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Leaked Document Shows Europe Would Fight UK Plans To Block Porn
Mark Wilson writes: Before the UK elections earlier in the month, David Cameron spoke about his desire to clean up the internet. Pulling — as he is wont to do — on parental heartstrings, he suggested that access to porn on computers and mobiles should be blocked by default unless users specifically requested access to it. This opt-in system was mentioned again in the run-up to the election as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Sajid Javid assured peopled that the party "will age restrict online porn". But it's not quite that simple. There is the small problem of Europe. A leaked EU Council document shows that plans are afoot to stop Cameron's plans in its tracks — and with the UK on the verge of trying to debate a better deal for itself within Europe, the Prime Minister is not in a particularly strong position for negotiating on the issue. Cameron has a fight on his hands, it seems, if he wants to deliver on his promise that "we need to protect our children from hardcore pornography". Documents seen by The Sunday Times reveal that the EU could make it illegal for ISPs and mobile companies to automatically block access to obscene material. Rather than implementing a default block on pornography, the Council of the European Union believes that users should opt in to web filtering and be able to opt out again at any time; this is precisely the opposite to the way Cameron would like things to work.
Sure. Let the Brits only see their own porn!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
And how exactly do you block access? Politics and policy aside, from the technical viewpoint, what he proposes is not possible. One country cannot get worldwide cooperation of every single adult website to honor this opt-in policy. Keyword based filters cannot work with encrypted traffic. Whitelisting or blacklisting would be such a massive undertaking as to never be effective. There's just no way to even do what he's advocating.
Better known as 318230.
I would suggest that this might be an issue that David Cameron used for the elections and for politics and that it isn't a core issue that he'll defend against such pushback.
Or we could just stop raising a country of sexually reclusive prudes who are ashamed of their own body and freak out at the through of seeing nipple.
Funny side anecdote: I was in Bad Hofgastein in Austria skiing and after a long day on the slopes I went down to the wellness centre for an evening of sauna. There was a British woman shouting at the receptionist that it is absolutely unacceptable that she was kicked out for wearing swimmers in the sauna area. There were a lot of naked men and women standing around quite bemused.
Cameron is staunchly anti-freedom. What's tragic is a majority of British liked this and voted for the man and those that didn't are forced at gunpoint to come along for the ride.
... wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” —John Adams
... breaks up the foundations of society.” —Thomas Jefferson
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill
“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.” —Ben Franklin
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” —Thomas Jefferson
“Democracy
“Democracy is the most vile form of government... democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention... incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” —James Madison
“The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and
http://democracyisnotfreedom.c... https://encyclopediadramatica....
UK & Greece: no porn and no money.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The world should not be set up safe as a default for you and your fucking whiny children.
The moral upbringing of your children in a sealed bubble which keeps the world at bay is your damned problem.
Every parent who insists the world be made sanitized for you and your precious little snowflake can piss off.
You want a nanny internet, you take the time to sign up for it and request it. But if you think the rest of the world should have to opt-in ... you can fuck off and leave the rest of us out of it.
I'm s sick of idiotic parents who think the world should change to protect their children. We don't give a crap, they're not our kids ... on behalf of parent-less couples everywhere, this is your fucking problem not ours.
I won't moderate my behavior for my mother. If you think I'll do it for you and your brood of annoying children ... well, ask me. I dare you. Because they'll learn every possible bad word as well as hearing them used in complete sentences.
If you think the world should tiptoe around you and your kids ... you're too stupid to have kids.
Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits. Fuck you, fuck off, go the fuck away, and don't make me tell you again.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
David Cameron needs to watch this video.
(for the record: i believe that ISP's should -try to- block access to such materials if users ask for it)
If you believe that, then you have failed to understand the Internet at a profoundly fundamental level.
The Internet was designed from the very beginning for all of the intelligence to be at the edges. The network itself is supposed to be as dumb as it is possible to be while still moving everybody's packets around. If you want censorship, it's your job to implement it on the tiny little network in your house, or even individual nodes on that network, and leave everyone else alone. No one else should be spending any CPU time for what you want.
As is typical for politicians of his breed, he only needs to be seen to be trying to implement an Internet filter. He doesn't need to pass it to be seen to be doing something by those people he's trying to win votes from, and if he doesn't succeed he'll be able to rally them again next election and win their votes. Failing to create a workable solution and being able to blame the European Union is probably highly beneficial to him, politicially.
"we need to protect our children from hardcore pornography"
Typical conservative "save the children" bullshit. What we actually need to do is educate children that "hard-core" pornography is not real. That it's the equivalent of a sexual cartoon for not very grown up grown ups, and that for the vast majority of people sex doesn't work that way.
There is so much free stuff available (so I've heard ;) ), how does anyone make any money with it at all?
Who pays for porn with so much free stuff available?
Is porn just advertising for the actors who engage in for-hire sex with anyone with adequate funds?
Are us poor slobs just enjoying the commercials while the rich guys get the real stuff?
The porn filter and protect the children thing is a straight up lie. It is all about censorship about blocking any ideas that compete with the false ideology of the rich and greedy, that ideology being they want more, more, more. It is all about accidental block sites, union sites, opposition (real opposition) political sites, real news sites, blogs basically anything at all. All so very accidental, then it takes months to unblock and costs thousands of dollars and then it gets accidentally blocked again.
Reality is, if they are serious about porn, they should simply strip sic it of copyright protection, cripple the ability of corporations to generate a profit from it and with out the profit there is no money to make more. Done and finished.
Of course it all has nothing what so ever to do with porn, that is a lie. All about blocking the majority from publishing anything and putting the power of publishing content back in the hand of a psychopathically greedy minority.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Some things are worth dying for.
UK ISPs already block certain traffic. Not necessarily bittorrent either. I've had more than a few blogs blocked not because of morally questionable content, but because of politically questionable content.
The message here from Europe, is that you can watch a video of a woman getting fucked up the arse but you can't watch a Youtube of someone with a beef against the British Government. It's starting to sound more like the West's vision of North Korea every day, but there it is.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Is there any evidence - I mean serious, well-studied, scientific evidence - that access to pornography is that harmful?
I've seen a lot of scaremongering. I've seen a lot of anecdotal accounts too, plenty of people sharing their personal stories of how porn ruined their mind and their life. But what I've not seen is serious data - the few bits of real research I've found are rather dubious in methodology, and tend to be carried out by the type of organisation with 'family' in the name that can hardly be called unbiased.
If pornography was one-tenth as harmful as anti-pornography campaigners claim, western civilisation would have collapsed by now - just about everyone has access to it and yet, somehow, the incidence of rape is actually going down. Yet the assumption remains unchallenged, because it's just too socially and politically awkward: Anyone who dares so much as suggest that maybe pornography isn't a terrible threat to children risks being branded as supporting child molestation. Society has reached the witch-hunt level: Anyone who questions the validity of the witch-hunt risks being accused of supporting the witches.
We need to define a "cameron" as a particularly distasteful (to prudes) sex act so that it gets blocked by the porn filter. I suggest something scatalogical. He is a little shit, after all...
Would be nice to get May in on the action too. Some porn star should use her name. The chaos caused if we could get "may" into the filter would be hilarious.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Someone should gently remind the prime minister that the Victorian era is over.
You obviously don't know much about the Victorians.
Perhaps banning fencing creosote.
Banned? It's just regulated because it's carcinogenic. That said, I do agree that the EU has passed many, many somewhat stupid directives but the consequences are nuisances - not something against fundamental European values of freedom and human rights. This particular plan to block porn is against freedom because it's censorship. Regulating creosote is not. Or the curvature of bananas.
It is important to be careful when referring to "stupid directives". Most of them are not and the ones that make the headlines are not even true. For example, the banana thing was an attempt by the EU to keep the quality of bananas in the face of sub-standard imports. Interestingly, the legal properties of the banana were taken from the already existing UK regulations.
Some EU directives discussed are a bit nutty but most of them never make it to being a law.
I propose this as the name of the SI unit for the minimum distance between two blunders.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What I really would love to know is why it's always, without fail, the conservatives who want more censorship while at the same time it is, again without fail, the conservatives who end up in weird revelations concerning nasty sexual perversions that even a long term internet user would consider ... at the very least a reason to back away slowly from them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.