Re: Down to the parents....
@Ken Hagan - "Next stop, a country where you can end up on the sexual offenders register and have your kids taken away for not ticking the right boxes when you set up your internet connection."
And what, precisely, is wrong with this? You'll get in deep kaka if you don't ensure your kids are properly belted in a car. There's more do-do if you don't ensure your kids go to school. If you don't keep the booze under control and let your kids start necking slammers, you'll be up to your neck in it. Rinse and repeat.
Why is the Internet any different?
Because it is a "computer" and computers are big-n-scary and people don't know how they work? No excuse. If you are going to let your kids loose on something, you better have at least a passing knowledge of:
1) Do they need protected? and
2) How to protect them.
If kids start seeing porn on the house PC, the parents have no one to blame but themselves. If they don't understand, they can either learn or hire someone who does. Ignorance is no excuse.
There are two main differences between SPAM, malware and porn.
1) SPAM is an irritant at best, an attack on the recipient's naivety at worst and a strain on the ISP
2) Malware is an outright attack and may result in a strain on the ISP (e.g. DDOS zombie)
Porn is just yet another piece of content and getting at the content is what people pay for. It is not up to the ISP to censor or restrict people, only to protect itself and SPAM or malware really fall into that remit. This, of course, does not alleviate the responsibility of people to know what they are doing. We would have less SPAM and malware issues if people were not so monumentally ignorant and knew basics like "What's a file extension?", "Don't execute random guff off the interwebs", "What's a security update?" etc.
"support distributed porn nets" what the hell are you talking about? If you mean porn-bait sites used to distribute malware, that's one thing and I'm fine with an ISP blocking those. But not blocking porn (or pretty much anything else) in general.
Furthermore, we must consider the unintended consequences of the "opt-in" list. When that gets leaked to the press, how do you think people are going to feel when the gutter rags splash "Internet Perv Joe Miggins is Primary School Neighbour"? Not well at all.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
