Internet porn may be blocked at source

[David51]

Communications minister Ed Vaizey is working on plans designed to prevent children gaining access to internet pornography.

He hopes to introduce a system that would enable parents to ask internet service providers (ISPs) to block adult sites at source, rather than relying on parental controls that they need to set themselves.

Adults using the internet connection would then have to specifically 'opt in' if they want to view pornography.

Full story:

www.metro.co.uk/news/850896-new-porn-controls-for-children-on-internet-planned-by-government

Mumsnet PLEASE think about doing a campaign about this. Or at least keep us posted on if & when the government decides to ask for our views.

In the meantime maybe we should all contact our current ISPs to ask what they plan to do and letting them know what we want as their customers.

The article about the xxx domain idea is interesting - and a bit depressing tbh.

WRT to it being a technical fix - I don't actually think is is technical. It's a sensible approach to a problem technology has facilitated. It's also a simple idea - like most of the best ideas are.

It's not a useless analogy, you just lack the understanding of what an ISP does.

Yes its possible to block. But in doing so will have BIG unintentional sideeffects, won't really work and as I said before, it becomes a big white elephant giving you a false sense of security.

I at home using software can choose to block what I want. You can choose to block what YOU want. Everyone is happy. What's wrong with that?

An ISP level block would be full of holes and must be more restrictive.

At work, we obviously block porn. BUT we've also had to block lots of other protocols and categories too. So for example, we've had to block proxy sites such as www.the-cloak.com which has nothing to do with porn but its the only way we can stop users from simply bypassing our controls.

What ISP blocking in effect does is completely remove the principle that they are "mere conduit" providers. This is an important principle, recognised in law. Without this, you will find that Google, Youtube, hell even my analogy BT cannot exist.

Why must we have govt controls? Why can't we make our own decisions?

I can't help feeling that there are a lot of people who want Big Brother to run their lives, as long as everyone else gets the same treatment. So let's have unworkable centralized Internet censorship that we can complain about (or would complaints also be censored?) and nobody has to take responsibility for what comes into their own house, or what their children do outside it.

"The problem with this "it's the parents fault" argument is that the parent cannot feasibly do all of this on their own - even you, who work in IT are saying that you get 'stuff' through that shouldn't be coming through."

It's not about "fault", it's just about saying where the only really effective level of protection can be put, and that's right on each computer.

And yes I admit that is tricky. So rather than waste an enormous amount of money to put in place a system that will still leave parents having to protect their children spend that money educating the parents to help them out.

I'm lucky, I know what to do, but so many people don't. We can fix that, we can do something, we can protect children.

"The ISPs cannot be simply "connectivity providers", that is wussing out."

No it's not, it's accepting how the internet works. And the moment people start encrypting their network traffic there is absolutely nothing that the ISP can possibly do.

Again China took the mindset that the ISPs are not just connectivity providers, they failed. And believe me China tried really hard to make it work, this isn't about technical ability or will power.

There are quite a few references - here is one you can use for other references too:

The role of pornography in the etiology of sexual aggression

Michael C. Seto, Alexandra Maric and Howard E. Barbaree

Aggression and Violent Behavior
Volume 6, Issue 1, January-February 2001, Pages 35-53

LadyBlaBlah, thank you. Any hint as to where a rural-living Scot might get her hands on that?

"It's not a useless analogy, you just lack the understanding of what an ISP does.

Yes its possible to block. But in doing so will have BIG unintentional sideeffects, won't really work and as I said before, it becomes a big white elephant giving you a false sense of security.'

I know exactly what an ISP does and I also understand their motives for not wanting to get involved in this debate and I don't happen to agree with them because there are some things we have to collectively take responsibility for. And ultimately that is what this debate is about - individualism vs collectivism. If you hadn't guessed, in this case my view is we are collectively responsible for protecting our children from this stuff, and that includes ISPs ( who are NOT simply connectivity providers - you may only buy connectivity from your ISP, but they will also, somewhere along the line, be providing content) Your analogy remains useless.

The BIG unintentional side effects are thus governmental control. Well, I like the government to take responsibility for some things, yes. It is not about blame it is about doing it in the best way and in this case regulation with the ISPs (not necessarily with the opt in scheme) alongside education of parents is the way I would prefer.

There already is a white elephant of safety with the personal filters - most people I know have installed very basic versions and never looked at them since. So that already exists.

OK, I've found something online, thanks again. :)

Abstract of 'The role of pornography in the etiology of sexual aggression'

"From the existing evidence, we argue that individuals who are already predisposed to sexually offend are the most likely to show an effect of pornography exposure and are the most likely to show the strongest effects. Men who are not predisposed are unlikely to show an effect; if there actually is an effect, it is likely to be transient because these men would not normally seek violent pornography."

Just to clarify what the abstract means by that sentence - a C & P from that article:

And BTW, just to critically analyse my own posted article - WTF is a "man predisposed to sexual aggression?"

I'm intrigued by depictions of nudity alone decreased subsequent aggressive behavior, while nonviolent and violent pornography increased aggressive behavior.

It sounds as if pornography should be prohibited but nudism should be compulsory.

"in this case regulation with the ISPs (not necessarily with the opt in scheme) alongside education of parents is the way I would prefer."

But regulation just doesn't work, Australia shows the failings of that in a Western style democracy, China shows that it even fails in a system that simply doesn't care about people's freedoms.

So with regulation you still need education.

With education you can hopefully remove the need for any regulation.

Rather than take the path that has provably failed when taken by those with more will and resources that we could provide why not just try education?

Believe me I want to protect my children. If the Great Firewall of Britain happened I wouldn't relax my guard one little bit, I would still have to be as vigilant as I would have been before, I know that that firewall won't work and won't help.

Educating people is the only option if you genuinely want to protect children.

Yes Tei, based on that I might get naked statues scattered around the home.

who are NOT simply connectivity providers - you may only buy connectivity from your ISP, but they will also, somewhere along the line, be providing content

Thanks again, LadyBlaBlah. I think some studies were done on convicted sex offenders, with controls of men who had not been convicted (or, I would hope, accused!) of same. Would these be the men "predisposed to sexual aggression"?

I simply don't agree Badgers

ISPs make a lot of money ( generally in secret) from porn, and they should have some responsibility somewhere for this. AS should the makers of it, but then that's a whole new debate.

I do agree that parents are responsible aswell, just not solely

"ISPs make a lot of money ( generally in secret) from porn"

No they don't.

ISPs don't make money from much other than just being there.

And right now they're actually having a pretty tough time as people use more and more bandwidth.

"they should have some responsibility somewhere for this"

But for all the reasons discussed it's impossible for them to do it completely, and anything other than complete blocking means that parents still have to be vigilant.

And the moment people encrypt their traffic or use foreign proxy servers there it utterly nothing the ISPs can do.

"AS should the makers of it, but then that's a whole new debate."

Most porn is hosted overseas beyond our control.

"I do agree that parents are responsible aswell, just not solely"

In the end that's where the buck stops for purely technical reasons. Child safety has got to be carried out on each machine and anything other than that is no safety at all.

Why waste money on building a great firewall that will have so many holes so as to be utterly worthless when the same money could have so much greater effect if used to educate and inform?

I want children to be safe.

I'm not willing to pour money into an endless quest to build the perfect firewall, enriching IT consultants along the way, when there are enough examples out there in the world to prove that it's an impossible goal.

LadyBlaBlah, are you seriously suggesting that a large percentage of UK ISPs actually host porn? Because that is absolute news to me and I know a fair number of people who work in the ISP business. All the anecdotes I've heard make it clear that very few UK ISPs will even consider hosting it here. The UK has got fairly strict laws on obscenity compared to many other countries. The UK is also fairly expensive in terms of cost-vs-bandwidth and porn hosting must eat up a lot of bandwidth.

But (for fear of being accused of being some sort of porn defender for even pointing this out) this also goes back to the question of "what do you mean by 'porn'?" All the information I've seen is that the vast majority of hardcore images and videos are hosted overseas. Slash fiction and other text-based resources may well be different. I dunno. That kind of stuff doesn't tend to show up in the big discussions and reviews of Internet traffic flows.

But, to go back to the point I've made several times and that you seem to steadfastly ignore, the proposals talk nothing about hosting. It's all about connectivity. But feel free to ignore this fact yet again if you wish.

Oh FFS someone else quoting fucking Zillman and his 'porn makes people sexually callous; bullshit, badly flawed research (what he appears to call 'callousness' includes a lot of viewponts that many people might call rational, compassionate and liberal ie thinking it's not wrong to be gay and that marriage is not compulsory).
To sum up, no study on porn has ever been able to prove anything conclusive about its effects other than a slight suggestion that men who are already predisposed towards anti-woman violence might be slightly more likely to commit a crime if they look at a lot of porn.
There are also much worse things than porn that DC and sugggestible adults might find on the web. Extreme racist rantings, tips on how to make bombs, distressing pictures of wounds and dismbembered bodies (which may be there legitimately eg as a resource for medical students etc). But pro-censorship activists are always these sexually-dysfunctional woman-hating nutjobs, who think that an atmosphere of ignorance and shame around sex is far preferable to anyone actually seeing a bit of couble anal penetration.

I apologise in advance, this is probably going to be a long post, but if you are interested in the technical reasons why filtering porn cannot work, then you really should read it.

Anatomy of a website

Domain
The domain is the address you type in.
Eg. www.mumsnet.com
This is actually separate to the website itself, which is why you can have multiple domain names pointed to the same site.

Say you wanted to block www.mumsnet.com you wouldn't necessarily be blocking access to the website itself. As they could then just set up www.mumsnetisback.com without having to change where it is hosted or reload content.

You also could block domain names with keywords in the title, say you blocked "mumsnet", however this wouldn't block www.mummsnet.com - which could easily be pointed at the same site.

So that wouldn't work for filtering websites, too easy to get around.

Hosting
A website is hosted on rented or bought server space, you could block the IP address for a server, which is what the domain name points to. This is about the only way to block websites, but requires you individually blocking each website.

An ISP provides access to the internet, whether for a user or server, some have their own servers which they host sites on. But not all do. Hosting and providing net access are two different things.

URL
Essentially the same as the domain name, but with directions to specific pages or files.
Eg. www.mumsnet.com/Talk

You could block specific pages within a website, either by keyword or knowing the address. However you'd have to somehow take into account embedded information;
The web standard style of coding websites nowadays usually runs along the lines of;
Main page
¬ Header
¬ Content
¬ Footer

So while you may have blocked "main page", you haven't blocked "header", "content" and "footer", and if someone was to direct link to one of them..

Meta Data
Hidden information coded into webpages, usually keywords and a description. Not all sites bother with this though.

So although you could search the meta data for keywords and block pages where the meta keywords are to be filtered, if someone hasn't entered meta data then the computer will have no way of knowing.

HTML/Coding
Keywords could also be in the coding. This will include the text you see on the page. You could block pages with blocked keywords, however, read on to see why that is flawed.

Images
There are only two way to block images.

1. Block any images that are inserted using the code. Which will block 99% of images. 99% of all images that is. Including the MN logo at the top of your page.
2. Block images with filtered keywords, but this has the same problem as meta data, it doesn't have to be filled in. And the image file could be 111111.jpg. With no keyword data, you have no clue of that is a pornographic image or a pretty little flower.

There is no technology that exists that can identify what an unlabelled, generically titled image is either.

Embedded Media
Exactly the same as Images. This covers embedded video, interactive flash and audio.

Different filtering methods

Keywords
You could block keywords. But what keywords would you block for porn?

Penis? Vagina? Breast?

• there goes any website that mentions anatomy in any way, say medical websites...

Pussy?

• so no personal pages about Ginger the cat.

Porn? Erotica?

• There goes this page, and a large part of the feminism forum.

Do any of you have spam filters on your email? Does that work all of the time?
Do you ever get emails asking if you'd like to purchase v1agra?

That's the other way to get round keyword filters, just type things wrong or leave sp aces in them. You could even add in sym|3ols.

Also, if you wanted text but didn't want it searchable then you'd just use an image file with the text on and not label the image file. Easy.

So to summarise. You can block individual IP addresses, one by one - but hang on, how would you implement this? Who'd decide? Do you create a central agency to decide? Or do you leave it up to the public to report?

If you leave it up to the public do you immediately filter any reported sites to look at when someone gets a chance? Or do you wait? Could get a few complaints when sites aren't removed promptly enough? Say you decide that you will only filter a site when it has a set number of complaints? What happens when a large group of internet users decide it would be amusing to all report one site at once?

And would you block the page with the content, or the whole site? What if someone posted a pornographic picture on flickr, do you filter all of flickr?

If you use keywords to block sites then you will block innocent websites.

There's also a flaw with opting in. Say it's a family network, (because remember, the ISP's can't distinguish between separate computers) and one person wants to opt in (possibly because the filter system has blocked a website which isn't actually pornographic) then how do you protect the children?? Oh yeah, a computer based filter. One which can be set up not only for individual computers, but also for individual user accounts on one computer.

And you can set it up to block or not block exactly what you want! How exciting!

Fantastic post, KalokiMallow!

Indeed, great post Kaloki. I would just add one thing though. There are systems that analyse pictures and decide whether they are likely to be pornographic or not. They're hopelessly inaccurate and liable to huge numbers of false-positives and false-negatives, of course, but you can get them.

No No Kaloki. Don't use logic and facts to support your position.

FFS, won't you please think of the childrennnnnn!

Now off you run back to your secret stash of porn!

Thank you for that great post, Kaloki