anyway? Do they have any redeeming value at all? And even if they do, is it worth the risk that young Timmy might see a nipple?
Besides, sex is unnatural, and so is the human body. Nobody should see it naked. It's been that way since the beginning of time; children never witnessed nudity or sex until they were eighteen and in no way should we question this belief. Its not as if this sort of repression causes any problems. Anyway, the youth of today must be inculcated from the start with the idea that it is okay for the government to tell us what to read and what to do, for the good of the nation. A strong government should lead its people in thought and action!
I for one am glad the government of Great Britain is moving in this direction and can only hope the governments of the other nations of the world follow suit. Its just one step towards bringing our world back to a more civilized level of discourse, where things like sex, violence and alternate religions are removed from view. It's for the good of our children after all.
(By the way, just out of scientific curiousity, have instructions on how to disable this feature been issued yet? I only ask to make sure I don't accidentally turn it of, of course).
The crucial point is that if no porn is available, the boys will just wank off the photos of clothed models and celebrities as they did before the Internet was widely available, and it's hard to find any valid argument why wanking off the photos of clothed people is inherently better than wanking off the photos of nude ones. It certainly didn't do me any good not to have porn available when I most needed it back in the 80ies.
Its hard to find any valid argument why wanking off to any photos is inherently a bad thing. Anyway, before the internet came along, people just passed top-shelf magazines around the playground, no clothed people required.
I'm waiting for the big ISPs' lists of people who have opted out of filtering to be leaked and the press to publish a list of MPs who have asked the ISP to let them watch porn through the internet connection that they put on their expenses... :)
(Also: please will people write to their MPs and tell them to oppose this shit?)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
I find a lot of the debate around this very deceptive. That "near-universal acknowledgment that the system wouldn't work" means that it can't block every pornographic image out there. That's a lot like complaining that speed cameras "don't work" because people still speed on other lengths of road, or that aeroplanes "don't work" because occasionally they crash, or that firewalls "don't work" because sometimes attacks come through port 80. You'd be stupid to have a firewall installed, right? They don't work - some attacks still get through! And "effectively told ISPs to lie"? That's bullshit. You have a filter which will be turned on unless you take an action to turn it off. But by default, it will be on. Sounds like default-on to me. The ISPs want to label it some active choice plus garbage, but that's what it is. The letter suggested they call a spade a spade.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
I didn't see anyone mention "illegal content". Blocking The Sun would be a first step to a better Britain, though.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Without even the slightest hint of irony, David this morning promised that he won't ban Page 3. So in future, if you need to fap, you'll just have to pay Rupert Murdoch for the privaledge (who from this point forward, will form the backbone of our nations moral compass).
it is easier, cheaper, quicker and garners more positive publicity for the politicians involved to get the ISP to block something (anything, does not really matter what, as long as something is blocked) than it is to actually tackle the underlying problem and catch the child abusers.
However, as politicians we need censorship options to go alongside our surveillance capability... we use the surveillance ability to keep an eye on the people we are afraid of (in the UK, that apparently means the Government is afraid of about 65 million people... quite a way behind the US though, who have a list of 300 million or so people that scare the politicians). We then need the censorship mechanisms so that we can keep information about our surveillance system out of the public domain, and we then need the surveillance system again to watch the people who are trying to circumvent the censorship equipment (oh, good... we are already watching those people, because they are on our "people to be feared" list!).
On a more serious note, Claire Lilley at the NSPCC pointed out that "In every single child abuse image there is a victim, a child who has been abused". This is true, if you check the circumstances of the photograph. But I am 100% sure than a 5 minute search of Youtube would turn up a ton of clips from movies, from which you could grab stills that look like child abuse and that a third party viewer would categorize as child abuse, even though no children were abused in the production of said image.
I am all for stamping our Child Abuse, preferably in a process that involves stamping out the penis and testicles of any men involved in said abuse, but blocking sites that some unaccountable quango group deep in the bowels of the British government thinks should be blocked is not the way to go about it... unless of course, the porn blocking is simply a convenient excuse behind which the real purpose of the system is being hidden.
Damn, I am starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Somebody pass me my kool-aid, quick!
That's right. Gun laws in Britain make no difference whatsoever, in fact the gun murder rate there is ten times higher than in the USA.
Oh. Wait. No it's not. Actually the USA is number 11 on that list and the UK is number 60. But hey, never let facts get in the way of your preconceptions.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
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.
That there is the problem. You see, the assumption is unreasonable - you can understand why the assumption would be made, but it's still wrong non the less.
The difficulty comes with specificity, when you search for something you also get a lot of false positives. For example: You search for a pornstar and also find the facebook page of some poor schmuck with the same name. Another example would be you search for some porn term and get a wikipedia page. When searching this is not a problem, false positives have little real cost, since we just skip over them.
Now lets consider the filtering scenario. Lets say you search for Joe Bloggs' facebook page, trouble is there is also a Joe Bloggs who stars in certain adult entertainments and the system gets confused. Suddenly the facebook page of our upstanding member of society has been filtered, and worse all of his friends are now flagged as having looked for 'bad things'.
You see, the key difference between search and filtering is that of the involvement of human decision. Search uses a flawed heuristic to give us a set of things to look at first with ultimately a human deciding and making up for the flaws in the search algorithm. Filtering uses said flawed heuristic and then sticks another flawed decision boundary on top, and there is no human presence to counteract it's mistakes
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.
The crucial point is that if no porn is available, the boys will just wank off the photos of clothed models and celebrities as they did before the Internet was widely available
Wouldn't Rule 34 imply that the whole Internet would have to be filtered out under this scheme?
Ezekiel 23:20
It's just blonde, brunette, redhead...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
All hail our Glorious Leader Dave, saviour of the internet and all things just.
Forget that he left his own child at a pub whilst out drinking. Forget that he failed to introduce plain cigarette packets. Forget that he failed to introduce minimum alcohol pricing. Forget that he failed to fix unemployment.
All hail our Glorious Leader Dave.
Forget he was a member of the Bullingdon Club. Forget heâ€(TM)s a u-turning dishonest clueless toff. Forget that the UK population did not vote him into power.
All hail our Glorious Leader Dave.
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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.
There are lots of bad arguments though. The standard approach is to swiftly change the topic: Whenever the block is being discussed, rapidly turn the conversation towards child pornography or (second choice) graphically violent pornography. It's much easier to win support for blocking those. The trick is to simply ignore the existance of regular non-child pornography as much as possible.
For example, look at how Cameron announced the block officially: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-internet-and-pornography-prime-minister-calls-for-action
There's some general fluff by way of introduction in the first section that can be ignored - that's just padding about the value of the internet in a somewhat pathetic attempt to reassure people he does value free speech really. But when it comes down to the meat of the argument, approximately half of the length of the speech is about child pornography. Why? There is already a national filter for this. It's already illegal. Nothing is changing in that area beside granting the IWF permission to investigate rather than just act on reports, and a demand that google needs to do something. It's in there because it presses the 'outrage button' - after a long talk about the evils of child porn, something loathed by all, the reader is in a moral-crusadin' mood and ready to condemn just about anything given half a chance.
It's quite fun to figure out what he actually saying. It's a true political speech: Riddled with contradictions and a few outright lies. My personal favorite is 'This has never been a debate about companies or government censoring the internet but about filters to protect children at the home network level,' followed later by 'And, in a really big step forward, all the ISPs have rewired their technology so that once your filters are installed, they will cover any device connected to your home internet account.' I'm not sure if this is an attempt at doubletalk, or simply that his speechwriter doesn't actually know the definitions of 'internet,' 'home network level' or 'install.' Or 'rewire.'
What parents? WHAT UNFIT PARENTS?
That would be us. It's no big deal.
Mine is a new teenager. She's been on the internet unsupervised for a good three years. Sit down for this bit: we also let her loose on the BBC's website when she was a toddler, all the time we were in the room next door doing boring household chores. Lock us up and throw away the key.
We check in on her from time to time. We're mostly greeted with grunts and "can't you see I'm busy chatting to my friends?". We ask about things she's doing. Mum checks her Facebook. I ask questions; questions like "how many accounts do you have on Facebook?". I'm not stupid, even if her mother is.
Facebook:
Here's an issue. Teenage daughter likes buying clothes with her friends, bringing them all back to my house, trying them all on like some fashion parade, and posting photos and videos on Facebook. I get it. It's what teenage girls do.
These posts attract men aged 25-45 from an area of the world spanning the middle east to indonesia. They all tell her how pretty she is. How sickening is that? What should a parent do? Maybe Glorious Leader Dave can help?
We've educated her to block these people and explain that there are a few nasty people out there. Wrapping her in cotton wool until she's 18 is not something we've chosen to do.
Unsupervised? Yes. As a well rounded and balanced person, she has earned that right.
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