I remember when it wasn't going to be on by default, and also when it was going to be JUST for really revolting/violent pornography. People say that you can't argue slippery slope here, but I say otherwise. The UK government has proven that the temptation to block anything they want by default and shame others into not turning off the block is too great, and I feel that this entire filtering experiment is a step or two away from a China-style firewall.
You've conflated the different styles of blocking and come up with some nightmare block scenario which just isn't happening.
There are the court ordered blocks of some torrent sites. Any ISP that receives valid court documents has to implement these blocks, but they're easy to bypass.
There are the Internet Watch Foundation cleanfeed blocks which only block images of child sexual abuse and sites with those images; or images of criminally obscene material (which is a tiny subset of porn). Most UK ISPs comply with this with I think only A&A not.
Then there are the optional usually opt-in filters that cover whatever the ISP / customer wants - these are usually granular with a bunch of options for different content filtering. Mobile phones have had this for years, and it's been opt-out on mobile since introduction.
It's important to know the difference so that complaints againstthe blocking are more effective.
Because if theres anything we know for sure, its that private information (including lists of celebrities and politicians who have requested access to porn) will certainly remain private indefinitely.
OK, sure. But the parent didn't say "keeping information on me that should it be illegally released might cause me shame" though, he said shaming and the context was present tense.
Not being a UK native, I'm not clear on this, but: to some extent, free market still applies, right? I was under the impression that unlike in the US, one can choose one's broadband provider somewhat more independently of geographic location.
So less a draconian measure and more a market differentiator perhaps? Plenty of families would voluntarily sign on to this feature for the peace-of-mind.
You can easily choose your broadband provider, yes. The problem lies in the fact that all of the large ISPs in the UK have now implemented the blocks. Thi leaves only very small (and usually very expensive ISPs) as the only ones not to have some type of filtering.
Optional, different blocks. Every single British Internet service provider gives you an unfiltered Internet connection if you elect not to turn on (or choose to turn off) the offered content filtering.
(With the exception of the 'Cleanfeed' filtering which is supposed only to prevent access to verified child pornography and seventies rock album covers)
Just a little perspective...I've got Sky Broadband and turning off this filter took a couple of clicks. Actually it might have even just been one, and that's it.
It's been harder to access age restricted content from other providers like Three for over a decade. Access to adult content through the Three network requires you to sign up with a credit card to prove your age for example.
Neither of these situations are ideal, nor are they catastrophic. Just retain a little perspective and afford these companies the courtesy of believing the intent is well meaning.
Of course there are slippery slopes and changes throughout the years, but also remember we're an 800 year old democracy (almost), that's _probably_ not going to change and it's good to keep a level head about this stuff.
Being well meaning isn't the problem - history's greatest monsters thought they were doing good by their country. There's an old saying about good intentions...
Anyways, the problem with requiring affirmative consent to unblock is that the people running the filters are just a
select name from subscribers where filter = false
.away from getting information that could be used against people.
It's best that they not have that information in the first place, and that's before we get into the question of if "protecting children" is worth all this trouble anyways.
But they have that information anyway. If they want to know which subscribers access porn, I'm sure they can find that in the logs, filters or no. Not that I think filters are a good idea, but it doesn't really give "them" any additional information.
And search engines and social networks already have that information too. And even if there wasn't a db to search one could surely equally query which domains they'd accessed either from their ISP or DNS provider or GCHQ.
No, but IP requesting certain porn sites \approx user wants to see porn => account holder specifically requesting porn blocker be disabled. The equivalence can be expected to almost always hold, because its simply the easiest way to account for the behavior.
Thus the inital objection stands.
There are tons and tons and tons of reasons (tons) to be against the porn filters. "The government is going to tell people I looked at porn in order to assassinate my character" is one of the most far-fetched and ridiculous ones. If the government is dead-set on assassinating your character, then first of all, you have a much more serious problem on your hands than a lack of pornography, second of all they have far more effective tools at their disposal than "Hey, so-and-so, (maybe) wanted to see a boob once".
Logically not equivalent, for sure. Practically, in most cases they would both say the same thing. We're not just talking about household though, surely some individuals have Sky accounts too and looking past that particular ISP if you're asking for unblocking from your mobile then there's a good chance that you're viewing porn - it's probably an equally veritable indicator as that your mobile visited a porn site.
I'm going to go with 99.9% accuracy as my first guess.
No but it necessarily means that the account holder took action towards accessing porn.
An IP requesting access to a porn site does not - ads can easily contain pornography, malware can use computers to access anything, and anyone who can connect to the network can be the one requesting the porn site.
There is very little you can determine in the real world from a public IP requesting a porn site
> Neither of these situations are ideal, nor are they catastrophic
No, no, this is actually quite catastrophic. Someone else is deciding what is and isn't acceptable for you to consume by default. Establishing the precedent that someone else knows better than you, what content is acceptable for you to view. That's absurd.
Christopher Hitchens had a very poignant[1] part about why the path to hell is paved with censorship, and I think it's worth a watch.
From those categorical statements I guess you are one of those that objects to sites defaulting to a language guessed from your ip location, or google trying to <strike>auto complete your search</strike> putting words in your mouth.
> From those categorical statements I guess you are one of those that objects to sites defaulting to a language guessed from your ip location, or google trying to [auto complete your search]
I think it's a stretch to compare using geolocation to make a good assumption about linguistics or using natural language processing to make a good assumption about a search completion, to using political rhetoric to make an objectively regressive default.
I suppose if you considered the filter being on by default a "suggestion" (in the way that a language is suggested or a search term is suggested) then I could see the comparison, but that's a policy decision, and you as well as every other adult on the planet should be capable of self-policing.
Just a little perspective...I've got Sky Broadband and turning off this filter took a couple of clicks. Actually it might have even just been one, and that's it.
Oh goody. Glad to hear it's easy to get your name on a list of filthy perverts. What's the worst that could happen?!
Does anyone know of any studies that show that pornography harms children more than anything else, like seeing bomb victims on nightly news or ISIS beheadings on Facebook? I seem to recall seeing porn when I was a child, and i'm not intellectually or emotionally damaged, as far as I know.
Well, you're not exactly an unbiased source on yourself ;)
To be honest, I would expect many studies to have rather a moralistic bent, since it's getting into issues of right and wrong, cultural issues rather than strictly behavioral ones.
That said, I do think there is something to the idea that early exposure to porn does change one's expectations when it comes to sex. Sure, you could view like a "action movie" version of the act, but all the same it could taint somewhat one's ideas of how it's done, what the opposite (or same for that matter) sex is like in or out of bed, etc.
Banning it is, of course, ridiculous and impossible, so I wouldn't support it even if I thought it was morally justified (precious little is).
Still baffling, that violence and murder you see on TV almost non-stop is not considered a big problem. Probably because it is not.
Everyone is going to deal with sex. Only a few will have to deal with murder. Go figure.
Yes it does matter! It matters if we could easily spend fewer resources to fix a much greater harm, but we are focusing on some scapegoat due to moralistic reasons not having anything to do with the scale of (or even existence of) harm.
It matters, sure, especially if there are great alternatives handy that really do spend much less resources for much more benefit AND working on the example at hand rules out alternatives. But without those qualifiers, it is a weak line of reasoning. It's pretty rare that we can attack a social problem only one way at a time.
Is it a reasonable argument to say that the USA's carbon emissions do not need to be worried about, because the USA does not emit more carbon than anyone else? China produces about 40% more carbon than the USA.
So what criteria do you use to determine what you should 'fix'? If you're going to do it arbitrarily, I suggest we just ban all images and videos on the entire internet. It's a much more elegant solution and it would fix more issues.
Of course, we would need to create filters for ASCII pr0n, lest the kiddies on a BBS suddenly become paralyzed by a boob made out of markup.
Acting against harmful things is very often not a net positive. Children playing and scraping their knees, etc.
In the cast of overreacting to nudity, uh, maybe you risk weird sexual hangups later in life that can interfere with intimacy? On top of negative effects that happen when you get as far as censorship.
That's assuming it's actually harmful, which we have absolutely no proof of, just "think uh duh childrens" gut feelings.
Society hasn't collapsed just because kids have had access to internet porn for a few generations. A more libertarian perspective would be "unless you can prove something is causing demonstrable, serious harm, the government should not be involved in it at all, because at best you're wasting resources on something insignificant, or at worst you're unintentionally causing actual, demonstrable damage to society in pursuit of a misguided goal."
Not that it really matters in this case, it's obvious that Cameron doesn't give a shit about porn and is just using this as an excuse to curb civil liberties and justify surveillance.
I caught that. I will also admit that I could have been more verbose and state that I was primarily objecting to
>we should do something about it.
because I believe governments and societies generally function better when they err on the side of permissiveness whenever possible. Even if we did agree that pornography is "bad," not every "bad" thing should warrant a response.
Also, I think you were wrong to object to your parent commenter's argument, because there is a big difference between "us" choosing between "stopping" internet pornography or violence on the nightly news, and the government and media hypocritically attempting to censor one kind of (allegedly) traumatizing material while flaunting and sensationalizing an arguably much more traumatizing kind.
How quickly do you need society to collapse anyway? Just because it hasn't collapsed yet doesn't mean it isn't collapsing. Wouldn't disturbing trends precede this collapse, like time magazine's report on millenials[0] or the abysmal state of technical writing?
What on earth does that have to do with internet porn?
I think you took my mention of societal collapse way too literally, but if you want my serious opinion on that, the real problems afflicting millennials are all directly caused by economic woes, while the moralistic whining about attitudes and porn and snapchat etc. is part out-of-touch curmudgeons being curmudgeons as they have always been, and part governments and their media lapdogs trying to point the finger away from said economic woes. See Japan, where porn and "parasite singles" are constantly blamed by the media for the nation's low birth rates, when the more logical answer is that Japan never fully recovered from its bubble and most people simply can't afford to get married and have kids these days.
The problem is that they catch porn, in the first place. Who is the government to tell me what I can and can't watch, provided I don't hurt anyone directly or indirectly.
Next thing you know, the government is going to tell me who to vote in and out the office.
The government already tell you what you can and can't watch via the BBFC and other various legal means (e.g. downloading a film to watch because the studio hasn't given it a UK theatre/DVD release would be illegal, I think.)
I do note that the government have already mentioned aloud the possibility of coercing ISPs to use these filters to block foreign porn sites which wouldn't get a BBFC 18R (see the ATVOD crap we've been having over here).
Oh, I don't know, I can think of loads offhand that would be caught - even more if they applied the 18R rules to static images as well as VOD.
But I'm not surprised it's already on the cards - this has been coming since the early 00s (e.g. the "usenet is CHILD PORN!!!!1!!" newspaper outrages, the Sexual Offences Act 2003, etc.)
The democratic government aren't preventing you from getting your fill of porn; they're telling ISPs that it might be best if you just have to log on to your ISP config page and uncheck a box and ISPs are (not surprisingly as it will save them bandwidth I imagine) agreeing.
For the sake of argument let's assume the only person you hurt by watching porn is yourself, and let's not worry yet about the degree of harm or the potential mitigation from "responsible" usage. (This applies to various drugs, too.) Why would a government that cares about its citizens not step in when there are simple counter-measures with significant gains that stop the majority from doing self-inflicted damage? Even if that majority can come up with rationalizations for the damage? (Like self-flagellation to get closer to God, or brain-cell killing substances "to take the edge off".) I'm not advocating for draconian measures to try and prevent 100% of the people from doing X, and those are impossible anyway when X is readily produced (like alcohol) but there's a middle ground between that and doing nothing while your population withers.
Problem isn't with kids but more with teens.
Instead of trying to ban it, just talk about it.
Banning it would only make it slightly harder to find and would make parents believe their child/teen is "safe" and will never see porn... WRONG. Kids have plenty of time to find what they want.
I absolutely hate this myth. Porn IS NOT Sex Ed. Actually, Porn misrepresents Sex by a magnitude of 10. The fake breast implants, fake butt and make up and editing etc. etc. Its just make believe. There is mounting evidence of Porn being harmful to the mind and causing ED, anxiety etc. There is a reason reditt is filled with NoFap stuff. People, I am all for sex ed for 16 year old. But with near ubiquity of internet and kids playing with tablets and phones my worry is not about the 16 year old, its about the 4 year old.
I question your, um, "mounting evidence"; but in any case, we do agree on one big point: pornography is entertainment for adults, with heavy artistic licence.
People shouldn't try to learn about martial arts from kung fu movies, and shouldn't try to learn about sex from porn.
Of course, this filter will also try to block you if you're trying to learn about hacking, or seeking anonymous advice about self-harming. Don't fall into the trap of thinking this is just a porn thing.
Its unfortunate so many people here are mixed up about first amendment, liberty and ease of watching Porn. I will not hold that against you, few years ago, I was you.
Porn and sexual norms have been inextricably linked for decades now. One need only consider the once shocking, now common practice of pubic hair removal to understand this. That cat is out of the bag, so to speak.
And not all porn is like the porn you're describing. Erotic literature and comics are quite popular with the younger generations, which manage to depict outlandish fantasies and fairly normal sex within caring relationships with surprisingly similar frequency. Not to mention, if you consider things like crossdressing and transexual porn, one person's kink can be another's lifeline. To censor all porn, apart from being reprehensible on the grounds of freedom of speech, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
As for 4 year olds, I actually don't think they need to be worried about. I grew up with the internet, so naturally I stumbled across porn a few times before I hit puberty. I remember being quite surprised at first, but I got over it pretty quickly. I said "gross," clicked back, went back to surfing the web and playing video games, and never really thought about it or sought it out again until the hormones kicked in. Of course that's an anecdote, but I think finding porn as a kid is about as inconsequential as walking in on your parents having sex.
What people should be fucking terrified about is the popularity of camera and GPS-equipped smartphones that your naive kid can use to post geotagged selfies up for the entire world to see, making it trivial for predators to stalk them. But few parents are aware of the danger of this, and a firewall wouldn't help it anyway.
Oi, downvoters, can you convey your objections in the form of text? Not because I give the slightest shit about internet points, but because I want to understand what you're thinking.
Embro didn't say that porn was sex ed. Sex ed would counter those negative effects in a way that banning doesn't. There are also terrible relationship examples on mass media that need to be talked about and have many of the same problems.
I'd also like to see some properly collated evidence.
Right, what is government is doing when a sexual predator has to register and not live near a school? Isn't it taking care of the children of the community. Public Policy is more complicated than bumper sticker slogans.
First, there a major difference between restrictions placed on convicted criminals, and restrictions placed on every citizen of an entire country.
Second, one represents a danger to the physical safety of others, and the other represents something that you would prefer your child not to see - do you not see a stark difference between a child being kidnapped and raped, and a child accidentally clicking onto a pornographic website?
Its not that complicated - we punish those who have committed crimes, we do not do so preemptively to entire populations.
I'd disagree with that - most other large ISPs have similar parental control services but they are not all exactly the same and differ widely in technology and scope.
There used to be a single Internet, with all content and addresses treated equally. Now, depending on your location, your provider, or your device/ecosystem, you may have vastly different network landscapes from others, elsewhere in the world.
In my opinion, "peak Internet" occurred sometime around 2010-2011. That is when the largest number of people had access to the most open, monolithic network.
Yes, most certainly - but turning off this filter is literally a two-click job. And unless you're a new customer to this ISP today, chances are that you were already asked "Do you want Broadband Shield? Yes or no" (that's what Sky call their filter) and responded accordingly.
Indeed, AAISP are very strongly anti-censorship, anti-logging. They're good people, impressively low level of bullshit, and even their front-line tech support are actually techs who know one end of a DSLAM from the other and how to diagnose MTU issues, and not a bloody call centre (although they do only work working days and not weekends).
Strongly recommended if you're in the UK and if they can get you a good connection (if Sky can, they definitely can).
I know it when I see it. ;) And unfortunately - no, they don't, that's Symantec's job! :( All of the censorship management is outsourced, Sky don't have any direct control over it, they can't even log in directly to override and they barely understand it - which is going to be a big problem when it inevitably shits the bed (again). One of the biggest problems about this kind of thing is the absolutely brutal lack of transparency as a result of that sort of thing. (e.g. they've already falsely blocked the TorrentFreak news site at least once, not to mention the Wikipedia Virgin Killer incident when the IWF listed one of the pages because of the nature of the album cover, or the jQuery CDN a year ago, or…)
In truth, no part of this was a good idea. A very disappointing mistake. I did warn them, loudly. I'm not sure what more I can, or ought to, say, except that the filtering infrastructure is: beyond their control; vulnerable (no further comment); and, already in a uniquely-privileged network position on all Sky broadband connections regardless of settings (operating the blocklists you can't opt out of - the Internet Watch Foundation child porn blocklist, the court order ones like the Pirate Bay block, for example - something the High Court only felt themselves able to order because the blocking infrastructure was already there! - and shortly the 'hate site' blocklist).
This move is a complete U-turn from what was said at the meeting with Claire Perry MP - with whom I have some quite potent disagreements - that it would never be on by default. I wonder why that could be.
Disclaimer: I work in an affected industry, and I really don't like censorship. But it's not just "pornography and adult" this blocks: they're defaulting to the "13" age rating, which also includes blocks on categories including: "dating"; "anonymizers, filesharing and hacking"; "suicide and self harm"; "drugs and criminal skills"; "weapons, violence, gore and hate"; and "phishing, malware and spyware". There was a "cyber bullying" category as well, but that's gone now and is now included in the "social networking" category (not in the default blocklist). But remember: there are two, shortly to be three, lists you can't turn off, so the system is still in-path, and still vulnerable…
Yeah, it's weird that ultra-hardcore pornography is so available yet at the same time I find myself watching PBS and they blur out anatomical details and swear words even in depictions of paintings or in films. On foreign films they even add another layer of subtitles to obscure offensive words, despite a warning at the start of the program that it contains adult subject matter or suchlike.
Meanwhile, it's considered perfectly OK to depict all kinds of murderous mayhem, demonic possession, mutilations and so on even in early-evening time slots.
Didn't The Sun just decide to stop printing topless women on page 3? I thought I heard they were replacing them with regular old scantily clad women or something.
Actually I think it's part of their current marketing effort. TalkTalk, and/or others, have probably been successful with increasing sign-ups by having default filters and Sky are probably following the market.
That's all good and well, I used to use OpenDNS to try to block porn, so I can see the idea behind what they are trying to do. Unfortunately my son worked out how to use VPN a long time ago so really the only choice I got now is to be open and talk to him. It did help him learn more about networks and general hackery, so it is all good really..
I wonder how long before they either reverse or otherwise make it boneheadedly easy to opt out. This strikes me as wholly to appease the gov entities and as soon as it negatively impacts the numbers...
You can already opt out now. When you sign with any major ISP the first question it asks you on connection is, basically, parental controls, yes or no. You say no and get on with your life.
The single and only thing that Sky have done today, is changing that "If you don't answer, we'll assume no (filtering)" to "If you don't answer, we'll assume yes."
To take a bit of a contrarian perspective here, pornography has been linked to human trafficking, at least in Nevada. So if we want to distance ourselves from the religious moral and ethical arguments that oppose the "we're not actually harming ourselves" perspective, there is, at least in part, the perspective that viewing pornography contributes to violations against those viewed.
Mere linkage is the flimsiest of possible arguments. We can link TV to violence, and then ban all video content based on that.
A better argument would be quantifying the negative impact, weighting it compared to positive impact, and then using that weight to judge the merit, both in absolute and relative to other thing we decided to ban or not ban.
While I completely agree with your statement --- the Internet filters at my place of employment block access to many of the keywords associated with finding these numbers.
So your perspective is, "meh. We can't do anything about injustices to humanity so we'll just roll with it?" I find your analogy flawed by comparing viewing pornography with water. I don't see how they compare.
We can stop human trafficking without placing restrictions on pornography, except for specific pornographic content proven to be linked to human trafficking.
How does this combat my point? Are you referencing the line "correlation does not imply causation"? If so, never once did I imply that the sole cause of human trafficking is pornography.
Even if it was the slightest cause, by ending porn the world over you will not diminish the act of human trafficking or prostitution. In fact, you may, and probably will, only strengthen the practice as people look to other means to live out their urges. As has been learned by the conservatives who thought telling teenage kids they should wait, or that sex was bad, to tip the scales in their favor.
