recent decision by MNHQ

Yes Mme that's correct about you vs neighbour.

The production and distribution is generally abroad anyway. The viewers would be the ones to opt in. Also to view sites which are not porn, but somehow match some of the criteria used.

Child porn is a completely unrelated matter, and significant punishments (rightly). What is still problematic for me is that if someone was sent an illegal child-porn photo in e-mail and at some point the authorities detected it, they are considered guilty unless they can prove their innocence. That's a complete reversal of our legal system and one I dislike (though have no sympathy for anyone who produces, distributes or uses child porn, and they need to be locked up for good).

Kaloki suggested that making tools available for every household to use would be better, such that protection would be offered to all who wanted it. The task of filtering (and selecting what is filtered/acceptable) is better at the home end of the connection not centrally, as it allows traffic to be sent without delays added by the need to filter, allows individual homes to have different settings, and does not need costly systems to be put in place and paid for by all, even the ones who would choose never to use it.

Someone mentioned www.the-cloak.com (and I have used www.http-tunnel.com to experiment with access to websites using a USA IP address).

In both cases the traffic from your browser goes to a foreign (US?) website and the lookup for a web site is done there. Data goes from that website to the-cloak.com or http-tunnel.com and then from those services through to your computer.

In the case of http-tunnel.com the data is encrypted. While decrypting data is not impossible, it is sufficiently hard that it is unlikely to be worth the effort just to see if someone was viewing an American TV site (where one may see clips of new TV shows months before they hit the UK) or a porn site.

Given these allow free anonymous browsing, and have perfectly legitimate uses (eg wanting to check my web site gives one set of pages for UK customers and a different set of pages for customers outside the UK) there is no way to ban them without complaints as to the justification used for such a ban.

Oh well. Don't say you've not been told it might not work very well.

It seems (only spotted this today) that the Digital Economy Act (rushed through as it was up for debate on the day the date of the election was announced, so went through "on the nod" with few changes and very little scrutiny) has provisions which could allow for blocking of file sharing sites (as protection of intellectual property), but their effectiveness is under the microscope.

On Feb 1st, the Government asked Ofcom to review the provisions for blocking, in part to see if they are achievable, so there is clearly some doubt. Here are the questions for Ofcom:

1 Is it possible for access to the site to be blocked by internet service providers?

2 How robust would such a block be ? in other words would it have the intended effect, and how easy would it be to circumvent for most site operators?

3 What measures might be adopted by internet service providers to prevent such circumvention?

4 How granular can blocking be ? i.e. can specific parts of the site be blocked, how precise can this be, and how effective?

5 How effective are sections 17 and 18 of the Act in providing for an appropriate method of generating lists of sites to be blocked?

6 If possible, identify either a potential range of costs for ISP blocking solutions or the main drivers of those costs.

You can see from items 1 to 3 that bypassing a block is giving someone sleepless nights, as it would look pathetic if the law was made but could do nothing to prevent easy avoidance.

There was speculation that the attempts to close down Wikileaks, where some powerful government bodies acted together but failed, has shown how similar attempts to block file sharing and porn could be a 'cat and mouse' game with the authorities always a few steps behind.

I know the DEA is a separate issue, but it has broadly similar blocking requirements.

SEA - in a nutshell the proposal so far from the Minister is to have ISPs block porn from getting to customer homes.

It is unclear whether this would just be websites or include torrents, newsgroups etc.

There's to be a meeting of ISPs (+ Mumsnet and others) quite soon in February, and MNHQ has added to the Campaigns page their support for this proposal.

It is not intended as complete ban on porn, because households could "opt in" for an unfiltered connection (ie what exists for us at present).

A number of users here on MN have expressed their scepticism of it being a workable solution, but if the ISPs are forced, then the costs will fall on the ISPs and thus, on everyone with an ISP (they will simply pass all costs for initial work and upgrades to us, perhaps as an extra fiver or tenner a month).

The Government proposes it, for ISPs to get on and do it. Presumably there would be penalties for any which did not do it.

I would prefer an option for some ISPs to say "yes, we filter for families" and other ISPs to say "we don't filter the data".

If that was allowed, then the cost of filtering would only be placed on those who wanted it, not those who don't want it and would opt out of the filtering (but probably be unable to opt out of the unwanted cost).

MNHQ "there will always be scope for a determined child to circumvent a network filter"

They don't have to be that determined when on the thread in campaigns, niceguy2 wrote how one could search for "how to bypass school filters" - I recommend you try that search for yourselves.

Without needing to be a whizz-kid, there are lots of ways to bypass attempts to block sites, so to be "determined" is not a requirement, just to "like a challenge" is enough, and in part, for the buzz of beating the system / school / parents.

Frankly I am glad my clients have mundane (applications related) problems rather than wanting blocks on thousands of different web sites.

Of course it would be possible by simply having a 'white list' and disallowing every other request, and it is how I will block traffic when I have staff, but is not a practical method for an ISP.

With a lot bit of luck, MNHQ are being given the technical flaws in the suggestion by their Tech friends and will come back some time to discuss...

I'm busy this afternoon (just saw the time) but will no doubt catch up with all this much later!

Kaloki - I hope you could consider adding links to such tools as the ones lessnarkypuffin has provided... on your blog page

lessnarkypuffin - an alternative called Cyber Buddies for 7-12 would be one safer place, to start with, and the BBC has a 3-part radio series about cyber bullying - partly to increase parental awareness - but it has been on at daft times.

Weekday 11:30 for 3 weeks, 18 months ago, while schools open and parents working... 15 months ago when Parliament in recess for summer, so on at 23:30 for three consecutive nights, again not best time for teens and parents to hear.

Recently I heard repeats on R4 at 1am on the world service, again unlikely to be heard. And let's face it, R4 won't reach 50++% of families even if they had been putting this on at 10:30 on a Saturday morning when some better chance of hearing it.

Awareness and support for DC if they are being bullied is only option I think, for now. Some parents remove the phone or access to the victim which is a second "kick in the teeth" and I would prefer bullying to be treated with an ASBO and loss of access by the perpetrators.