UK - Online pornography to be blocked by default

[Neil]

So by default, ISPs will have to block adult content, unless you click to choose otherwise. Hmm... Can't work out if this is good or bad, if only because of the amount of content that will be incorrectly blocked, or the amount of content that should be blocked that will not.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23401076


Most households in the UK will have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they choose to receive it, David Cameron has announced

[Andy]

I say its a bad thing, if you nanny people too much their natural instinct is to rebel. Thats why countries like japan, which have some of the most lenient porn laws in the world also have the lowest rates for sexual crimes.

Also it will be an entirely pointless and costly exercise as anybody with the slightest computer knowledge, or access to google, knows how to circumnavigate a ISP block.

[MinionZombie]

As a general rule of thumb I'm in favour of "Opt In" rather than "Opt Out" - ISPs should make the tools to block stuff that parents don't want their children seeing as simple and clear to use as possible, and be up front as that being an option - but forcing people to have to go to the faff to opt out is a step too far in my view. Plus, as you say, it'll no doubt block content that it's not supposed to be blocking - how do these things work, anyway?

There's a lot of hysteria in the tabloids about it - there was a situation recently where a "journalist" was appalled to find 'child porn' via Google ... as it turned out, the video she found wasn't child porn at all, it was an American production featuring an 18 or 19 year old porn star whose records were on file. The type of video is another issue - but her claim that it was kiddy porn was found to be abundantly false ... indeed, that really flagged up an actual problem - these people have no idea what they're on about. In the article that 'fisked' those claims (made in the Daily Mail - naturally) they showed SFW screenshots and good lord, it was so obvious it was an official production ... ... it kind of reminds me of the fact that the makers of Cannibal Holocaust had to go to court to prove they didn't kill anyone! :stunned:

However, I'd wager that as computers and the internet become ever-more second-nature (the woman who did the aforementioned article was born before computers were an everyday tool). Hell - computers weren't an everyday object to me until I was in my teens! Now though you're going to have parents coming up who are web savvy - whereas at the moment you have a lot (but surely a decreasing amount) of parents whose children know more about computers than they do. What these parents should do is, oh I don't know, take some personal responsibility and LEARN how to protect their children online. :rolleyes:

You also think, in relation to all this - what more can be done to actually stop the horror of child porn at the source, to stop it being produced in the first place? Sadly, there's probably always going to be unseen corners of the globe where stuff like this happens, but the places where these vile acts are presented, and traded in digital content, could always be better targetted and shut down, surely? :rockbrow:

It makes you think that governments around the globe need to employ the finest computer-minded folks to help limit (or preferably end) these practices ... at the moment it's like an analogue fist in a world of digital needle-eyes.

Just thinking about it, it must be an absolutely horrendous job to be one of the people who work on these anti-child-porn task forces ... *shudders* ... top marks and respect to the people who suffer these sights in order to try and stop them from being distributed!

...

Some responses to these proposed plans:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/10194641/Camerons-crackdown-on-illegal-pornography-criticised.html

Every householder with broadband internet will be asked to confirm whether they want to activate parental controls blocking adult content by the end of 2014, under the plan.

I'm confused then - is it default for new internet contracts, and a question for existing internet contracts? In other words, default blocking for newly signed up accounts, and then an email or phone call asking for a decision to stay the same or change the setting for people who are already up-and-running on the web?

Also:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/micwright/100009396/david-cameron-cant-protect-us-from-child-porn-because-he-doesnt-understand-the-internet/


The “deep web” and the “dark net”, areas of the internet where robots.txt files are not in place for Google to crawl, are where sites like the Silk Road – an online market for illicit goods – hide. They are also where the bulk of illegal images are shared. The unpleasant fact is that the majority of child sexual abuse online is perpetrated beyond even the all-seeing eye of Google. It looks good on front pages, but Cameron’s call for internet firms to fulfil their “moral duty” barely touches the edge of the problem. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! make easy targets because the average voter knows who they are. A crusade against software that enables online anonymity like Tor, and provides access to the lawless depths of the dark web, doesn’t have such a ring to it.

Many of the figures quoted in the press about the British public and its exposure to “child porn” are wrong. In June, the Internet Watch Foundation took to BBC Breakfast touting shocking research that 1.5 million people in Britain had stumbled upon images of child sexual abuse while surfing the internet. However, as the Ministry of Truth blog exhaustively detailed, the "research" was, in fact, based on an opinion poll. ComRes surveyed a representative sample of 2058 British adults concluding that the vast majority of people in Britain think child sexual abuse content and computer generated images or cartoons of child sexual abuse should be removed from the internet. Of those 2058 adults, three per cent said they had “seen/encountered ‘child pornography’”. The IWF applied that percentage to the population of Britain and declared that 1.5 million have stumbled upon child porn.

The Daily Mail’s Amanda Platell would presumably include herself among that inflated figure. In May, at the behest of her editors, she claimed to have viewed child pornography online, purely to ascertain how easy it was to find. She wrote in a hysterical article that she had searched for “little girls in glasses”, the phrase typed into Google by Stuart Hazell, the killer of 12-year-old Tia Sharp. She then added the word “porn” and, shock horror, was presented with sexually explicit images. With Google’s SafeSearch feature turned on, even typing those words does not bring up explicit material. It removes the word “porn” from your search. There is no earthly excuse for “stumbling upon” child sexual abuse images.

The phrases punched into Google by Platell grow more and more vile as her piece goes on and in turn so do the images she views. But there is strong evidence that the clips she uncovered of “a sweet-looking girl in her early teens” were, in fact, from legal pornographic productions featuring adult women dressed as school girls. That Platell herself writes of the man in a video being clearly identifiable indicates she was not watching illegal material. There is no doubt that “school girl” porn is an unpleasant niche – but filming consenting women, over the age of 18, is not illegal.

[shootemindehead]

There's no doubt in my mind that there is some incredibly vile material floating around the web, but I view these so called "anti-porn" laws with great suspicion. Like the tip of an iceberg, as it were. To me, legislation like this is all too open to "extension" to other areas, under the auspice of "protection".

I read somewhere that the fact is that pornography accounts for a very small percentage of peoples' search material...surprising...I know. But the vast, vast majority of people surfing the web have never even seen pornography online, nor do they actually wish to.

It really is only a matter of time before the net is destroyed. Mark my words, you'll be telling your grandchildren how great the internet used to be and how free and easy it was.


...but the places where these vile acts are presented, and traded in digital content, could always be better targetted and shut down, surely?

Agreed, which makes me think that this type of legislation has little to do with the question at hand and more to do with being a useful segue to tighter internet access laws generally.

[Danny]

I find things like these incredibly shifty. For one thing what is "adult content"? What does that entail? aren't movies with an 18+ rating adult content? what about games like silent hill? or books like the shining?
"adult content" is a lot more than pornography and its an umbrella that cuts people off to a lot more stuff than any none big brother state should.

Of course i know theres some absolutely despicable porn out there. Vile shit you would NEVER want a young child to go online and see by accident. But theres only so much of it that can be blocked before its shown to be more a "we cant control and tax this" being the reasoning over "think of the children!"

I'm reminded of the bill hicks bit where he quoted the US supreme court as judging pornography as "anything without artistic merit that promotes sexual thought" and points out thats just about every advert on television and that was over 10 bloody years ago!
Because lets be honest, a woman watches a buff dude get wet and take his shirt off? she aint thinking of the diet coke in his hand in the ad:lol:

I just dislike governments playing a part in judging whats porn, because thats too close to "what is art" and leans that much closer to freedom of speech being replaced with "is this a thought crime or not" for my liking.

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I read somewhere that the fact is that pornography accounts for a very small percentage of peoples' search material...surprising...I know. But the vast, vast majority of people surfing the web have never even seen pornography online, nor do they actually wish to.


Actually that doesnt surprise me. Porn is a conscious thing people search for, compare that to how many times an hour we just go "what is X" or "what does X mean" or "how does X work" or whatever leading to going down the wikia-hole or something.