95% of households in Airstrip One are to have porn blocked by default by their ISPs. Just what exactly ‘pornography’ is who knows. Maybe next time I’m looking up Michaelangelo or Caravaggio who like to show a titty or two a warning from Big Brother government will pop-up. Perhaps we should start censoring the news so innocent minds are shielded from violence? Maybe the Firemen will search your home for your jazz mags so children don’t get their hands on them.
“I’m not making this speech because I want to moralise or scaremonger, but because I feel profoundly as a politician, and as a father, that the time for action has come. This is, quite simply, about how we protect our children and their innocence.” - David Cameron
Fuck that and fuck you, you smug censorship-loving patronising nanny-state loving prick. The government doesn’t trust you as a parent so it’ll take it upon itself to do your job for you.
The real bad guys will laugh at us and find a proxy;
But former Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre boss Jim Gamble told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme it was important to “get to the root cause” of illegal pornography, by catching those responsible for creating it.
He added: “You need a real deterrent, not a pop-up that paedophiles will laugh at.”
Most Dopers are Americans - thank your stars for the magnificent First Amendment and weep for your mother country sliding into totalitarianism.
You’re not the one having to contact your ISP and telling them to turn off “family-friendly filters.”. If this were really about protecting the children there would be an opt-out system rather than the government assuming things about you and censoring the internet accordingly.
The article indicates that your ISP will e-mail you or send you a pop-up or something. What makes you think you’ll have to call them? If that were true, I might be more sympathetic, FTR.
It’s the dumb rhetoric around this that is trying to conflate “child porn” with “couple who like to check out x-art on a quiet Thursday night”* that really grates.
Either way you’re still having to let your ISP know with no good reason why. Why not have the same system for violent material? Or any material of any kind that some moral guardian finds objectionable?
I hate to break it to you, but your ISP already knows you love bit black butts or schoolgirls or whatever.
ETA: As for why they aren’t censoring violent material, it’s a matter of administrative convenience. Porn is fairly easy to categorize. Violent material, not so much.
Phones have come with a filter on by default for years. I just went into a local Vodafone shop and asked them to lift mine when it kicked in - easy enough done given I’m obviously over 18. I was mainly pissed off that SomethingAwful was blocked.
But yes, it should be opt-in to the filter system if there has to be one, but when has this government ever done anything sensible? The filter is just a comfort blanket anyway, the real bad guys aren’t passing round anything that’s searchable.
It’s not that I’m pissed about, it’s the government thinking that it has a role in regulating and censoring the internet that will do no good, and making assumptions about everyone who uses the internet. If an ISP independently enacted these measures they would lose customers faster than the Titanic.
ETA: Is porn really that easy to classify when it comes to censorship? There are lots of good points in this prior thread on the subject.
The government regulates and censors television, radio, and print media. What’s the difference? I know Western governments generally haven’t regulated the Internet to this point, but that’s largely because they didn’t know how.
I imagine (I am no expert) it’s easier to censor porn than violent stuff. The former is just a subset of websites with nude images and video. The latter could be anything from instructions on how to build a bomb to a Mortal Kombat fan page.
Because it’s utterly pointless. Will this have any deterrent (or benefit for that matter) for kids looking at the internet? They’ve grown up in the internet age, they’ll know how to use proxies and get around page blocks just as well as anyone else. Hell, we were doing that at school back in the 56k days. Not to mention, the best way of making a subject more tantalising for teenagers is to mystify and forbid it.
When it comes to the kiddy porn, that stuff is already illegal so I fail to see how regulating anything pornographic is useful here either.
Video featuring an insistent, recurring beat pattern providing the background and counterpoint for rapid, slangy, and often boastful rhyming patter glibly intoned by a vocalist or vocalists.
