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.

I think it comes down to one simple question for those of you supporting this plan.

Do you think all born should be filtered out or just dedicated porn sites?

If the latter, then that can be done; if the former, then good luck

All born? All porn that should read.

I don't understand Dittany why you need to be so rude? You seem to be so blinkered and angered about this subject that you are convinced I am opposing this because I have some deep vested interest in porn.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I've said from day 1 that my objections are merely because such a system cannot work and would only give a false sense of security.

From your posts, you are so blinded by your hatred of porn that you'd happily make EVERYONE in the UK hand over control of their Internet habits to some faceless government organisation and pay extra for something which doesn't work.

I suppose you also believe that we should ban all cars because kids get killed by them and knives because people get stabbed.

Niceguy, it's one of dittany's standard techniques; if you don't agree with her over porn it must be because you spend 24 hours a day growing hairs on the palms of your hands. If you don't agree with her about prostitution, you must be a punter.

" Porn users are not going to get it all their own way for much longer"

Don't know about that, but I'm fairly sure that mumsnet's angriest feminist isn't going to cheer up soon.

But people's right to view images and wank, and discuss and explore sex is important and is worth fighting for. As someone else said, bringing in new types of censorship will hit the ethically-made, creative, idea-exploring porn first and hardest, just like when the moronic Dworkin/Mackinnon ordnances were adopted it was the lesbian and gay organisations that the Government went after.

"Dworkin/Mackinnon ordnances" would those be the ones that are generally held to be unconstitutional?

I know that we don't have first amendment protection here in the UK, but the principle still stands.

sgb - that is crap

Sexual content is 'censored' all the time, the internet just needs to catch up that's all

All the porn channels on Sky are heavily regulated - if they step out of line by 'going too far', they lose their license. Everyone accepts this - people can still have a wank.

There is no need to be so dramatic about rights to wank.

It's just young people don't need to see this stuff when they are still going through puberty and unable to contextualise it all.

So you want to regulate the web like it were TV?

Good luck with that!

10 years ago no-one would have believed you could surf the net on your phone. 20 years ago you wouldn't have believed the internet could do what it can do now.

The technology is basically there. It's just the 'want' isn't. And that is where the misogyny comes into it.

You cannot police the net. You can filter what makes it to your PC, but that is it.

What I really want to know, from those of you that want ISP's to filter porn, do you think all porn should be filtered out or just dedicated porn sites?

"A filter is literally a list of websites that are unsuitable according to a set of criteria. So if someone tried to access the BBC website which had some sex education information on, and couldn't, this person could contact the ISP and tell them. A human would look at the site and say "actually that site is fine, it is not adult porn humiliating women, I will take this site off the hit list". This problem would never happen again, to any other user, ever again. It's not that much of an issue for everyone."

OK so you're going for the blacklist approach, that is everything is accessible until it's blocked.

And you're also blocking individual pages within a site and not the entire site.

Do you know how many countless millions, if not billions, of URLs there are that will lead you to porn? So you want each and every one blocked? Have you considered how much that will slow down your internet access? Every single URL your browser requests, and each page will have dozens of them, will have to be compared to the list of billions of addresses.

The IWF do something very similar with the much tighter remit of child porn. And they very often get it wrong even dealing with that much smaller and more obvious target. They very famously once blocked the entirety of Wikipedia.

And then there's the issue that nothing is blocked until it's reported. Countless new URLs of porn appear on the internet every day, it's a nigh on impossible human task to keep on top of that.

And to give the final proof of how successful such a black list type of system is this is exactly what Australia has tried to do. And it's not working. Which is why SaferMedia, the right wing group who filled Claire Perry's head with nonsense and started this off, don't mention then.

Filter lists are flexible, and non static. Just because the filter might make a mistake on a website doesn't mean it will make a mistake every time - it will only make the mistake until the system has been notified and changed. And this goes both ways for letting through porn and also not giving access to non x rated sites.

There already is a system in place for age categories used for TV and film - and I don't hear many people on here saying that this is censorship and we should be able to have 18 films on the tv at 5pm. The classification of porn argument is simply an irrelevant red herring. If anyone seriously believes that content shouldn't be 'censored' for children, they are literally insane.

And this argument that supporting a proposal such as this then follows into a place where people don't support/allow sex education is ludicrous and unsubstantiated, and simply wrong.

At home personal filters are different. Many people operate them on a whitelist system, only allowing people to view pages from sites that they trust. And that's why they're more effective. And it can also operate on a user by user basis, so DC can be blocked from Wikipedia but Mum and Dad can still see it fine.

"There already is a system in place for age categories used for TV and film - and I don't hear many people on here saying that this is censorship and we should be able to have 18 films on the tv at 5pm."

And that shows one of the biggest misunderstandings about how the internet works.

We control the TV companies in this country and we can therefore have control on what content they output. If they showed something bad we wouldn't come down on Virgn or Sky for carrying the program but we'd come down hard on the BBC or ITV for showing it.

We do not control the internet sites that host porn, most of them are not in this country.

"And this argument that supporting a proposal such as this then follows into a place where people don't support/allow sex education is ludicrous and unsubstantiated, and simply wrong."

Once again the people behind this, SaferMedia, want the entire internet age rated. Not just porn, everything. It was a presentation about that that Claire Perry attended, it was after that presentation that she started talking out, it was after that that she got her meeting with the minister.

And once you agree to age rate things you will end up age rating sex education materials. And in the same way that there is pressure for people to be able to withdraw their children from sex ed classes they will demand that sex ed material is rated as adult only to give them the same choice on line.

The groups driving this are genuinely scary and fearful of knowledge.

Please do some research about how internet filtering and control works and also about the groups that are pushing for such things.

Claire Perry didn't.

Either that or she decided that her career was more important.

But then she was labelled an "incorrigible crawler" and "an appalling sycophant" by Quenten Letts, so make of her what you will.

Good question Kaloki.

And if I may add another. What would constitute a "dedicated" porn site?

As I've previously mentioned, would sites such as Punternet which discusses where to find the best prostitutes but yet has no "porn" on it?

Would FHM be considered porn? I just had a quick look at the site and their Upgrade Girlfriend video looks pretty much like soft porn to me. But would that escape the ban since they also have articles about cars, gadgets & cough news?

Or am I merely just trying to justify my porn fix?

"The technology is basically there. It's just the 'want' isn't. And that is where the misogyny comes into it."

No the technology is not basically there.

Before you say that it is please go and read up on China who have perhaps the most extensive internet censorship capabilities.

The initial work on their great firewall, remember this isn't to complete or run it, cost over £500 million.

A report in 2007 estimated that over half the web sites that allow interactive content (blog sites of Wikipedia for example) are just completely blocked blocked because the Government cannot keep on top of the flood of new content.

And despite all of this what they view as "bad" content still creeps through and given how the internet works there are things that they just can't stop.

So what they then have to do is to put software on every PC sold in China to do more filtering and blocking at the local end.

And this, rather, than Australia is the example that the people pushing for censorship here are citing.

The technology is most definitely not there.

Trying to frame this debate as one of porn users insisting on being able to access porn whenever and wherever they want is missing the point very badly.

This proposal would do nothing to stop adults wanting to access porn from accessing porn as they could just opt out of the filtering.

What it would do is require all ISPs to install powerful content-filtering systems on their connections. Today they're talking about using them to "save the chillddrunn!!!" from porn. A couple of years ago the government were talking about mandating the use of such systems to block copyright theft. On other occasions the government were talking about mandating the use of such systems to block access to "terrorist training material".

This is about mandatory filtering. Blocking access to porn for children is just the latest smokescreen for that. And it's obvious it is a smokescreen because the ISP-level filtering approach is a very poor one for achieving what they claim they want to achieve.

Once the kit's in place then I guarantee you the list of stuff that will be filtered out will increase over time. And much of it will not be an opt-out thing. Do you really think the government would have allowed access to wikileak's material if they had the capability to stop you?

The IWF are another bunch of meddling fuckwits without a clue: unelected, unaccountable, screamingly self-righteous and thoroughly dubious.

'Also right back at you with the utterly inane questions about "erotic literature". Absolutely zero to do with a discussion about porn, yet you insisted you deserve an answer. No you don't, and if you don't like the one I give you, don't bother asking any more questions like that in future.'

Shall I put you down as a 'don't know', then dittany ?

Just for the sake of argument, let's pretend we all agree with your definition of porn (whatever the hell that is) and let's also pretend that we all agree that such material should be blocked by ISPs ... how are we going to do it ? How on earth do you write filters that can tell the difference between a pornographic image and any other image? How do you write a filter that understands the difference between 'cunt' as it's used on MN and 'cunt' as used in a pornographic context? How do you codify political and historical context? How do you make a machine understand art or education, misogyny or sexual abuse?

However 'inane' you find these questions of definition, however much you think they're a 'distraction technique', you'll get absolutely nowhere without tackling them. A computer programme won't 'know it when it sees it', neither can you write a 'down with this sort of thing' algorithm.

Dittany, I am bothered that children are seeing pornography online. It bothers me enough that I make sure my children can't by using a combination of local filtering (which will inevitably be more effective, flexible and accountable than ISP-level filtering) and parental supervision.

But, again, attempting to frame this debate as one of slavering porn hounds versus anti-porn activists is both needlessly and inaccurately offensive while also massively missing the point of what this proposal is all about.

Ooh, cross-posted. Dittany, the difference between ISP-level filtering and local machine level filtering has been discussed quite a lot here. If you really don't understand the difference then that's fine as some of it is quite esoteric.

But it does make you look ever so slightly foolish to then go on to claim that it's a Simple Matter of Programming when actually it's a lot more complex than that. Particularly when there are people here with direct experience of managing the technologies involved who are trying to explain why it's a lot more complex than that.

Discussions about how best to deal with Internet porn is not a new thing by any degree. It's been a matter of hot debate within the networking community for at least a decade. And all the attempts to have ISP-level filtering to date have had massive flaws and significantly failed to work as advertised.

No I don't use porn. I mentioned that in the very first post I made in this thread.