so pushing web filters from the other end?
UK to stop children looking at online porn. How?
Commercial porn websites face big fines if they allow British children unfettered access to their content. The companies must introduce age verification and will have a legal obligation to ensure that those accessing their material are over 18 years old. The government said the proposals put the responsibility “squarely on …
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 10:03 GMT TonyJ
"...so pushing web filters from the other end?..."
Yes and I personally have a real problem with their entire approach to this - I've said it before on here but any government, or government-controlled agency, that has the ability to effectively censor information would do so.
This whole "think of the children" thing is really "let US think of the children" to allow the generally stupid - that are exactly the kind of people who think that if they do something stupid, they should be allowed to claim compensation from someone else because it must be both someone else's responsibility to protect them from themselves and well they deserve it.
I mean notwithstanding the whole question of how you control this for sites in say, Canada or Japan, the whole concept is insidious and ridiculous.
For crying out loud 1984 was supposed to be a warning not a set of instructions!
Apologies for the rant.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 10:50 GMT Dr. Mouse
I have to agree. It is the parents' responsibility to ensure their children are safe, but we now have a whole generation who think they can leave their children sat in front of a TV/Computer, ignore what they are doing, and assume they will be safe.
It is simple to implement appropriate filters to a child's internet access, and that should be the parents' job, not the government's. It is also a parent's job to take an interest in what their kid is doing and protect them from the evils out in the world (to an appropriate level).
This is all a symptom of the entitlement culture and laziness epidemic in this country (and beyond), as well as the government's wish to regulate and intrude on every aspect of our personal lives.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 11:47 GMT John Lilburne
"It is the parents' responsibility to ensure their children are safe,"
Adults tend to get their lawmakers to make sure that unsavoury material is not readily available to kids. Which is why porn tends to be on shelves out of reach of small kids, and fags and alcohol is age restricted. I seem to recall that Germany already has a age-verification law regarding online porn and kids.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 12:16 GMT Hans 1
>I have to agree. It is the parents' responsibility to ensure their children are safe, but we now have a whole generation who think they can leave their children sat in front of a TV/Computer, ignore what they are doing, and assume they will be safe.
The thing is, kid has hw access, any measures taken are futile. As usual, education is the only way to go forward here, and/or constant surveillance of your offspring.
I use a little of both, I tried the filters thing, then, a mate of his managed to reset the admin password on the box while I was not around. He has a mobile with data plan, can do tethering. He can go into any internet cafe and, and, and - education is the only way for teens. For pre-teens, active surveillance is the only way, I think.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 19:22 GMT Geoffrey W
@Hans 1 "education is the only way to go forward here"
How do you educate kids and teens, or indeed adults, to not be interested in mucky pictures? You cannot educate rampant hormones and a burgeoning sexuality. You can educate them to be careful at best.
Why do people panic so much about sexuality in the young? We've all been young and been in that situation, and look how we all turned out!
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 05:23 GMT ShadowDragon8685
@Geoffrey W "How do you educate kids and teens, or indeed adults, to not be interested in mucky pictures?"
You don't, mate. As a 30-year-old man (oh my god, how did that happen?!) I very clearly remember first being interested in getting my hands on pornography at the ripe age of 13, and succeeding. I also remember, at the age of 17, successfully defeating the nannyware on a school computer in under five minutes, as part of a bet with the IT wanker who installed it. I wagered the cash I had on me ($20,) versus his day's wages. The twat accepted, then reneged on the deal when at the 8 minute mark he was staring at the Playboy.com homepage.
"Why do people panic so much about sexuality in the young? We've all been young and been in that situation, and look how we all turned out!"
Ephebophobia. No, seriously, that's a word, look it up. It means the fear of adolescents, which is not generally the same kind of phobia as I have towards anything with greater than four legs, but generally the same sort of thing which leads persons in middle and later age to be irritable, grouchy, and completely out-of-touch with current youth culture.
(Ephebophillia is something very different, and I do not recommend googling that one.)
But seriously, kids are gonna look at porn. Nothing short of global nuclear armageddon is going to prevent that. Possibly not even that, at least not until the old copies of Hustler and Playboy wear out. And even then, that only raises the bar as high as convincing someone to take their clothes off.
Honestly, if you want to stop your kids from having wild amounts of sex, the best thing you can do is LET them have unrestricted access to pornography. Not only will they be better able (and thus more inclined) to satisfy their urges manually and autonomously, but the porn will give them a wholly impractical viewpoint on what a sexy, attractive human body is, meaning that they'll feel inadequate compared to the porn stars, and they'll find almost any prospective partners they can lay their hands on to be equally imperfect and less desirable. Which is not to say it's an absolute guarantee, but it'll help.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 23:22 GMT dan1980
It is, of course, the parents' responsibility but that doesn't mean that there is no place for the Government to be part of this. After all, it's also parents' responsibility to monitor and help choose what their children watch on television and the government provide a useful service here in setting up classification systems.
The specifics of those systems are not always fantastic - as our own experience in Australia with R ratings for video games demonstrates - but the concept is a good one: provide the information and tools for parents to better understand and manage what content their children have access to - as they see fit.
Putting that in practice, the 'solution' is simple: create 'net nanny' style software (and support) that parents can - if they want - use to manage this themselves.
That would would not only respect the role and rights of parents but would also be FAR more effective because it would help restrict access to the (as the author says) millions of free porn sites around the world. Yes, it would be quite the job to maintain such a list but that's exactly why this is a suitable place for the government to come in - it's far too big a job for parents to manage by themselves!
I'm not suggesting the government should code the software itself and certainly it shouldn't manage the site list but it is (in my opinion) a perfectly acceptable use of public money to fund the development and management of this software by a professional, independent third-party so that the necessary tools can be provided to parents.
The biggest downside of such a solution, however, is that it respects everyone's privacy and treats adults like, well, adults. And that is something that all our governments seem opposed to in the highest degree.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 23:55 GMT John Brown (no body)
stupid, not ignorant parents.
"I have to agree. It is the parents' responsibility to ensure their children are safe, but we now have a whole generation who think they can leave their children sat in front of a TV/Computer, ignore what they are doing, and assume they will be safe."
I'm having increasing difficulty in having any sympathy whatsoever for these parents. These are people in their early to mid 30's FFS. They all got at least some computer education/instruction at school and have probably been on the internet since their own teens. There's no excuse for them not to know what's out there. We are well past the days when computers were something mysterious and magical to parents and that all their kids were "computer geniuses" because they can spend all night playing games and twatfacing their friends.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 08:55 GMT Nattrash
Maybe I am just a(n too old) fart, but...
"but we now have a whole generation who think they can leave their children sat in front of a TV/Computer"
So what the hell ever happened to...
"Now you get out there and don't come in before you have scabbed knees. Or tried to jump the moat... and failed."
Bloody "Health and Safety" culture...
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 11:08 GMT Robin
I mean notwithstanding the whole question of how you control this for sites in say, Canada or Japan, the whole concept is insidious and ridiculous.
But what do you expect, coming from people who at one point (and probably still do) believe that email addresses and real world people have a 1:1 relationship.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 11:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
The fictional book-within-a-book in 1984, "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein", is pretty much written in a howto style for ingsoc society.
“The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.”
Sounds frightening familiar doesn't it?
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 15:14 GMT h4rm0ny
Agreed. There are two immediately obvious problems with this, (three if you count it wont stop teenagers looking at porn). The first is that whatever the ostensible aim of this, the effect is to track people's porn viewing habits. That's a pretty big deal in a society like ours. Is it right or even smart that the government should build such profiles of people throughout their life? Call it exclusion of children, but you could more accurately call it identification of visitor.
Second big problem is that this sets up the government as arbiters of what is or isn't acceptable viewing. Aside from any debates about porn, it would be inevitably amended into a general category of "Bad Material". Political and social information and opinions would rapidly be placed into the category, starting with those that "everybody knows" are bad, and ending... well, somewhere else I would bet.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 18:14 GMT Graham Marsden
Here is the link to the consultation
Excuse the blatant piggy-back, but so far I've seen nothing that links to the actual consultation, so here it is:
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/child-safety-online-age-verification-for-pornography
Go there, fill it in, explain to them WHY them demanding the moon on a stick doesn't mean that anyone can deliver it and maybe, just maybe, we can stop this nonsense.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 02:05 GMT Graham Marsden
@Suricou Raven - Re: Here is the link to the consultation
> I'm actually surprised the questions are worded in a way that makes disagreement possible
Yes, that is a pleasant surprise, although the comment boxes are tiny with limited character input and, for one question, I had to tick "yes" to get access to the comment box on the next page as "no" would just have skipped it.
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 04:21 GMT Daniel Voyce
Re: Here is the link to the consultation
That is a farce of a questionnaire - it is like they are already assuming that they have worldwide reach to apply punitive laws on websites that are hosted anywhere else in the world, why do we still allow people who have no idea on technology to legislate on it?
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Wednesday 17th February 2016 12:20 GMT Graham Marsden
@AC - Re: Here is the link to the consultation
> I aint filling that in, I'm still furious that they leaked everyone's responses on the Filtering consultation
I don't know if you're joking or not, but a) AFAIR this one doesn't ask for your personal details and b) when you provide responses to a consultation you agree that, unless you specfically state otherwise, they will be made public.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 09:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Gubmint knows this will fail, it's just a way to move further along to their ultimate goal...
What would the web look like if it was being built from scratch in 2016?
It would look exactly like a corporate app store. They want to kill the web and make it into a cross between pay TV and an app store.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 11:04 GMT Stuart 22
Re: Gubmint knows this will fail, it's just a way to move further along to their ultimate goal...
You would almost think our legislators have shares in the VPN business. Worse is that it is an incentive for our kids to learn and spread the black arts of hiding their behaviours.
Perhaps politicians should pay more attention to 'unintended consequences' than 'looking out for the kids'.
I mean all that guff to stop (supervised) under-age drinking in pubs of our generation to be replaced by (unsupervised) drinking and worse in the parks for our kids was a really great move - yeah?
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Thursday 18th February 2016 11:04 GMT Graham Cobb
Re: Gubmint knows this will fail, it's just a way to move further along to their ultimate goal...
You would almost think our legislators have shares in the VPN business.
Not the VPN business... the Media business (and not just shares: very lucrative donations, revolving doors and cosy relationships). I assume this is being pushed by Big Media, who are very annoyed at the censorship of films in cinemas, on DVD, and on TV which is bypassed by porn sites.
Of course it helps that it plays well with the authoritarian wing of the Tory party, but there is no money in that so that can't be the real driver.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 12:26 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
Re: Gubmint knows this will fail, it's just a way to move further along to their ultimate goal...
"What would the web look like if it was being built from scratch in 2016?"
what a horrible thought!
There has always been a direct correlation between how corporate a website is and how useful it is.
something like x= - y where x is corporate bollocks and y is usefulness.
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Tuesday 16th February 2016 08:37 GMT Dan 55
UK’s ISPs will have to get involved in this somehow:
Realtime blocking of free pornsites, worldwide? That's only slightly more expensive than the snooper's charter.
Will there be a special dispensation for dead pig fucking? It obviously allows you to pontificate about family values and all that's good and wholesome.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
