Porn, why is nothing being done???

[Sews230]

Good afternoon peeps, those of you who are concerned about your children seeing porn might have heard that last November the government banned a big list of sex acts that could be shown in UK Porn:
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-porn-legislation-what-is-now-banned-under-new-government-laws-9898541.html

Great, you might think, it's a start you might think, unfortunately you'd be wrong, the UK Porn industry is tiny and to view any of its content you have to pass an age verification process and have a credit card, not something that most children can do and why would they even try? If they really want to look at porn all they need to do is go to free "Tube" sites that have all the hardcore porn you really don't want to imagine, for free!!

I've been talking to a few computer geeks (an affectionate term) on my course and they tell me that nobody pays for porn anymore, all the porn people want is free and extremely easy to find, all the sex acts now banned in UK porn are there and more, rape, forced sex, choking, school girls, revenge porn etc, all on tube sites like Xhamster, youporn, pornhub, porn-spider (don't look at them unless you are made of really steely stuff, those sites are really repulsive).

What the government has done with these laws is like banning cigarettes whilst letting people stand on street corners giving them away for free, it makes no sense, when are they going to do something about the free sites??? Articles like this scare the bejesus out of me, what are these sites doing to our society, our children etc, I shudder when I think about my two looking at this stuff... www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/most-young-people-agree-that-porn-creates-unrealistic-views-of-sex--but-they-still-admit-watching-it-9679160.html

www.independent.co.uk/news/people/anne-robinson-watches-porn-for-the-first-time-he-could-really-be-pounding-some-pastry-10180656.html?icn=puff-3

In my opinion the government need to ban these sites, block them from entering this country (they are all from oversees) force the ISP's (internet service providers) to block people from seeing them, you might have heard recently that various illegal download sites (for films and music) like Piratebay have been banned in this country (following lobbying from big business), and while there are ways of getting around these blocks, what I'm told these bans do is make going to these sites a hell of a lot more difficult, and if you don't have the computer know-how you simply can't visit them anymore.

Now I know that this government is always keen to help big business but this is a more important issue than film and music copyright, this is about our children/nation being corrupted, children thinking that the attitudes displayed in porn are the norm, I heard on the new a few weeks back that it's common place for children as young as ten to send naked pictures to each other before they start dating, sickening, how has it been allowed to get this bad???

I'm new to this site but have heard in the past that it carries political clout, is there a way that I could start a petition to try and get something done about this issue?

Thank you for listening...

That could explain why so few of the videos have direct links. There does seem to be quite a bit of amateur content on those sites as well, I have no idea how that effects anything. If it effects anything.
You do know a curious amount about how those sites work though, what's your source? I have tangentially known people in the US porn industry, and have never gotten the impression that it's hurting for money in any way.

I have tangentially known people in the US porn industry, and have never gotten the impression that it's hurting for money in any way.

And in any event, "it is important that we clamp down on tube sites because otherwise the poor hard done by porn industry won't be able to make its profits" does not seem like a particularly pressing political issue.

Also a valid point, name I don't think that's a rallying cry too many people are going to get behind.

Name change its ok I work in IT, have done for 20yrs, I know how it all works, no need to explain it to me... The words sucking eggs comes to mind...

Why can't the government ban open access porn? So if adults want to watch porn, they can watch it after placing their credit card details.

This way children are protected from it, and adults who want access to it, have access to it.

Surely this is easy to implement?

inter how can the govt control what is not hosted in this country? how can they force these sites to make people put in CC details?

how can they force google/yahoo/any other search engine to stop showing pictures/videos if you search for something unless you have entered a CC? how will they ensure you can get to teaching material without having to enter those details?

sorry but your plan just isn't thought out at all.

China has managed to get Google to stop showing results for all sorts of things!

What China may or may not be achieving with one search engine isn't going to make even the tiniest dent in availability of material on the internet globally.

Good luck with trying to legislate it - how would that 'ban' on open access porn work? Other than the onky possible tech solution which, as namechange points out, means disconnecting UK from the Internet and international phone network.

Why can't the government ban open access porn? ...Surely this is easy to implement?

Perhaps you could tell us how, if it's so easy? "Disconnecting the UK from the Internet" is easy, but might have just the slightest economic impact.

You know sews, you sound more like someone in the legitimate porn industry trying to get the sway of MN behind your cause of shutting down access to non-paid for porn.
As posters have pointed out-of-date it is a parent's responsibility to educate their children and restrict their access.
I don't allow my children to watch YouTube at all. For one thing, the comments are beyond vile, frequently misogynistic or racist. Before you even get to the content of music videos etc.

China has managed to get Google to stop showing results for all sorts of things!

No, it hasn't. It's managed to get a figleaf in place such that if you're a semi-literate rural worker using the one PC in the cyber cafe you had to walk a mile to find, you can't Google Falun Gong or Tibetan Independence. It allows the government to pretends it's doing something and, in a semi-fascist country, frightens people who know they could access the relevant material, but are worried about reprisals.

It provides no meaningful bar to anyone who knows the first thing about computers, and who is not quite as easily frightened.

The only way that technical controls work is when backed by credible, enforced sanctions. You don't attempt to evade the AD Group Policy on your work laptop, even though it's trivial to do in most cases, because if you get caught you will get sacked. That works state-wide in semi-fascist one-party states with a taste for machine-gunning protestors. In liberal democracies, not so much.

Suppose you get Google.co.uk to block access to stuff. I use a VPN to the US and access Google.com. Your move. Blocking VPNs? OK, so every international country just put you off limits for their staff to visit; not even China is that stupid. But on the offchance that that's what you do, me and ten of my mates rent an EC2 instance from Amazon and run a proxy there, or rent a machine in any one of a thousand data centres where a VPS costs about fifty quid a year. OK, so now you block access to all cloud hosting data centres, world wide. Right, so now the UK is completely isolated from the rest of the world: what do you think our economy looks like now? No City of London, no manufacturing, no trade. Well done you.

Still, one good thing to happen this week is that Richard Desmond has given UKIP 1.3 million pounds, thus guaranteeing that thousands of people opposed to porn will never vote UKIP.

Sorry, I hadn't noticed this in the OP:

you might have heard recently that various illegal download sites (for films and music) like Piratebay have been banned in this country (following lobbying from big business), and while there are ways of getting around these blocks, what I'm told these bans do is make going to these sites a hell of a lot more difficult

Hah. Hah. Hah. How is "download Opera; use it" or "download PirateBrowser; use it" "a hell of a lot more difficult"?

www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/internet/3492629/how-access-pirate-bay-blocked-torrent-sites-online/

Is there an option to ban specific sites via your ISP or whatever? So to protect my children I can at least ban the "tube sites" and other stuff.

Yes, Iggly you need a device-based filter such as K9 (but there are lots of others out there). At some stage, your DC will learn to circumvent them if so minded, but they're pretty good for what they do - which is not, btw, to remove all offensive content, just to reduce it.

Is there an option to ban specific sites via your ISP or whatever?

For the purposes of stopping ten year olds, yes.

Beyond that if everyone is willing to pretend it works, if all the computers are nailed down in the way serious corporate IT functions do (up to, and possibly including, the correct use of a TPM to secure boot, and certainly involving central provisioning of all mobile phones and tablets), if the neighbours don't have unsecured WiFi, if no-one has a PAYG mobile phone, if you forbid the installation of any additional software on machines, if you have regular audits of all equipment in the house and if you have a credible and implemented policy of severe sanctions against transgression then yes, it's possible.

On the assumption that no-one is willing to spend their time reading CESG standards and running ISO 27001 audits of their house, it's not possible for anyone with the slightest motivation to bypass it.

That should be "it's not possible to stop anyone with the slightest motivation bypassing it".

You can get blocking by ISP, but it's generally not as effective as device-based. The main limitation is that it does not cover portable devices outside your home, but also that it may exclude sites you want to visit (example above of political blogs; MN has been barred by filters) leaving you to fiddle around with settings.

Provision of filters by all ISPs was the Coalition's Big Announcement on cyber safety. Take up has been really low, and I don't think it's made any discernible impact.

I'm techno savvy enough to fiddle with settings so will try that. It is more about stopping accidental stuff for now as they're very young. As they get older, I will see!

In a kinder, gProvision of filters by all ISPs was the Coalition's Big Announcement on cyber safety. Take up has been really low

www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2015/01/ofcom-uk-children-know-disable-isp-internet-filters.html

The research is, however, implausible. Take for example:

Overall 33% of 12-15s said they knew how to delete their browsing history (42% in 2013) and 12% claimed to have done this in the past year (19% in 2013). Meanwhile 22% knew how to amend settings to use a web browser in privacy mode (29% in 2013) and 6% claimed to have done this (12% in 2013). Finally just 11% said they knew how to disable online filters or controls (18% in 2013), and just 3% had done this in the past year (6% in 2013).

Does that seem likely: that on every front, fewer teenagers know how to circumvent parental controls and fewer, both as a proportion of the cohort and as a proportion of those claiming to how how to, have actually done so? Only 6% of teenagers used a browser in porn privacy mode in 2014, half the proportion that did in 2013, even though mass-market availability of browsers with this feature increased over the period in question? That reads to me that either there's been a methodological change or teenagers have just got smarter about keeping quiet about it; none of it seems terribly likely.

China has managed to get Google to stop showing results for all sorts of things!

Not reliably they haven't. Wholesale circumvention of China's Great Firewall is commonplace.

Moreover, the effort that China has had to put in to get even the mediocre results they've achieved so far has caused substantial damage to China's Internet connectivity as a whole. Internet access in and out of China is woefully slow and unreliable.

If we attempt to exert the same level of control over Internet access as they do in China we would cripple our digital economy. The UK is an important Internet pathway between the US and Europe.

Peeps not got an answer to this?

"Can anyone explain to me (helping me to be more informed) why the government has banned those certain acts in UK Porn under the banner of child protection?"

Also if Site blocking has zero effect, less than zero according to some on here, why are media companies so keen to get them blocked, shelling out money on expensive court orders etc? You'd think they'd know a bit about media and the net after all it's their business...

We're not peeps.

What are peeps? I thought it was a slang abbreviation for people?

sews The UK govt thinks certain acts should not be shown in the UK - many people disagree. Most people agree porn is bad for children, which is why they protect them from it.
You seem to believe that parenting your children is not your responsibility, which, IMO, makes you the bad party here.
No-one said site-blocking had no effect. Filters on your home system are very useful for keeping young children (