In UK, Search Engines Urged To Block More Online Porn Sites 186
An anonymous reader writes "Search engines such as Google should do more to restrict access to online pornography, a government adviser on child internet safety has said. John Carr said increasing the number of sites automatically blocked by search engines would make it more difficult for paedophiles to get images of abuse. It comes after Mark Bridger was found guilty of the abduction and murder of five-year-old April Jones in Powys." It sounds like a continuation of the blocked-by-default porn white-listing plan that's been going around in the UK for a few years now.
Think of the children blah blah (Score:5, Insightful)
How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.
Re:Think of the children blah blah (Score:5, Insightful)
How about parents doing more to restrict their kids from getting into age-inappropriate things on the internet.
How do you imagine it? Sitting next to the kid and watching over her/his shoulder?
How about we grow up as a society and rely on education instead of prohibition? How about explaining to a child what porn is and how it relates to sex and leave her/him make decisions.
But no, it could be awkward, stressful and demand something like actual parenting. Forget it, censor this shit off my internets!
Re:Think of the children blah blah (Score:5, Funny)
How do you imagine it? Sitting next to the kid and watching over her/his shoulder?
How about we grow up as a society and rely on education instead of prohibition? How about explaining to a child what porn is and how it relates to sex and leave her/him make decisions.
But no, it could be awkward, stressful and demand something like actual parenting. Forget it, censor this shit off my internets!
The child can learn about sex on their wedding night. Prior to that no-one really has much of an interest anyway and certainly won't be finding ways to slake that curiosity.
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Fairly sure sex stops after marriage.
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Nah, you have the honeymoon period right after marriage, which can last anywhere from minutes to years. For most, it's just a few days. After that, sex is strictly solo or with mistresses and prostitutes.
Oh for fucks sake, won't anyone consider the poor married blokes who need a wank once in a while.. Online smut is lot cheaper than a fine strumpet.
Re:Think of the children blah blah (Score:4, Funny)
The child can learn about sex on their wedding night.
In muslim countries the child certainly can learn about sex on their wedding night.
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Most young girls learn about sex by the time they're 9 in said muslim countries, even in places where child brides are illegal.
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How do you imagine it? Sitting next to the kid and watching over her/his shoulder?
That's the whole point. That task of monitoring what your kid surfs around on is left to the people complaining about the porn in the first place.
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Educating your child is the parent's responsibility.
Exactly...
Teaching your child the difference between right and wrong.
Teaching your child what is acceptable behavior and what isn't.
Teaching your child to listen and obey your instructions.
Monitoring your child's behavior to be sure the first 3 stick, and distribute appropriate punishment (including corporal) accordingly when they fail to do so.
Those are all 100% the parent's responsibility.
If you want the community to educate your child, then you give up
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You're right. While you're at it tell your 5 year old that there's no such thing as Santa, the Easter bunny, or the Tooth Fairy and watch how well that goes down.
Education does not imply all information is appropriate for people of all ages. Sure my kid will learn about sex before his wedding night, but that doesn't mean I'm going to sit him down at age 8 in front of 4chan and let him go his hardest, (poor choice of words really in this case).
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Wait, are you saying we should censor all sources where kids can find out that there is no Santa? (kidding, of course)
But seriously, you know not every kid believes in this bull, don't you? And they don't grow up depressed because of it or anything. And you don't have to believe the stories to enjoy them, or else there wouldn't be any fantasy fans.Give children some credit, they are young, not retarded.
And nobody is suggesting sitting anyone before anything. But if my kid, by chance, would find 4chan, I wou
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I respectfully disagree. We censor until the mind is ready to consume such information. There is documented evidence that certain stimulus has an incredibly strong effect on a person, such as viewing pictures of people brutally killed, extremely violent pornography etc. This while it may not have much of an effect on the developed mind is incredibly damaging to the young and developing.
How about ensuring your kid can't actually stumble upon 4chan et al until they are ready and mentally capable of understand
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Who needs knowledge when you have ignorance?
Good quote, you've just displayed plenty of it.
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kids brains are not done developing
Not done developing != retarded. Now vanish, censorship troll.
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Jack Chick, is that you? [chick.com]
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Subtle trolling from an AC hinting that being gay is somehow abnormal? How original...
And I would be the first one to show my kid how to circumvent such software.
Re:Think of the children blah blah (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but there should be tools helping the parents in doing so.
The suggestion in the summary is mixing up two completely unrelated issues. Those issues must be addressed separately, otherwise we are going to end up with the wrong solution.
There may be people who do not want to see porn online and wish to be protected from that. That is fine, but it should be a voluntary decision. Unless the person is a minor, in which case it is the parents' decision. But in order to do this, you need to have the content classified. Now it boils down to who has to pay for maintaining this classification. You cannot just require the sites themselves to do that, because some of them will be outside your jurisdiction, and some of them may not have an interest in being correctly classified. Once you have the classification, getting it applied to the right set of people is not all that hard. But don't force it upon grown ups, who do not want it.
The other issue, which is completely unrelated, and should be treated as such, is the issue of child pornography. Many people are acting as if the main problem to be solved is that of people looking at such pictures. And as long as we can prevent anybody from looking at those pictures, then the problem has been solved. That is not true. All which has been achieved by that is hiding the real problem. The real problem is, that what is depicted took place in the first place. That pictures were taken of it and that somebody saw them did not make the abuse itself any worse for the kid, but in some cases it does help reveal that the abuse is taking place, which can help stopping it.
Current laws may actually do more to destroy evidence of crimes rather than stopping the crimes themselves. How would things change if possession and distribution of child pornography was legalized, but manufacturing and trading it remained illegal? Instead of interest organizations building up censorship, which is ultimately going to hurt more, when it is used for other purposes, those interest organizations could collect child pornography and perform data mining on it, and as soon as they have identified individuals in the images, they can hand that over to authorities. I believe that would do more to stop abuse of children, than the current laws.
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Why would kids look at online porn with a computer, at their parents home with parental controls, when their smartphones have an unlimited data plan and they can watch anywhere? Kid have an inherent ability to join cliques of like minded peers, adults too for that matter, and it only takes one to say "hey check this out", and the search engine becomes irrelavent.
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This is an opportunity for the telecompanies. They need to introduce phone subscriptions intended for kids, where the parents can apply limitations. I guess they sort of exists already with limitations on phone calls. For example the kid may be allowed to make an unlimited number of calls to certain numbers white listed by the parent
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Well you know the old saying "Anything is easy if you don't know what you are talking about".
I have yet to see any filter that does more than block a bunch of known sites and both kids and adults have a knack for finding sites that should have been on the block list but are not.
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Finding out exactly what content to block is the hard part. Actually blocking it once it is identified is the easier part. The telecompany could contract with one of those many companies, who already specialized in the first part. Then they can install that software on a bunch of servers, and sell it as a service to parents
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Every one of those companies has an extremely flawed list for exactly the reasons I just mentioned.
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Using the lists should be voluntary. I don't want anybody to force any of those lists upon you. But if somebody finds the lists to be useful, they should be allowed to use them for their own needs. Those needs may include filtering on a phone, which a person is paying for someone else.
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The problem is that those lists end up providing a false sense of security for the people paying for them. In reality they block most of the famous sites and only block a fraction of the other sites out there while accidentally blocking innocent sites(pretty much all of them, have a high false positive rate). The other problem is that the contents of those lists are secret and once sensors get going they simply cannot stop. Several of filters have been known to block any sites that post anything critical
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You can't really keep it secret, if you put it on the user's computer. And consumers are free to avoid any vendor, who try to keep their list secret. I haven't done market research because I have never needed such a product myself, and I have no intention of going into that business either. But I believe there is a market, and I have heard of multiple competing products in that field.
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Mobile phone internet access in the UK is already filtered by default - to get an unfiltered connection you need to explicitly request it, and provide proof of age.
Students get around this by just taking naked pictures of themselves and emailing/mmsing/facebooking them around.
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"Why would kids look at online porn with a computer, at their parents home with parental controls, when their smartphones have an unlimited data plan and they can watch anywhere?"
Watching Monstercocks on tiny screens is awful.
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There may be people who do not want to see porn online and wish to be protected from that. That is fine, but it should be a voluntary decision. Unless the person is a minor, in which case it is the parents' decision.
Precisely, every corner of the world, a country, even a neighbourhood, is not necessarily safe or appropriate for children, the internet is an extension of that world in terms of information. It is however a lot more accessible than the real world.
But in order to do this, you need to have the content classified. Now it boils down to who has to pay for maintaining this classification. You cannot just require the sites themselves to do that, because some of them will be outside your jurisdiction, and some of them may not have an interest in being correctly classified. Once you have the classification, getting it applied to the right set of people is not all that hard. But don't force it upon grown ups, who do not want it.
Im' sure many different forms of this concept exist already and i'm pretty sure i've seen it advertised on various "internet security" packages, I think OS X has some kind of built in parental mode, whether or not that extends to the web i don't know.
Anyway, the s
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You are right. I should have expressed myself more clearly. I of course did not want the distribution to be legal under circumstances, where it would have been illegal even if the depicted persons wer
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"Another topic is, does looking at cp make pedophiles more likely to molest children? Does it make them less likely to do so?"
That's what I think too. If they can't get videos of the stuff, they have to do it themselves.
Just as when there's no dealer where you can easily get it, you have to grow your pot yourself.
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That's what I think too. If they can't get videos of the stuff, they have to do it themselves.
Because the only thing stopping normal people from being rapists is the fact that they can find porn and/or can get into a relationship with another normal person; both absent, we'd all be rapists. I seriously doubt it's true that a pedophile would magically become a child molester just because they can't find porn.
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Anime porn is illegal in the UK because of that.
That and the fact the British are retarded, and can't tell a drawing from an actual, living, breathing child.
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Another topic is, does looking at cp make pedophiles more likely to molest children?
No until proven otherwise. Even if it did, though, censorship is never the answer.
If people believe the former, even animated cp whose production involved no children at all is not going to be legal.
That's because so many people despise freedom.
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Yes, but there should be tools helping the parents in doing so.
Why?
Because nobody has time to go over every webpage themselves to find out which of them has porn, that they don't want their kids to watch.
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Things that has already been tried include:
And because of that people keep coming up with new ideas, which are mostly mixtures of the above ideas. You can get pretty decent results by such a mix. But it is not efficient to have everybody do it on their own, which means there is a legitimate need for somebody to collect the necessary data to
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Because nobody has time to go over every webpage themselves to find out which of them has porn, that they don't want their kids to watch.
If you can't spare the time to supervise your kid's on-line activities, they shouldn't be on-line, or you shouldn't be a parent.
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If you can't spare the time to supervise your kid's on-line activities, they shouldn't be on-line, or you shouldn't be a parent.
Considering the quality of kids these days? Most people shouldn't be a parent, after all many people for the last 20 years have been using TV as the parent, and now more are using the interwebs. Quality upbringing right there.
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Twenty? Try fifty [wikipedia.org].
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Rather than have it all done by Google, Bing, Yahoo, BangBangDuck or whatever, you can install your guardian software on your PC where you can control which ones it lets through and which ones it bans, and use the list available to ensure you don't have to visit them all yourself.
Or does nobody have the time to install software on their kiddies' PC?
I did not say anything about where it should be done, because my comment was focusing more on the policy aspect than the actual technical implementation. Having it done by search engines is obviously not the best place to do it. But on the kids own device is not the best solution either, as even a kid can learn how to bypass that. Putting the filter on a middlebox between the device the kid is using and the internet is a good start. A bit of cooperation from the device the kid is using would help, for examp
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Just for a change, the article isn't about that at all. It's about paedophiles advertising through easily searched for codewords on porn sites.
Seems to miss the point that such adverts could easily made to look innocuous and placed elsewhere.
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They probably already seem innocuous in context, because it seems to me all legally operating porn sites are extremely paranoid of being associated in any way with underage content. The suggestions are quite frankly bizarre and counterproductive, a registration requirement for being allowed to search for porn? With the implication that this'll be a huge red flag on you since the border between legal and illegal sexual images is nothing but a thin red line rather than the difference between a healthy, fun an
Re:Think of the children blah blah (Score:5, Informative)
It's nothing to do with kids getting age-appropriate material (this time). Their contention is that adult pedophiles first see pictures of children being abused (or anime versions, which are no different according to them) which then encourages them to go out, abduct, rape and murder children.
The obvious solution for the censor brigade is the same setup that mobile phone networks have largely switched to - heavy filtering by default (in this particular example, they want maximum google safe search as default on for everyone) so adult men can't find pictures or anime of naked children, and thus, will never go on to rape and murder real children. Tada! In order to see any sites that are otherwise filtered - such as legal porn, medical sites, art sites, any site to do with the town of scunthorpe - you have to register yourself as a dirty porn watching perv, which list presumably the police will be watching closely in case you start desiring to go on a child abduction and murdering rampage, and will explicitly discourage people from doing, thus keeping their minds clear of unpure thoughts in good Christian fashion.
That it achieves one of their other goals, the appearance of a kiddy-friendly internet with no adult-only activity ever, is just a happy co-incidence.
In a separate but parallel move, the Home Secretary is trying to revive the Snooper's charter - i.e. ISPs, webhosts, service providers such as google and facebook would have to keep extensive logs of what emails and websites UK users visit, which the police and security services can troll through at their leisure, looking for Islamic terrorists planning on chopping down passersby in the street with machetes. And probably now porn-viewing adults, in case they turn out to be child murdering pedo's.
It is the usual 'ban this filth, won't someone think of the children' attempts to whitelist the internet, but this time it's to protect the children from the men who murder them because they saw porn on the internet and decided to get the real thing. That child porn is ALREADY blacklisted by the list run by the IWF, and subscribed to by most ISPs, and he was getting stuff that wasn't on the blacklist, and thus filtering wasn't actually even doing the job they wanted it to when running as intended is being conveniently ignored.
That they and the home secretary don't have a damn clue about how the tech, ISPs or the internet work is a given. They see it as one giant branch of WH Smiths, and it's just like banning the sale of dirty magazines, and will obviously solve the problem once and for all, and anyone that tries to point out the flaws is in league with the terrorists and the pedo child murderers, and heaven forbid anyone express concerns about the Big Brother or Free Speech aspects.
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The *actual* problem is that becauso religious fundamentalist social conditioning, you think a kid watching porn would be something bad or even "harmful". ... while *insane* psychopathic bood-baths and religious schizophrenic brainwashing on public TV is somehow completely OK.
Either the kid is too young, and by himself goes to another site because he doesn't like it, or he's curious because he didn't know it existed... or heâ(TM)s in or past puberty, and liking porn is something utterly normal and natu
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The *actual* problem is that becauso religious fundamentalist social conditioning, you think a kid watching porn would be something bad or even "harmful". ... while *insane* psychopathic bood-baths and religious schizophrenic brainwashing on public TV is somehow completely OK.
Yeah you might want to go explore the world a bit, I'd run out of fingers, and toes three times over with the number of left-leaning parents who have this view point. This mindset is exceptionally prevalent in the GTA, and other left-leaning strongholds here in Canada.
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Mark Bridger is 47. I doubt he would have taken much notice of his parents telling him not to surf porn.
This isn't about preventing children watching porn, this is about preventing everyone watching (certain) porn. If we could be confident that it would only be child porn that would be blocked then I'd be content with that (I don't want to stumble on that stuff by accident), But I don't think we can be confident.
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How about their parents giving their kids a long assed info dump on human sexuality ala Monty Python with examples, charts diagrams and pictures. Suck all the life out of it. Make it ordinary and they'll go play "Pretty Pink Ponytail Pony Princess" with their frands.
At least till the hormones hit. Unfortunately Britainians can't have dad cleaning a quantity of guns on the kitchen table while a young cock monger visits his daughter.
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Also how many pedphiles do a general search via Google for CP?
I assume they would have their own set of sites that would try and NOT be easily found by a random person or law enforcement. The Abuse team at an old company of mine would get reports of CP, and often times the server Admins would not know, as the server was compromised.
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Why bother? I don't think it's "inappropriate" at all. That said, I do agree that it's the parents' problem.
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Why yes, yes it is - run kitten, run.
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Ooh yes the 5% of the population who are Muslim are tooootally dominating English culture and online pron is a concern exclusive to Islam. They have imams in the House of Lords, oh wait, no they Bishops from an Established Church (WTF) the Church of England in the House of Lords and the head of state is also the head of that church.
Re:Is England turning Islamic ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This seems to be being pushed by rather conservative types, not by the UK population or government coalition as a whole.
So who put them in power, the people of Lower Slobbovia?
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Usually, politicians play the anti-child-porn card when they want to distract the general public from some other failing, scandal or downright incompetence that the government has recently shown.
Has anything happened recently in the UK that fits this mold . . . ?
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You ask like this is a relatively rare occurrence that needs an occasional distraction. You'd be wrong. It's every day.
Slippery slope (Score:1)
Think of the children!
Only God knows what they would demand to block once infrastructure would be on place. Many things, facts and lies that annoy or disturb powers-that-be come to my mind, though.
porn or violence (Score:5, Insightful)
it never ceases to amaze me that legislators are paranoid over even the slightest form of nudity while it took a massive public outcry to get a facebook movie removed in which a woman was decapitated with a kitchen knife.
I rather have my kids accidentally stumble upon some extreme acts of intercourse than extreme acts of violence.
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Well, the US does get its perverse puritan sexual values from England, not continental Europe, where women don't even own bikini tops.
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That'll be an England of several hundred years ago. Anyone who has been to England in the last thirty years will know that the general population is far from puritan.
Re:porn or violence (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. And I also noticed that children tend to go sites for children because that is where they find what they want.
The "pornography" they might stumble upon accidentally is soft, and they don't even notice it because it's not intersting
Once they start finding pornography interesting, you cannot prevent them from finding it, and why would you anyway.
As teenagers, before the Internet, we had some pornographic magazines which someone would have found and which we would look at in a far away corner of the school yard. It hasn't traumatized me.
In short, my children who are now almost adult always had access to the Internet, and I have never noticed a problem with pornography.
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And I am CONSTANTLY reading in the news about boys gang-raping girls, and drugging and raping them
That definitely never happened in the past. The days before pornography were rape-free utopias where women were considered completely equal to men.
maybe because it gets boys thinking that girls are just sex objects and not people
And the show Will and Grace makes boys gay too, right?
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It was one thing looking at Playboy
The seventies magazines I was referring to were not Playboy. If you consider Playboy to be pornography, then you really have a problem.
Personally what I find amazing is... (Score:2)
it never ceases to amaze me that legislators are paranoid over even the slightest form of nudity while it took a massive public outcry to get a facebook movie removed in which a woman was decapitated with a kitchen knife.
I rather have my kids accidentally stumble upon some extreme acts of intercourse than extreme acts of violence.
Personally what I find amazing is that we don't have rampant comedy on the streets because of the sitcoms on TV, rampant reality on the streets because of reality TV, and humorous cats everywhere like some pre-warp civilization equivalent of tribbles.
Play spot the fallacy/error (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure exactly what it is Carr wants blocked? He seems to be calling for all sexual imagery to be blocked, and to justify this he cites behaviour related to pretty fucking horrendous child porn. It's like banning all metals because sodium reacts pretty explosively on contact with water.
Mr Carr said there was "no question" that some men who look at child sex abuse images go on to carry out abuse.
Earlier, speaking to BBC Radio 5 live he said: "There is enough evidence to suggest that if we can put more barriers towards guys getting to child abuse images, fewer of them will do it and more children will be safe."
He said between 15 and 50 per cent of men who previously had no involvement with child abuse images would go on to physically harm children once they accessed them.
This rate seems very high. I'm assuming he's referring to the kinds of images that most people wouldn't really want to be seeing, in which case these are deviants who have self-selected themselves. The impression he's giving is that up to 50% of normal otherwise sexually healthy people will driven quite mad by porn.
To put it another way, 40% of people who enjoy lettuce in some part of their diet are obese, therefore we should restrict lettuce if we wish to reduce obesity.
His comment on increasing barriers to porn being an effective way to reduce child abuse is pretty fucking telling. The same logic can be used to ban or restrict pretty much anything. Let's say that 10% of people who steal cars will use them in bank robberies, therefore introducing a levy on car purchases will decrease purchases, reducing car availability, thus decreasing bank robberies. Whether its the journalist or him, I don't know, but the tack keeps shifting. I agree that restricting access to images of child abuse is sensible, but is that all he wants? Earlier he seems to be going after legal porn sites as well. I get the impression he's happy to drive a bulldozer through a house in order to crack a walnut.
It has been suggested that some internet companies are reluctant to change their search settings as it would drive users to sites unwilling to change their policy and put them at a competitive disadvantage.
And the same would be true if Carr was asking Google to censor all search results depicting black people. They'd have no good reason to do so, and it would indeed gimp their service and drive customers away.
But he said one of the "key routes" paedophiles used to find content was through adverts containing "code words" that are placed on legal hardcore pornography sites.
So paedos have their secret code words anyway for locating their child porn - what's the fucking point in using Google then? Also, what he's getting at here is that legal porn sites are providing super secret access to child porn, so the solution is to remove all porn sites (legal or not) from search results? Website operators found complicit in the distribution of illegal images should be dealt with by the law - not everyone blocked because Carr claims there are some bad apples. Certainly people caught browsing such sites should be hearing from Plod.
Terrible summary (Score:2)
Though it would have a similar result, this is entirely unrelated to the calls to block porn by default in order to protect children using the internet.
The stated goal here is to make it harder for paedophiles find child-porn by searching for codewords in adverts on legal porn websites.
This still seems pretty short-sighted to me, if we're aware of these secret code-words, shouldn't we be attacking the source of the problem? If porn sites were blocked from search engines, wouldn't these disguised adverts jus
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How do the pedophiles manage to agree on these codewords? If they have a secure communications channel already to agree on codewords, they don't need to sneakily post on porn forums.
I suspect this claim about secret pedophile codes is made up. But as such words would be far too dangerous to reveal to the public for investigation, we shall just have to take it on faith that our politician overlords wouldn't lie to us.
The Internet isn't a nanny (Score:3)
Ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
Both John Carr and I have been involved in the foundation of Inhope.org. But ever since hotlines and online child protection came into fashion, there's been differences in policies in various countries in Europe. In the Netherlands, policy makers, service providers and volunteers have always had their focus on preventing and fighting (pictures of) online child abuse (aka "child pornography"). In the UK, the focus has been on protecting childrens poor souls from seeing things that policy makers think children should not see. Hence, they block the obvious porn sites, leaving only the more hidden and nasty sites for children to visit. Even the EU in the early 90's quickly switched from preventing online child abuse to blocking porn. There was plenty of subsidy from the EU to local hotlines (of which Meldpunt was the first and the Internet Watch Foundation second), but as the focus shifted, Meldpunt was party left out from the subsidies, because it kept its focus where it should be: preventing and fighting child sexual abuse.
Sex is part of life. Educating children about sex makes them better prepared for life as an adult. You can easily see that by comparing stats for porn intolerance and teen pregnancies. Holland has a very low teen pregnancy number. And if parents don't want their kids to see online sex, why can't we just leave that to parents?
Governments should spend tons of money catching the guys who sexually abuse children. They should not interfere with sexual education, let alone censor the internet.
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Oh, and as for blocking child porn sites: blocking those sites makes them unavailable to the general public. They will remain available for pedophiles, one way or another. But if they're not visible for most people, no one will urge their members of parliament to spend more money on catching pedophiles. As a founder of Meldpunt.org, I know for a fact that if the stuff is visible, papers and blogs write about it, and the government (parliament and police) take action. If child porn had been blocked from the
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I know the man, although when I last saw him was in the '90's. He's actually a nice man. But I don't think he knows a lot about the internet, like, the bigger picture of it. The founders of Meldpunt all ran (and still run) their own linux servers, while in most of the other hotlines, let alone in the advisory councils, there were suits and police officers whith entirely different backgrounds.
confused meddler (Score:5, Insightful)
His statements seem to be very confused. He wants Google and others to do more to block material depicting child abuse. Well that's already blocked in the UK, and it's done at the ISP level with no need for Google to be involved.
He wants Google to use 'safe search' as their default search setting. I thought they already did?
He seems to think people will have to register to be able to search for porn. Register where? Search how? And register for what? This is where I'm utterly confused by what he's assuming, what he's proposing and how he thinks it will work.
The only certainty is that it wont.
Mark Bridger viewed non-pornographic images of April Jones from Facebook. So does Carr want Facebook banned? Does he want images of five year olds banned from Facebook? Does he want it to be impossible to search for images on Facebook?
Mark Bridger had a collection of images of child abuse. Those images are already illegal. Access to them is blocked when possible already within the UK. There's not a whole lot Google can do about that, not least because anybody finding any material via Google can already notify the Internet Watch Foundation and let them know about it.
The good news is that in another ten years or so the politicians will start to be replaced by people that grew up with the Internet, that understand it better and that will at least have a grasp of the pragmatic realities involved.
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What is going on is politicians trying to sound as though they are "getting tough" on paedophiles whilst not actually understanding how the internet works. For instance, some years ago I read an article by a self-confessed paedophile on how internet access to this illegal material is actually managed. As I am sure nobody here will be surprised, the serving system is via encrypted filesystem virtual servers, hosted off-shore, working entirely over https, where the web address is usually a plain IP address or
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The good news is that in another ten years or so the politicians will start to be replaced by people that grew up with the Internet, that understand it better and that will at least have a grasp of the pragmatic realities involved.
I wouldn't rely on internet dwellers to have a sense of perspective. Soon we'll probably be able to call 911 to have police dispatched when we read a mean facebook comment.
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Ah. Erm: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/oct/08/april-jones-teenager-jailed-facebook [guardian.co.uk]
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His statements seem to be very confused. He wants Google and others to do more to block material depicting child abuse. Well that's already blocked in the UK, and it's done at the ISP level
No its not. *Some* ISPs have signed up to censor content the IWF(*) tells them to (notably Virgin and BT). The majority of ISPs haven't.
(* The IWF mandates blocks on whatever content they feel like with no kind of oversight to prevent abuses - they have a history of being a tad overzealous, so sensible people don't use an ISP that signs up to the IWF. The IWF also requires a relatively large mandatory "voluntary donation" from the ISPs, which is another reason why the smaller ISPs aren't interested).
He wants Google to use 'safe search' as their default search setting. I thought they already did?
The
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*Some* ISPs have signed up to censor content the IWF(*) tells them to (notably Virgin and BT). The majority of ISPs haven't.
According to the list at https://www.iwf.org.uk/members/member-policies/url-list/iwf-list-recipients [iwf.org.uk] the ISPs servicing 98.6% of UK households are signed up.
Along with Google, as it happens. I didn't know that.
So whether the majority of ISPs use filter on that list or not, the majority of internet users in the UK definitely do.
There's some material that should be blocked. (Score:1)
The problem is how do you do that without restricting everyone elses freedom to look at ordinary bare naked women/men, as their fancy takes them?
In the main, the fuss is being generated by "Think of the Children" agitatiors and their allies, the "family" tabloid press. Its a typical knee-jerk response to a tragic incident, similar to those calls for all dogs with teeth to be put down because their owners are feckless layabouts who allow them to chew up small children and pensioners.
No doubt, an "Aprils Law"
HOWTO argue against Internet censorship (Score:2)
The logical path (Score:2)
Would not to block all porn sites but to demand that all porn-sites are paywalled, with an bank account in the country of the customer, and make a law that the transaton data (i.e. the customers) will remain anonymous and may only be asked for in the "give me infromation for name x" in case of a legal trial.
A paywalled porn-site has no interest at all to get that account seized, since it would do direct economic damage. The customers would be happy not to get trojans or have 100 windows popping up.
At the sa
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Arranging a situation in which the involved parties can gain somthing by acting correct goes over trying to force them to act correct.
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Who is punished by using a service for paying money? Who is punished by geeting money for providing a service?
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i never stated that it is neccesary. I just stated that iff advertisements on porn site are a problem, then the solution is to forbid the ads, not the site.
Conflation (Score:4, Interesting)
It's amazing how quickly they leap from "porn" to "paedophiles". Just two paragraphs in, and both of them very short.
It used to be "gays == paedophiles" but they can no longer get away with that.
Got it.... (Score:2)
> a government adviser on child internet safety
A what? Sounds like that's their problem right there.
How about.. (Score:1)
An opt-in clause from the ISP?
But whatever.. Then you couldn't obfuscate your secret Web blocking plans..
Foot in the door - everyone's at it. Once the proverbial salesman's foot is in he can pitch his sale. This planet is fucking full of slimeballs.
Propaganda if I ever seen it. (Score:2)
Tell me what this has to do with pornography?
This sort of cherry picked anecdotal evidence is nothing more than fear mongering, and it is NEVER uniformly enforced either, and always has to do with some form of confirmation bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
Google for kiddie porn? (Score:2)
I doubt it. The speed with which Google will deliver CP to some pedo is matched by the speed with which law enforcement will find it.
Most CP is hidden from easy access by the general public as a matter of self preservation. Sites are passed around by word of mouth in forums where one has to establish some level of trust before being admitted to the 'good stuff'. Like post some before we show you ours.
It's about child porn not children viewing porn (Score:2)
Problem number 1 define:porn,Child (Score:2)
the biggest problem of this (not counting the actual problem of kids being abused) is how do you define Child Porn??
the line between artistic and Porn images is very fuzzy short of images of actual sexual acts or abuse.
what needs to happen is Father Uncles and Older Brothers need to be able to take pictures of their siblings (or friends siblings) without being glared at (assuming no crime is being commited).
and yes any block list has a Zero Chance of working correctly (false positives and negatives will be
whattttt (Score:2)
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Come to think of it, it's a small miracle that bbc.co.uk hasn't been blocked yet. Judging by the news the BBC appears to be the largest pedo ring in the world.
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I'm intreged by this pagan concept call HELL.
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"by putting speed limiters in cars, and banning what are effectivly 'race' cars/bikes from the road. there is no legitimate reason to have a vehical that will do 0-60 in under 12 seconds. "
I agree there should be limits on speed - but not on acceleration. If your speed limit is 70 (I presume we are talking miles per hour here) then it doesn't matter how quick your vehicle gets up to that speed.
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I agree there should be limits on speed - but not on acceleration. If your speed limit is 70 (I presume we are talking miles per hour here) then it doesn't matter how quick your vehicle gets up to that speed.
Here's my rule: People make mistakes (including myself). Accidents happen when people make mistakes, and other people don't or cannot compensate for the mistakes. Extreme acceleration reduces the possible reaction time when people make mistakes, makes it harder for everyone to compensate for mistakes, and therefore causes more accidents.
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