Through one method or another, sex is still taboo. We can't talk openly about it. It's something that generally happens behind closed doors.
Making this filtering opt-out is a "soft ban". People will have to take that "uncomfortable", "shameful" step of "unbanning" it. If someone watches porn, they've gone to the trouble of getting it unbanned to feed their "filthy" minds.
That's the narrative behind the psychology of this ban being enforced.
The govt. will have a big list of people they can spy on to make sure they're not looking at anything they shouldn't be, and I hazard a guess that the govt. will change their mind on what's acceptable more rapidly now they have a handle on it.
"It is this need to conform to society and control the libido that leads to tension and disturbance in the individual, prompting the use of ego defenses to dissipate the psychic energy of these unmet and mostly unconscious needs into other forms."
Your locked door is your protection of privacy. This is akin to requiring people to register to look at your door to decide if they want to open it.
We all know how wonderful government registries are, because nobody has ever been unfairly prosecuted for sexual preferences and/or orientations, religion, race, etc...
This makes a nice tagline, but the first amendment, like almost all of the other ones, has been eroded over time. For example, having to have a permit to protest in high traffic areas.
I'm sure it was hyperbole, but how many guns do you really need at the grocery store? If it's not a zombie apocalypse, my vote is on a maximum of one, assuming you are licensed to carry it, of course.
He gave an interview on Woman's Hour where he sounded functionally illiterate. He sounded really confused about the idea of "where the filtering actually occurs", saying that all new computers (by the end of the year) would have to have this filter on, "ticked off by default" (meaning, I think, 'on' by default).
The filtering is almost certainly applied on the ISP end, with a web interface to a control panel.
I have no idea what Cameron means when he says it will be on all new computers by the end of the year, but he mentioned iPads. I suspect it's just his confusion about client / server, and that the OS will have no effect.
Yeah, I suggested as much but loose politician lips can sink ships. Especially ignorant ones. A poorly drafted law can have unpredictable consequences and later be impossible to change with the "My opponent wants your kid to be sodomized on the internet by copyright pirate, terrorist, porn industry magnates, blasphemers,{scary moral panic subculture of the month}" argument.
Since PCs are falling out of favor, you can bet that all locked-down non-PC devices will be gradually implementing "lawful and compliant" restrictions on user activity, and hefty surveillance "just in case."
Android devices will be no exception, and families/businesses will be encouraged to install "lawful and compliant" software on all new computers. Any vendors looking to get a foothold in the UK will be jumping on this bandwagon, and I wouldn't be surprised if Canonical tries to get in on the action too.
It would be good to see Google take steps, beyond publishing the AOSP repos, to build trust in their systems and services:
1. Publish build-able Android source code for as many products as possible and incentivize OEMs to publish their source code.
2. Support strong encryption for storage and communications, including friendly key exchange and key-signing features. E.g. NFC-enabled key signing in Android devices.
3. Open source client software, e.g. an open source GMail client for Android and desktop, to build trust in their crypto implementations.
The phrase "tick off" is legitimate and means to put a mark next to, such as with a checklist. It isn't even esoteric AFAIK, it is just that "tick" for "check" is more of a British usage. (To be clear: not saying he isn't confused.)
Oh, yes, this is just a gently confusing inversion.
I was expecting him to say the filter would be "on" by default, because it will be. He's describing it as "off" by default - meaning "show me porn? [ ]" instead of "show me porn? [x]".
(Cultural note: 'ticked off' normally means 'unhappy' or 'dissatisfied'.)
Remember, the purpose of this proposed legislation is not to be implemented, or to achieve specific results; it's to curry favour with Conservative voters, and especially those who read the Daily Mail. It will be pushed through only to avoid the loss of face that would come from "giving in to porn".
(One of the major problems with the Blair years was this kind of closed loop between policy making and newspaper headlines; actual policy impact spewed out in all directions like scattered neutrons leaking from the policy reactor)
Is probably just an attempt to get back some of his core voters that he managed to annoy with the whole gay marriage thing.
If/when it fails he can then point fingers at the ISPs and say that it is their fault it didn't happen, which is probably why he is claiming that he is fighting them from the outset as it fits the later narrative better and means he can scapegoat them when the time comes to minimise the splashback.
> 10 Do you really think these plans will stop the ‘corrosion’ of childhood?
question 10 is indeed the most important one, IMHO blocking porn on the internet is not going to stop kids to have access to adult content so it's really pointless unless you want to have a start point for something bigger (censorship)
With regards to "corrosion of childhood", I believe "access to adult content" is a bit of a red herring. More worryingly, kids are spending more time indoors, isolated (often on the Internet/games consoles, though that's missing the point).
As little as ten years ago, you'd generally see kids playing outdoors, in the parks and in the streets, often unsupervised. Now, thanks (I can only assume) to paedo-paranoia, parents are unwilling to allow their children to play outdoors at all, let alone unsupervised. I'd consider this to contribute more to the corrosion of childhood than "access to adult content" - especially since they'd likely have less of the latter if they spent more time being kids.
I think the delay in starting a family is also a big factor. Anecdotal evidence (including personal experience) suggests that older parents are more anxious about their kids since, from a purely biological perspective, replacing a lost one is no longer possible. That makes people paranoid about the dangers to the kids they have. The paedo-paranoia and (my pet peeve) endless stories of dead children in the media only go fuel parental anxiety further.
So if Cameron want to stop the "corrosion of childhood", a crackdown on media outlets eliciting emotional responses to boost readership would be a better place to start.
It's not just parents. My local school (~500 metres away) doesn't let students walk to and from school unaccompanied by an adult until they are eleven.
I'm gently sympathetic to the "let's help children avoid accidentally stumbling across hard core pornography". I don't think this is the right way to do it, and I don't think it's nearly as much of a problem as it used to be, although the various porn-video sites don't seem to require any age verification at all.
Google and DDG and others seem to be working hard to reduce the amount of pornographic content shown to people doing searches. (A Google image search for [vintage beef] largely returns the YouTuber and Minecraft player, and not vintage naked men. Even without filtering explicit results it's just a few naked men, and nothing "horrible".)
Email is a lot better than it used to be, I think. It would have been nice if the UK had implemented a real anti-spam law when we had the chance. Existing law means it's only illegal to show porn to people under 18 if you do so for the purpose of sexual gratification. (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/12)
>the statement about making it a criminal offence to possess images depicting rape sounds a good idea on the face of it
How does making images of consenting adults doing something completely legal sound like a good idea in any way?
It will be interesting to observe if this gets into law without being challenged.
UK public did not really care about "Tempora" etc. as far as i could see it. (i hope i am wrong) And systems like these are just the front door approval to cover the other systems.
They tried to implement a system like this in Germany and failed miserable but every society acts differently we are still up in arms against the spying programs. But in most countries this topic already vanished from mainstream media.
A government mandated crude filter applied by the ISPs by default, controllable by the account owner, would probably be acceptable to enough people in England for it to go through without much fuss.
But even with that there are obvious problems. Ann wants to turn the filter off, but Bob is the account owner, and Ann doesn't want Bob to know. Chas is their 15 year old child and he finds it trivially easy to bypass the filter.
And now Cameron has announced much wider plans, with many more flaws.
I'm annoyed and disturbed that Cameron is mixing in some measures against images of child sexual abuse and measures against normal pornography. They are very different problems[1] and should be dealt with very differently.
It would be great if image search engines could make reporting images to the Internet Watch Foundation[2] easier. That might go someway to appeasing the politicians. I doubt it would get much use. I search for a lot of images, every day, and I go down the long tail of the search, and I have never seen any images of child sexual abuse.
Perhaps search engines could provide some statistics of searches for certain words associated with child sexual abuse. This would have to be done carefully, but I'm not thinking of normal terms that every day people might use (someone doing research, or a child who has been abused) but some very specific terms that only people involved in trading images of child sexual abuse would know. I'm sure they have their own lingo.
[1] I say problem because that's the word they use, not because I think regular pornography is a problem.
[2] IWF are the regulators in the UK for this kind of thing and they coordinate with law enforcement world wide. http://www.iwf.org.uk/
He's not the only politician to have spouted off loudly about this stuff lately.
Each one of them seems to think that Google is the internet, and that if they don/t index something it doesn't exist. Each one of them also (intentionally?) conflates images of child abuse with images of consenting adults.
They come across as extremely ignorant. Unfortunately this isn't confined to a single party.
1 Who will decide what counts as ‘pornography’, and how?
Pornography is everything that gives a politician, cleric or judge a boner.
2 Do you understand and acknowledge the difference between pornography, child abuse images and images depicting rape?
See number one.
3 Are you planning to make all pornography illegal?
Only until people find joy in it. When the junior anti sex league is ready we will unban it.
4 What about Page 3?
Don't mess with the freedom of the press to make and break politicians. Yet.
5 What else do you want to censor?
Everything but the truth. There will be special government agency to decide what the truth is today.
6 What happens when people ‘opt-in’?
I will ask daily mail to kindly label them child rapists. Also will suspend the UK libel law for the Daily mail. Then I will offer a ritual sacrifice to the daily mail shrine in my office so the deity will bring more votes to me.
7 What was that letter to the ISPs about?
[Redacted for national security concerns]
8 Are you going to get the ISPs to block Facebook?
Facebook? Book with faces. We hadn't had such things in 1695, haven't kept up with the recent trends.
9 How do you think your plans will go down with US internet companies?
I will delay the tax pressure and they will cave. Too much PITA to chase the money to fund health and education anyway.
10 Do you really think these plans will stop the ‘corrosion’ of childhood?
No but it will give is critical tools in being able to delay or outright prevent developing of critical thinking and free thoughts.
On a serious note - if the kid is able to learn about the Holocaust, WW2, Gulag,Wikipedia pages on torture or Greek mythology with pictures at age of 8 (they won't be censored) and not be scarred for ever, his/her mind is probably strong enough to bear the sight of a consenting women and men having sex few years later. Even if it is in a bit weirder ways.
>1 Who will decide what counts as ‘pornography’, and how?
>Pornography is everything that gives a politician, cleric or judge a boner.
So, everything then. The ruling classes have the most profound and perverse paraphilias one can imagine. A friend who is a PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to a Tory MP reports that he is a horse fancier, however prefers to be ridden than to ride.
This article doesn't make the distinction between "porn" and "illegal content" half clear enough. Porn is not illegal (and in my view not necessarily immoral) to make or to watch. Using child abuse arguments to legitimise legislation about porn is just disgusting.
The internet is HUGE. Detecting porn is a non-trivial task, but even if you solve it, you will still need insane infrastructure to crawl the internet and apply your magical algorithm to every image on every website.
Exactly and with all the massive cuts they're making because we spend far too much, is this really what they should be spending money on? The NHS is in shambles (visibly worse than under Labour), people having to pay for the extra room whilst their children are away fighting in Afghanistan and many pensioners much less than well off and the government wants to fund a porn blocking filter that's undoubtedly going to cost tonnes? I do not like my government.
1. You draw up a blocklist of offending domain names and IP addresses for child porn websites and get ISPs to block them
2. Force google not to return results for people searching for child porn.
Because politicians and their advisers really do seem to think it's that easy and that if it's not listed on google it's not on the internet. It's stunningly ignorant.
This move is to please middle England since they read all the headlines about '1/3 of kids addicted to porn' and stories about teenage rapists heavily implying porn made them that way.
Oh I know about cleanfeed, ever since the wikipedia debacle. The issue is that they think it actually solves anything!
I wish it was only one side of the house that was into this rubbish, but various Labour front-benchers have come out with very similar nonsense. Also the last labour government seemed to be full of "All Porn is Rape" style feminists * .
( * please note, I consider myself a feminist in as much as believe in absolute equality and free self determination for all humans, I just disagree with some aspects of some feminist philosophy. As do a lot of prominent feminists AFAICT)
'Family filter', what a crock of shit, similar to the crock of shit verdict that GCHQ's use of PRISM was deemed legal (by whom exactly?). We know you want to spy on us, don't use the bleeding hearts at mum's net to get your agenda passed.
Exactly. I thought we'd had the intelligent debates about censorship and the Internet over ten years ago!
Same old crap, wrapped in some slightly different packaging.
You could call a referendum on this one and get it through, just by asking a thinly veiled question like: 'Do you think our children should be protected from pornography?'. Just flash a picture of Jimmy Saville visiting a hospital while you ask it.
I feel this country is getting less and less progressive at every turn and u-turn.
Some furore over some phone hacking - remember that? Remember that eavesdropping is a bad, bad thing? Then a few months later, happily talk about eavesdropping/filtering the nation. Sickens me, even more than Mandy's mutterings.
Boxed into a corner - will be wiping ballot paper on arse at next election.
There are some of us the would love an ability to opt-out of certain parts of the internet. I understand the problem with censorship. But I would love the option to opt-out. Especially when children are involved.
The internet is an amazing source of information. But currently it is not safe to leave a child alone on the internet. Is there a way to keep every one happy?
As I always note in threads like this, this is not a problem of censorship or defining what is "pornography". These are all distractions from the real problem: a legalized violence employed by people calling themselves "government" to achieve their ends.
"Anti-porn law" in plain words means this: if you happen to provide an internet connection to some people, you will have to do what we say, or we will bring people with guns to make you to or give up your property (and maybe put you in jail too). We may ask for suggestions in form of "petitions" and "voting", but only within the imposed framework which you are not allowed to bypass. E.g. you are not allowed to vote for not sponsoring this whole mess by not paying your taxes. And even if you can, there's a mob rule: 50%+1 will overrule you.
When Apple censors porn on App Store, no one really cares because Apple does not point guns at people. You may use any other device, any other distribution platform. You can build one on your own. Apple only tries to be nice to people and attract customers voluntarily. This 180º opposite from how government operates. Government does not really try to please people, that's only for decoration. Underlying principle is to force everyone to obey.
I find this article overly critical. Leaving the feasibility issues aside, I don't think most parents will just rely on this measure and totally forget about their own responsibilities. What, do people not teach their kids against taking drugs, just because they're illegal?
Also, assuming that the NSA will use the list to find terrorists or child pornographers is also ridiculous. If there's a porn site the ISP's keep track of (so they can "opt" it in the program), chances are that the site does not have illegal porn on it, so why the fuck would they care? Even if it could be used for public shaming, who the hell still cares about who watches and who doesn't watch porn?
The only legitimate complaints are those regarding feasibility, like what counts as porn (do sites that allow it, but are not really about it, count, like reddit? or to a lesser extent, as already mentioned in the article, facebook) but hell, might as well just ask why all politicians make promises they can't keep. The article would have been way more credible if it kept to sane arguments, rather than trying to throw around random criticisms like #2, which makes references to porn that is already illegal, or #3 and #4, which would obviously never come to fruition.
As for #10, which is a legitimate question, definitely not, but it's an aid towards it, with a significance in the long term that is yet to be discovered.
I want to see the detailed metastudies that clearly suggest exposure to internet porn does significant damage to kids.
I also want to know why this has to be enforced by the nanny state, rather than provided for by already available software? Do the parents have no responsibility?
Actually, since this government likes to full-on lie about evidence [0] let's just wait until we have a chance to throw these demagogue idiots out.
I'm no expert, but that seems to be a report by a probably biased organisation, rather than a scientific metastudy looking at sufficient sample sizes and eliminating confounding factors. Please correct me if the report is of equivalent quality.
I'd be amazed if there was actual evidence that violence in the media actually contributed to real world violence even in children, as I thought this had already been covered at length with the various computer game scares.
Why didn't you just read the report instead of jumping to conclusions? In fact the evidence portion of this is based off over 100 different sources and appears to have been produced by 3 universities.
> Please correct me if the report is of equivalent quality.
Like I said, I'm no expert, so even if I had time to read the report (I don't) it isn't a scientific metastudy. It's a report, by a quite possibly (probably) biased organisation. So unless I had some special knowledge about the area (I don't) or time to review it in detail (nope) I don't know whether to trust it or not vs. a scentific metastudy.
A weary aside (I am not interested in arguing on the internet cf. http://xkcd.com/386/)
Your rudeness is totally uncalled for. If you excise that rude first sentence your post loses no value (in fact gains some.) I have a healthy skepticism when it comes to politically useful 'facts' like these and thus don't take government-commissioned reports even with many citations on face value. That doesn't deserve condescension.
When someone says "why don't you read XXX instead of jumping to conclusions", and it turns out you not only haven't read XXX but refuse to, the claim that their statement is rude becomes a little hollow.
He pointed out that the study did not appear to be a peer reviewed scientific study, and asked if this was really the case. He was told to read it himself, but reading the report yourself doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the review/publishing process for the report. (Of course since it's not in a scientific journal the chance it received peer review is pretty low.) Telling somebody to read something themselves may or may not be rude, but it certainly wasn't an answer to the question.
I know everybody on HN likes to think they are an expert in everything, but reading 'reports' by think tanks or other political institutions, even ones that cite scientific studies, is a good way to confirm your own biases, but not a necessarily a good way to educate yourself about contentious issues. If you are not familiar with the area of research you won't know what has been missed or ignored or proven unrepeatable or flawed. A peer reviewed meta-study would be much more likely to include the full cross section of available research.
You're probably right, but I think your point is orthogonal to mine. Being told to read something is insulting and rude if the presumption should be that you'd already read it before commenting, but that presumption vanishes when you militantly declaim that you shouldn't have to read things.
I'm biased because I sympathize with the "rude" commenter, in that I think discussions would be better on HN if people took more time to read linked sources and spent less time promoting their own preconceptions.
Also, if this community is as smart as it likes to think it is (no comment), it should be able to extract credible content from think-tank reports without succumbing to their intended conclusions.
You assume the rudeness is in being told to read it, rather than the tone of that. Actually it was the way he went about it, like I said, without that preface to his comment it loses no content and gains civility. There was no need, and my point stood as the kind parent suggests without my having read it. So I disagree, your point is not orthogonal.
I'm not as smart as many in this community think they are (the majority are also almost certainly actually much smarter than me), so I don't trust my ability to assess the scientific quality of the report.
I'm happy to have my preconceptions changed by the way, but I want to have some certainty - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that pornography harms children in any significant way seems to me to be quite extraordinary, and very clearly full of confounding factors, so I want to see an extensive metastudy.
Surely it's sensible for somebody to be able to critique very strong scientific claims that come not from a scientific journal but a government sponsored report by a committee which might reasonably be suspected of bias? Or do I have to read all the literature every time to be able to question that?
Clearly here on hacker news criticising the blessed points of a high karma user like yourself is not permitted (it's costing me karma) so I ought to stop.
It's obviously true you can say things about a publication without reading it e.g. a paper expounding cold fusion in some obscure journal. Knowing something about the circumstances of publication and difficulty of the problem gives you a priori knowledge that hey - it's probably questionable. But hey - in tptacek world, you'd have to read the whole thing before being able to say anything about it (even though you'd get nothing out of it unless you were a physicist.)
I think you've erected a straw man because you're pissed off about somebody not reading something.
Anyway, this whole line is just starting to annoy me and it's quite depressing to see a high karma user be so obtuse, so let's leave it at that. Arguing on the internet is such a waste of time.
So any kind of tone is ok if you disagree with somebody? I mean I disagree with you here, so can I get condescending?
I didn't read it because a. I don't have time to read a 20 page report which I have no skill to assess as correct or otherwise (as I said repeatedly above), and b. my reading it, though it would satisfy you, wouldn't actually get me anywhere, since like I said, repeatedly, I don't actually know whether it's valid or not.
What tone? He said you should read something before arriving at conclusions about it. He didn't add "you moron" to the end of it. And, it turned out, you hadn't read it.
Every criticism stings. They sting me even when I'm confident that I'm right, and even though a Markov 'tptacek could probably get 1000 karma points pretty quickly on HN. Don't confuse the sting of a critical comment with a breach of etiquette.
Say 'Why didn't you just X before jumping to conclusions?' out loud and tell me it's not rude. It also presupposes that my only reasonable response would be to read the whole report and criticise its contents, whereas I suggest you can criticise it from the point of view of who it is written by and the fact it's not a scientific article. I also clearly stated that I just didn't know. Why that justified that kind of response I don't know.
You probably find it less rude as you clearly have more of an issue with people not reading things than the issue at hand. On that point (unless I'm mistaken of course), let me point out I am happy to read TFA and do so all the time, but a 20 page report which I am simply not going to be able to reasonably assess is not quite the same thing, is it?
I'd like to see said studies compare the damage done by exposure to porn to the damage done by exposure to sex-shaming religions. Such as the official state religion of the UK, Christianity.
If porn has to be banned because it damages kids, why does religion get a free pass?
217 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 97.3 ms ] threadMaking this filtering opt-out is a "soft ban". People will have to take that "uncomfortable", "shameful" step of "unbanning" it. If someone watches porn, they've gone to the trouble of getting it unbanned to feed their "filthy" minds.
That's the narrative behind the psychology of this ban being enforced.
The govt. will have a big list of people they can spy on to make sure they're not looking at anything they shouldn't be, and I hazard a guess that the govt. will change their mind on what's acceptable more rapidly now they have a handle on it.
People may find these links interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisexualism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_repression
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libido_(Psychoanalysis)
"It is this need to conform to society and control the libido that leads to tension and disturbance in the individual, prompting the use of ego defenses to dissipate the psychic energy of these unmet and mostly unconscious needs into other forms."
Say... consuming material goods?
We all know how wonderful government registries are, because nobody has ever been unfairly prosecuted for sexual preferences and/or orientations, religion, race, etc...
I'm sure it was hyperbole, but how many guns do you really need at the grocery store? If it's not a zombie apocalypse, my vote is on a maximum of one, assuming you are licensed to carry it, of course.
Depends on who has it. Might need two.
It's just bafflingly bad. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03757cr)
I have no idea what Cameron means when he says it will be on all new computers by the end of the year, but he mentioned iPads. I suspect it's just his confusion about client / server, and that the OS will have no effect.
Android devices will be no exception, and families/businesses will be encouraged to install "lawful and compliant" software on all new computers. Any vendors looking to get a foothold in the UK will be jumping on this bandwagon, and I wouldn't be surprised if Canonical tries to get in on the action too.
1. Publish build-able Android source code for as many products as possible and incentivize OEMs to publish their source code.
2. Support strong encryption for storage and communications, including friendly key exchange and key-signing features. E.g. NFC-enabled key signing in Android devices.
3. Open source client software, e.g. an open source GMail client for Android and desktop, to build trust in their crypto implementations.
I was expecting him to say the filter would be "on" by default, because it will be. He's describing it as "off" by default - meaning "show me porn? [ ]" instead of "show me porn? [x]".
(Cultural note: 'ticked off' normally means 'unhappy' or 'dissatisfied'.)
(One of the major problems with the Blair years was this kind of closed loop between policy making and newspaper headlines; actual policy impact spewed out in all directions like scattered neutrons leaking from the policy reactor)
If/when it fails he can then point fingers at the ISPs and say that it is their fault it didn't happen, which is probably why he is claiming that he is fighting them from the outset as it fits the later narrative better and means he can scapegoat them when the time comes to minimise the splashback.
question 10 is indeed the most important one, IMHO blocking porn on the internet is not going to stop kids to have access to adult content so it's really pointless unless you want to have a start point for something bigger (censorship)
As little as ten years ago, you'd generally see kids playing outdoors, in the parks and in the streets, often unsupervised. Now, thanks (I can only assume) to paedo-paranoia, parents are unwilling to allow their children to play outdoors at all, let alone unsupervised. I'd consider this to contribute more to the corrosion of childhood than "access to adult content" - especially since they'd likely have less of the latter if they spent more time being kids.
So if Cameron want to stop the "corrosion of childhood", a crackdown on media outlets eliciting emotional responses to boost readership would be a better place to start.
Google and DDG and others seem to be working hard to reduce the amount of pornographic content shown to people doing searches. (A Google image search for [vintage beef] largely returns the YouTuber and Minecraft player, and not vintage naked men. Even without filtering explicit results it's just a few naked men, and nothing "horrible".)
Email is a lot better than it used to be, I think. It would have been nice if the UK had implemented a real anti-spam law when we had the chance. Existing law means it's only illegal to show porn to people under 18 if you do so for the purpose of sexual gratification. (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/12)
UK public did not really care about "Tempora" etc. as far as i could see it. (i hope i am wrong) And systems like these are just the front door approval to cover the other systems.
They tried to implement a system like this in Germany and failed miserable but every society acts differently we are still up in arms against the spying programs. But in most countries this topic already vanished from mainstream media.
But even with that there are obvious problems. Ann wants to turn the filter off, but Bob is the account owner, and Ann doesn't want Bob to know. Chas is their 15 year old child and he finds it trivially easy to bypass the filter.
And now Cameron has announced much wider plans, with many more flaws.
I'm annoyed and disturbed that Cameron is mixing in some measures against images of child sexual abuse and measures against normal pornography. They are very different problems[1] and should be dealt with very differently.
It would be great if image search engines could make reporting images to the Internet Watch Foundation[2] easier. That might go someway to appeasing the politicians. I doubt it would get much use. I search for a lot of images, every day, and I go down the long tail of the search, and I have never seen any images of child sexual abuse.
Perhaps search engines could provide some statistics of searches for certain words associated with child sexual abuse. This would have to be done carefully, but I'm not thinking of normal terms that every day people might use (someone doing research, or a child who has been abused) but some very specific terms that only people involved in trading images of child sexual abuse would know. I'm sure they have their own lingo.
[1] I say problem because that's the word they use, not because I think regular pornography is a problem.
[2] IWF are the regulators in the UK for this kind of thing and they coordinate with law enforcement world wide. http://www.iwf.org.uk/
Each one of them seems to think that Google is the internet, and that if they don/t index something it doesn't exist. Each one of them also (intentionally?) conflates images of child abuse with images of consenting adults.
They come across as extremely ignorant. Unfortunately this isn't confined to a single party.
Pornography is everything that gives a politician, cleric or judge a boner.
2 Do you understand and acknowledge the difference between pornography, child abuse images and images depicting rape?
See number one.
3 Are you planning to make all pornography illegal?
Only until people find joy in it. When the junior anti sex league is ready we will unban it.
4 What about Page 3?
Don't mess with the freedom of the press to make and break politicians. Yet.
5 What else do you want to censor?
Everything but the truth. There will be special government agency to decide what the truth is today.
6 What happens when people ‘opt-in’?
I will ask daily mail to kindly label them child rapists. Also will suspend the UK libel law for the Daily mail. Then I will offer a ritual sacrifice to the daily mail shrine in my office so the deity will bring more votes to me.
7 What was that letter to the ISPs about?
[Redacted for national security concerns]
8 Are you going to get the ISPs to block Facebook?
Facebook? Book with faces. We hadn't had such things in 1695, haven't kept up with the recent trends.
9 How do you think your plans will go down with US internet companies?
I will delay the tax pressure and they will cave. Too much PITA to chase the money to fund health and education anyway.
10 Do you really think these plans will stop the ‘corrosion’ of childhood?
No but it will give is critical tools in being able to delay or outright prevent developing of critical thinking and free thoughts.
On a serious note - if the kid is able to learn about the Holocaust, WW2, Gulag,Wikipedia pages on torture or Greek mythology with pictures at age of 8 (they won't be censored) and not be scarred for ever, his/her mind is probably strong enough to bear the sight of a consenting women and men having sex few years later. Even if it is in a bit weirder ways.
So, everything then. The ruling classes have the most profound and perverse paraphilias one can imagine. A friend who is a PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to a Tory MP reports that he is a horse fancier, however prefers to be ridden than to ride.
BAN HORSES!
So that would be animals (politician), children (cleric), and rape (judge)?
0) How will you do it?
The internet is HUGE. Detecting porn is a non-trivial task, but even if you solve it, you will still need insane infrastructure to crawl the internet and apply your magical algorithm to every image on every website.
1. You draw up a blocklist of offending domain names and IP addresses for child porn websites and get ISPs to block them
2. Force google not to return results for people searching for child porn.
Because politicians and their advisers really do seem to think it's that easy and that if it's not listed on google it's not on the internet. It's stunningly ignorant.
This move is to please middle England since they read all the headlines about '1/3 of kids addicted to porn' and stories about teenage rapists heavily implying porn made them that way.
I wish it was only one side of the house that was into this rubbish, but various Labour front-benchers have come out with very similar nonsense. Also the last labour government seemed to be full of "All Porn is Rape" style feminists * .
( * please note, I consider myself a feminist in as much as believe in absolute equality and free self determination for all humans, I just disagree with some aspects of some feminist philosophy. As do a lot of prominent feminists AFAICT)
Same old crap, wrapped in some slightly different packaging.
You could call a referendum on this one and get it through, just by asking a thinly veiled question like: 'Do you think our children should be protected from pornography?'. Just flash a picture of Jimmy Saville visiting a hospital while you ask it.
I feel this country is getting less and less progressive at every turn and u-turn.
Some furore over some phone hacking - remember that? Remember that eavesdropping is a bad, bad thing? Then a few months later, happily talk about eavesdropping/filtering the nation. Sickens me, even more than Mandy's mutterings.
Boxed into a corner - will be wiping ballot paper on arse at next election.
The internet is an amazing source of information. But currently it is not safe to leave a child alone on the internet. Is there a way to keep every one happy?
Or install your own filtering software / proxy / whatnot.
(At which point someone normally says "but those don't work" and the sane people go "and you expect a nationwide one to work instead?")
Either use categories or pick your own domains to block. If you want to block IPs, use a firewall or the hosts file.
You'd need to make configuring such things a little easier. Under Vista just trying to conjure up the IPv4 control panel requires an act of magic.
How is it not safe?
make it IPv4 only, that would finally speed up IPv6 adoption.
"Anti-porn law" in plain words means this: if you happen to provide an internet connection to some people, you will have to do what we say, or we will bring people with guns to make you to or give up your property (and maybe put you in jail too). We may ask for suggestions in form of "petitions" and "voting", but only within the imposed framework which you are not allowed to bypass. E.g. you are not allowed to vote for not sponsoring this whole mess by not paying your taxes. And even if you can, there's a mob rule: 50%+1 will overrule you.
When Apple censors porn on App Store, no one really cares because Apple does not point guns at people. You may use any other device, any other distribution platform. You can build one on your own. Apple only tries to be nice to people and attract customers voluntarily. This 180º opposite from how government operates. Government does not really try to please people, that's only for decoration. Underlying principle is to force everyone to obey.
Luckily in the US at least, any inbred retard has a gun and can impose themselves on anybody. It's much better.
And then what? Well hey, we can try to block the encryption and tunneling protocols they use and make those opt-in too.
Inevitably someone who "opts in to use encryption" will have to answer for it in a criminal trial.
He forgot to research about it or something?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/201001/wom...
(I know psychology today has some issues... but the article cite its sources)
The only legitimate complaints are those regarding feasibility, like what counts as porn (do sites that allow it, but are not really about it, count, like reddit? or to a lesser extent, as already mentioned in the article, facebook) but hell, might as well just ask why all politicians make promises they can't keep. The article would have been way more credible if it kept to sane arguments, rather than trying to throw around random criticisms like #2, which makes references to porn that is already illegal, or #3 and #4, which would obviously never come to fruition. As for #10, which is a legitimate question, definitely not, but it's an aid towards it, with a significance in the long term that is yet to be discovered.
I also want to know why this has to be enforced by the nanny state, rather than provided for by already available software? Do the parents have no responsibility?
Actually, since this government likes to full-on lie about evidence [0] let's just wait until we have a chance to throw these demagogue idiots out.
[0]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/conserva...
- Access and exposure to pornography affect children and young people’s sexual beliefs
- Access and exposure to pornography are linked to children and young people’s engagement in “risky behaviours”
- Exposure to sexualised and violent imagery led to violent attitudes
[0]: http://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/content/publications...
I'd be amazed if there was actual evidence that violence in the media actually contributed to real world violence even in children, as I thought this had already been covered at length with the various computer game scares.
A weary aside (I am not interested in arguing on the internet cf. http://xkcd.com/386/)
Your rudeness is totally uncalled for. If you excise that rude first sentence your post loses no value (in fact gains some.) I have a healthy skepticism when it comes to politically useful 'facts' like these and thus don't take government-commissioned reports even with many citations on face value. That doesn't deserve condescension.
I know everybody on HN likes to think they are an expert in everything, but reading 'reports' by think tanks or other political institutions, even ones that cite scientific studies, is a good way to confirm your own biases, but not a necessarily a good way to educate yourself about contentious issues. If you are not familiar with the area of research you won't know what has been missed or ignored or proven unrepeatable or flawed. A peer reviewed meta-study would be much more likely to include the full cross section of available research.
I'm biased because I sympathize with the "rude" commenter, in that I think discussions would be better on HN if people took more time to read linked sources and spent less time promoting their own preconceptions.
Also, if this community is as smart as it likes to think it is (no comment), it should be able to extract credible content from think-tank reports without succumbing to their intended conclusions.
I'm not as smart as many in this community think they are (the majority are also almost certainly actually much smarter than me), so I don't trust my ability to assess the scientific quality of the report.
I'm happy to have my preconceptions changed by the way, but I want to have some certainty - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that pornography harms children in any significant way seems to me to be quite extraordinary, and very clearly full of confounding factors, so I want to see an extensive metastudy.
Surely it's sensible for somebody to be able to critique very strong scientific claims that come not from a scientific journal but a government sponsored report by a committee which might reasonably be suspected of bias? Or do I have to read all the literature every time to be able to question that?
It's obviously true you can say things about a publication without reading it e.g. a paper expounding cold fusion in some obscure journal. Knowing something about the circumstances of publication and difficulty of the problem gives you a priori knowledge that hey - it's probably questionable. But hey - in tptacek world, you'd have to read the whole thing before being able to say anything about it (even though you'd get nothing out of it unless you were a physicist.)
I think you've erected a straw man because you're pissed off about somebody not reading something.
Anyway, this whole line is just starting to annoy me and it's quite depressing to see a high karma user be so obtuse, so let's leave it at that. Arguing on the internet is such a waste of time.
I didn't read it because a. I don't have time to read a 20 page report which I have no skill to assess as correct or otherwise (as I said repeatedly above), and b. my reading it, though it would satisfy you, wouldn't actually get me anywhere, since like I said, repeatedly, I don't actually know whether it's valid or not.
Every criticism stings. They sting me even when I'm confident that I'm right, and even though a Markov 'tptacek could probably get 1000 karma points pretty quickly on HN. Don't confuse the sting of a critical comment with a breach of etiquette.
You probably find it less rude as you clearly have more of an issue with people not reading things than the issue at hand. On that point (unless I'm mistaken of course), let me point out I am happy to read TFA and do so all the time, but a 20 page report which I am simply not going to be able to reasonably assess is not quite the same thing, is it?
If porn has to be banned because it damages kids, why does religion get a free pass?
http://sexualintelligence.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/sex-skept...