El Reg deep dive: Everything you need to know about UK.gov's pr0n block Remember last night when you went online to order pizza and stumbled across those two people humping each others' brains out? No? Us neither. But it seems we've all dodged a bullet because the Brit government is still worried. So worried, it is introducing age checks on online adult content to prevent kids accidentally surfing …
This is great. Our dark overlords get to de-anonymise the Interwebs and provide state aid to the pr0n industry, in a single move.
Think about it: what better way to facilitate the persecution of thought-criminals than to ensure that they cant even so much as have a wank without our benevolent dictators knowing about it.
Privacy? We've heard of it, and we don't like it, goddammit! It's just a circumvention device for terrorists and paedophiles. The fact that the 99% who aren't terrorists and paedophiles will have their civil and human rights raped is just inconsequential collateral damage. So, OK, maybe they're not terrorists and paedophiles, but I bet they've done something naughty, and we your divine rulers demand to know what it is!
Plus, as an added bonus, they get to siphon all your money into the pr0n industry, because let's face it, how else are they going to prove legal age, if not with financial transactions. Let them clearing houses take care of that pesky business. The ghost of Hugh Hefner thanks you.
""I don't think it's a done deal," said Blake. "There's no shame in abandoning a policy that it turns out isn't going to work the way you thought it was."
There's no chance that this will be abandoned. We have some clueless, cloth eared, inept old dear as PM, a woman brought up in a vicarage, somebody who knows less than nothing about technology, and to judge by other policies things "privacy" is a concept that doesn't apply to government.
And thinking about all the other crap policies that government keep pushing despite their self-evident stupidity, why would they see any sense on this?
Because it effectively introduces a censorship block on the entire country as a side effect. Mandatory one.
So it can be used in the next election(s) to protect us from corrupting influences from the East... West... South... Eurasia... Eastasia... Whatever we need to be protected to while being fed the correct regurgitated easy to digest goo produced by the Daily Beobachter.
Who couldn't set the age restriction rules on her browser.
So she organized a debate (that was attended by about 6 other MPs)
Next thing she knows CMD appointed her as Czar for Child Sexualization & Exploitation (later renamed when it read like the title was for someone to support both subjects).
And the rest is going to be history.
BTW It was Perry who though gambling sites should to the age checking, before it turned out one had dished its whole customer list to CC fraudsters.
There's no chance that this will be abandoned. We have some clueless, cloth eared, inept old dear as PM, a woman brought up in a vicarage, somebody who knows less than nothing about technology, and to judge by other policies things "privacy" is a concept that doesn't apply to government.
My mum met some civil servants from the Home Office when she was on holiday. I won't say where she was in case it identifies anyone. They said Chairman May was inept and clueless as their minister and just as bad if not worse since she moved in to Number 10. I can well believe that
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"What am I doing wrong?"
You presumably weren't using usenet in those days. The most insidious was the people who flooded unmoderated alt. groups with pr0n pictures - then complained to ISPs to try to get the group closed down.
This was usually aimed at groups whose discussion subject they disliked eg those of feminists, atheists, naturists.
The groups actually carrying pr0n often moved to a euphemistically named group - which could catch people unware.
There was much puzzled debate over one strange posting in alt.rec.urn - that transpired to be a list of botanical names of cacti. Apologies followed from a non-English speaker who had confused "naturist" with "naturalist"
Didn't everything have "binaries" in the name too?
Christ - it's got to be 20 years since I've used usenet regularly. It was about 1998 when alt.fan.pratchett got too big to read completely. By 2000 my now other-half was using usenet but didn't realise it because it was under the banner Google Groups rather than a news panel in her mail client of choice.
(Actually, Google Groups was 2001 so she was probably using DejaNews for the first year I knew her)
alt.sex.hamster.ductape?
Back in the 1990s the neighbour's 12 year old son used to boast about how they evaded the school's attempts to block internet sites. One nerd woul dfind a way - then it spread round the school like wildfire. He showed me one of his peer group's favourites - IIRC something like alt.binary.tasteless ??? Mainly very gruesome medical pictures. Definitely mind bleach territory.
If I remember correctly around the birth of flashing banners and mp3 download sites you were offered an extraordinary amount of porn along with some very risky images to click. This was in the days before "hot local singles in Hull are waiting to talk to you". Then came adblock and these are but a distant memory.
There are still a few naughty websites that will redirect you via java script but if you are on those websites you are already being naughty.
Which makes you wonder where all this "stumbled upon" porn actually is?
@Oor Nonny-Muss: In the 90s, a colleague* was working on a shared PC in the middle of the office trying to access a technical website - Called something like "MacDougal.com"; He typed "McDougal.com" which turned out to be NSFW. His shriek of horror drew everyones attention.
* Honest, it wasn't me. I got caught out when I ran an executable that turned out to be like an animated gif; My reaction was to reboot, but I didn't think to turn the screen off, so the image stayed there for several interminable seconds...
About two dozen years ago I installed a TCP/IP stack and Netscape on a work colleague's computer, then proceeded to show him the basics of how t'WWW worked. When it came to demonstrating search engines I thought I'd use his academic specialism as an example and typed in 'video live art'. Big mistake.
I was once showing my retired landlady and her husband how to access useful financial info on the web - share prices etc. Can't remember exactly which site it was, something like Moneyexpert.co.uk or whatever. Accidentally went to Moneyexpert.com which was something very different. Red faces all round
Hah, both Yahoo and Bing were prone to serve strait up hardcore on their Image and video search at various points. Yahoo did it overtly as on of it's ill fated attempts to monetize itself, before an inevitable humiliating retreat. Bing just drug their heels purging it when they launched video search. Hence the rise of things like "SafeSearch" et al., which still didn't stop the banner ads either
To be fair most of the sites they pointed were bottom feeding site scrapers that were spamming the search engines to drive traffic to even less savory locations. Places like Angelfire, Tripod, and Geocites would get hit in waves as they figured out ways around the successive waves of half-assed blocking. How did we survive the 90's and early '00s.
Anyone who claims to have made it to the modern age without accidental porn in their browser cache is probably either blind and using Lynx, a liar, or a Unicorn.
My kid stumbled upon some once.
First or second grade school project, at school if I recall. He was searching for images of kittens, and their adult form. Being a bit lazy he didn't include the last three characters "cat" in the search.
Let's just say he learned a bit about safe net use, and a bit about slang that day.
I can't see why anyone would object to just filling in a complete personal profile including your full medical history, your sexual preferences, previous convictions and your full banking and credit card details (and a fingerprint and DNS record that you will have to supply separately via some ridiculously expensive approved agent) that is kept by some Government agency quango.
After all - we all trust the government and their appointed proxies to look after and protect our data don't we ?
Perhaps we should get used to the idea of having microchip implants to identify us and enable Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to collect the data without all the hassle of asking permission.
It just occurred to me that they may be the perfect combination to act on the Government's behalf and provide all the data facilities needed .... on the other hand, why don't we just make them the actual Government? We already trust them with our data, and they already conduct themselves with the required level of moral and legal disdain and arrogance, so the transition should be imperceptible !
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