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 don't know nearly enough about the technicalities of the internet to comment on whether something like this is viable (although if it were, I would support it), BUT I have to stringly disagree and beg those of you who have used the arguement that "parents should just keep an eye on their children" to think more carefully about that.

Because the issue is NOT simply one of protecting one's own children. This goes for the issues the Mumsnet 'Let girls be girls' campaign is tackling as well. Its all very well to say "don't buy sluttly clothes for your own daughter", or "make sure you watch your kids whilst they are online", but the fact remains that there are many, many parents who are too ill informed/lazy/busy/whatever to protect their kids.

IF you believe its not healthy for children to view internet porn, then you need to believe that its not healthy for any children - not your own, and not those unfortunate kids who's parents wont take steps to protect them.

Ebven if you don't personally have any empathy for these children, you should care that your own children are growing up with them.

Dittany? Have you ever even used local site filtering like the K9 I've referred to?

It's a bit of a pain. Quite regularly it will block genuine sites and trust me I quickly grew tired of constantly having to unblock sites such as Youtube, Yahoo for having "adult content". In the end I had to open up the filter way more than I'd like to. That was an informed choice however I made as a concerned parent.

@Astrophe - the problem with your point that "...many parents who are too ill informed/lazy/busy/whatever to protect their kids.", is that those are the very people who either education will work with....or they don't care enough in the first place so they'd probably just remove the porn block without caring their child could see. You are in effect back to square one but have a rather expensive white elephant in the room giving you a complete false sense of security.

@Dittany. I don't see what's so hard about being responsible for your own computer and what it's used for? Right now my 9yr old son is sat behind me, in the same room with the computer. Even my DD(14) is generally not allowed to surf in her bedroom (although I do allow it and unbeknown to her, I have monitoring software on it).

I don't have to sit there every minute, i just keep my eyes open and use common sense.

Dittany out of interest is there filmed representation of sex that you would NOT define as porn. What if feminists produced their own filmed erotic content would that be porn? Genuinely interested here.

Apostrophe
"IF you believe its not healthy for children to view internet porn, then you need to believe that its not healthy for any children - not your own, and not those unfortunate kids who's parents wont take steps to protect them."

Is it the job of the ISP provider to protect the children whose parents expose them (in an actively or passively abusive context) to porn? Or is it the job of children's services, social services, the local authority and the police and the wider community? And how will this protect children whose parents opt-in?

Dittany, you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that ISP-level filtering as proposed is the only way to block porn. It's not. It's not the most effective, reliable, flexible or cheapest either. I wouldn't necessarily say it's the worst way (automated image matching is even less reliable) but it's getting there.

But if people want ISP-level filtering they can have it as some ISPs already offer it. It doesn't work very well, of course, but people could opt-in today if they were that bothered.

"a rather expensive white elephant" sums it up perfectly, NiceGuy.

People who work in IT often have to say "Actually, this idea is too complex/flawed/expensive to be achievable." Sadly we're rarely believed by politicians (or a lot of corporate senior management) but are nevertheless often proven right.

Particularly in situations such as this where huge amounts of time, money and brain-power have been thrown at this problem with the result demonstrated time and again that ISP-level porn filtering simply doesn't work very well.

Dittany, this: "I didn't say it was simple, I said it was possible" is just wrong, if what you want is a ISP-side filter that reliably stops children accessing porn on the internet. It is not possible to do that yet.

What is possible, is to create an ISP-side filter that reliably reduces the amount of porn children can access, a la Google SafeSearch. However, that merely cuts the accessible porn down from gigantic quantities to huge quantities. It does not materially restrict children's access to porn via the internet. For example, it cannot do anything about torrents, nor user-generated porn (eg kids showing each other their genitals via webcams, and being recorded without consent and reposted). It's the equivalent of security theatre at airports -- we might feel safer but we are not in fact safer.

You think people are being disingenuous and are saying this is "too complicated". They're not -- they're saying this is "impossible". Techie types say this to clients all the time! They often get the same response from the clients as you and Lady BlaBlah are giving too, tbh: "Whaddya mean, it's impossible? Technology is advanced, everything's possible nowadays etc etc". If only everything were possible. The other piece of bad news is that tech advances are as likely to benefit porn merchants and porn users as they are the filterers.

On another note, one thing I'm surprised hasn't happened is malware written by anti-porn feminists targeting porn users and websites. It would be illegal, but then that's not stop malware authors to date.

"This isn't censorship, the content will be available for anybody who wants it.

If you're going to twist the truth it's not possible to have a real conversation."

The people pushing for this, the people who brief Claire Perry before she launched her campaign, MediaWatch, do believe in censorship and want more of it.

They've complained to number 10 before that "the BBFC (funded by the film industry) no longer believes in censorship but in giving adults guidance so they may decide what they want to watch."

So yes it is very right to mention censorship with regards to what people have in mind and where they want it to go. MediaWatch are an unpleasant organisation who believe the sex education is wrong, homosexuality is an abomination, censorship is good, guidance is bad and Steven Seagal is an influential actor. You have got to look behind the scenes and see who's pushing for what.

"I mean if they try to do it and fail at least they've tried. But they should try."

They should try even if it costs millions, prices people off of the internet, will slow the internet down, won't protect children, will block legitimate web sites and will still leave parents at home to do the final job of making sure their children are safe.

Why not just spend the money educating people? Even with this system in place, as said above, parents will still have to take steps to protect their children. So all the other stuff is, in the end, a pointless waste of money. Direct the money to where it can make a difference rather than to something that will put a lot of money in the pockets of various IT people (one of which could be me) and yet won't do the job.

Yes, Google can block porn sites. That's not the same as blocking porn as a lot of porn appears on sites other than the big porn ones. Google can also block porn images on image searches. But reportedly with a lot of false-positives (ie, it doesn't show you a lot of images that are actually ok) and a fair number of false-negatives, too.

But can I just point out one rather important thing? Google isn't an ISP. The way that Google gathers, stores and delivers search results is staggeringly different to the way an ISP-level content filter needs to work.

I've used big Internet content filtering systems in a corporate environment. Exactly the kind of systems that this proposal is calling for. I know how inaccurate, expensive, flawed, slow and labour-intensive they are. I'm not just talking out of my hat here.

"Something not working very well doesn't mean it shouldn't be used at all."

See my point above, in the end this won't do the job and parents at home will still be left to do the final job of making sure their children are safe.

Why waste money on an expensive white elephant that will never be able to do what people hope it can.

"Do you know how you perfect things in IT - you keep producing new versions of it until you solve the problems. Isn't that how software development works?"

There are limits, some things just will never work, and this is one of them.

Even the Chinese who are willing to throw a ridiculous level of resources at this and have no problem with trampling civil rights have had to accept that ISP level filtering is not the final answer and they have to put something on each individual computer.

dittany, you have far too much faith in what programmers can acheive with this. Snorbs is absolutely right wrt politicians and the like demanding complex solutions that techies just cannot deliver. It happens all the bloody time. There have been a few very successful Government IT programmes (although you rarely hear about them). There have been many more collossal disasters.

My (limited) knowledge of coding suggests to me that in order for this to work, developers are going to have to come up with something akin to proper AI. We (or they rather) are nowhere near the point where this is acheivable.

"Well it would be difficult to get the IT industry to get behind this considering it is notoriously misogynist."

So if the only people who really know about this tell you that this is impossible they should be ignored because they "misogynist"?

So the only arguments you'll listen to and accept are from outside the IT industry? From people who don't know what's possible and what isn't?

niceguy and tondeleyo - I'm not really interesting in debating the pros and cons of this particular proposal - as I said, I don't know enough about it, or about technology in general.

It is the government's responsibility to protect children - yes, through social services etc, but also through legislation, and if such a legislation as is proposed would be workable (and I'm not saying it is or isn't), then yes, the government is responsible for making it happen.

Of course there would be parents who would switch the function off, therby exposing their kids to unsuitable content. And if that was going to happen in a majority of cases, then yes, we should invert time and money thinking of another system which will work better. But simply throwing up our hands and saying "we can't fix everything so we wont fix anything" isn't the answer either.

"All IT development is expensive and labour intensive. It's whether or not you are committed to investing in the project or not."

As said above China are committed both politically and financially to controlling the internet. They spent over £500 million just kicking the project off. There are 19.2 million households in the UK with the internet, so that's £30 per household just to make a start yet alone finish and manage the system.

And they can't make it work.

They've had to admit that it will never work and have to put software on individual computers instead.

And it still doesn't work completely.

If they can't do it with their knowledge, money, resources, determination and lack of respect for freedom do you think that we can?