UK Internet censorship plan no less stupid than it was last year

This is all over the place this morning. The porn I couldn’t care less. Protecting the kids - yes, it’s very high on my priorities. The highest. But despite the publically stated objectives, it feels like internet freedom erosion.

I like porn and I’m happy to opt out of the filter. Internet freedom erosion… sure… but I’m kinda not happy about the access kids have to porn. Porn is for grown-ups. I’m honestly all over the place with this. “Parents should…” is a non-starter because there are too many bad and/or technologically illiterate/time-poor parents.

Freedom is a great concept and looks dandy on t-shirts, but wouldn’t it be neat if we had to consciously sign-up for all the Internet crap we waste our time on?

Yeah, so I’m signing up for forum-trolling, cat videos, sneezing pandas, porn, Big Brother and… uh… the Daily Mail website… shhh, no don’t repeat that bit back!

With you on the porn is for grown-ups. When I was first shown Playboy aged 7 or 8, by a kid who’s Dad had a collection, I was confused over the importance of it. It seemed utterly unimportant. It was, really. Lots of kids placed an inherited importance on it. I built forts and crashed my bike going down hills.

But nowadays they see all sorts of yuch stuff. Loss of innocence. Too early they learn to focus on stuff that ultimately, doesn’t help them leave healthy, invigorated, safe lives. I suspect there is a split between families that highlight the unimportance of it all, and families that don’t bother, in terms of the preparatory outcomes of the kids’ minds.

Signing up is one thing, but an over-arching monitoring and surveillance system?

Is there an election coming up in the UK? This sounds like bullshit pandering to the “think of the children” crowd. Filtering doesn’t work. It won’t filter out all porn and it will filter out things that aren’t porn. And how long before the filter is used to blacklist things like Wikileaks, groups critical of the government, The Pirate Bay, and then maybe The Pirate Party?

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I always thought it was total BS that porn sites weren’t all on a separate, unique TLD like .xxx which would make it trivial to self-regulate without hurting anyone. Total lost opportunity.

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Under whose definition of porn? There are things most people will agree is porn, sure. But everyone has their own cutoff point where something is art instead of porn. Maybe every topless photo has to be on a .xxx domain, but that’s not porn to everyone. What about showing stomachs or ankles? Or faces? What about things that are painted or drawn? Is The Watchmen porn? Dr. Manhattan doesn’t wear clothes. Boing Boing often has content on its front page that would generally be considered not safe for work. Would Boing Boing need to be boingboing.xxx?

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If it is video or pictures of people having sex, and the entire business model of the website is predicated on showing people having sex, then .xxx domain? It doesn’t seem all that complex to me.

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What problem does that fix though? There would still be stuff that could be called porn on other sites, so the anti-porn crusaders would keep campaigning to push all smut onto .xxx domains. Not all the regular porn sites would move voluntarily, so you’d have to put it into the rules of .com, .net, .org, .us, .ca, .tv, .it, .se, etc. Or legislate it in a bunch of countries. And get everyone to agree on a single definition of what has to go on there.

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Future news headline, “Mayoral candidate opts in for smut! Do you want this person really running your community?!”

Few years after the porn ban, “Hmm, that went well. Lets put the kibosh on those pesky foreign news sites that keep pointing out our hypocrisy.” Lil more time goes by, “Some of these domestic websites sure are causing a ruckus. Lets add them to the ‘opt in’ list as well. That’ll make it even easier to know who to keep an eye on.” etc etc etc.

Parents need to parent. Period.
If keeping your kids from losing their minds over porn is even remotely high on your list of problems you are worrying about, you’ve already failed the test. Talk about “first world problems”.

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When I was 13 it was a mission to get a copy of Playboy off “that kid” that stole it from his dad. These days as a 13 year old its SMUT CENTRAL… which can be arrived at simply by typing “smut central” into Google.

There is a happy medium between smut depot for every 13 year old and all out Internet porn ban.

I worry about the practicality of any large scale smut block, I also agree with @Jardine that one man’s hard core porn image is another’s pink Burka revealing a sensual smile.

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Sure, artful nudes have some nuance. But there is rather broad consensus on what an actual sex act looks like though!

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Sure, but that’s not what the anti-porn people want banned. That’s not far enough for them.

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Sure, but then again:

Sometimes sex happens in movies and its considered “art” not porn. So just cause there is a “sex” act, does not make it porn. Its a very broad gamut.

Given the persistently pathetic treatment, by the establishment, of LGBT people; my concern is that the application of the law will be considerably biased.

Many years ago I saw an interview with someone from the BBFC (possibly James Ferman, can’t remember for sure) and they were discussing a quandary that they encountered when classifying a foot-fetish video. The entire film consisted of nothing but close-up shots of women’s feet, no other part of the body was shown. They had a real problem deciding how to rate the film, the vast majority of people wouldn’t consider a foot offensive, but it was being sold as pornography. In the end they gave it an 18 certificate, but in theory they could have passed it as a U. It’s an extreme case, but it does show how tricky it can be to classify these things.

I’m wondering if, akin to Obama announcing his intent to restrict the availability of firearms, there was a massive rush to download smut yesterday in the UK.

Thats not how the internet works. Domain names are a mutually agreed mapping between IP addresses and arbitary names. Nothing more. You and I could create that xxx TLD if we wanted to. A Government could do it. Porn sites could (and actually might) create their own DNS root and not tell the UK Government.

The Pirate Bay has been blocked by all the main UK ISPs - Of course their proxies haven’t, nor accessing via VPN, nor just typing in one of their IP addresses. The porn filter will be just as trivially defeated by determined younglings .

AFAIK the IP addresses ARE blocked, but the proxies are pretty much everywhere. That’s for a handful of NZB and torrent sites. There are MILLIONS of porn sites. They’ll have to automate blocking because there’s no way to deal with that much porn by… wait for it… hand.

Remember this is the UK and not the US. The restrictions on what you can sell in the UK porn market (held on alternate Tuesdays around here when the fruit and veg market isn’t on) are much stricter than the US and a lot of what’s freely available on-line is illegal to sell and actually illegal to possess, even on your hard drive, in the UK. Bondage porn, however classy (!), is illegal, for instance.

There’s also no real protection of free speech in the UK, so Holocaust denial, bomb-making plans and sundry other hate-speech and incitement to violence is all illegal here. Which I’m fine with and which you agree is fair game for filtering, so if the government decides that eg rape porn should be illegal and added to the list of things that we shouldn’t possess, is that really the human rights battle you want to be fighting?

Also, I may just be getting middle-aged.

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