http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15252128 To me this stinks to high heaven of censorship even though it would be an opt-in service. What's to stop the Government slipping any site that goes against their agenda on to the black list? Who decides what sites should be blocked? In my opinion there are far more effective ways to keep your kids away from inappropriate material online. Education and keeping the family computer in a common area of the house do that you can monitor what they look at would be better.
Plus there's nothing wrong with kids looking at porn. I ****ed myself silly between the ages of 12 and 18 over all kinds of depraved ****. Other than the flashing and a couple of quasi-rapes in my early 20s, I turned out fine.
Isn't this just like the same thing you get on SKY and freeview whereby you can block out any channel that might contain adult material?
Kids are exposed to far more sexual imagery via the slutty porn videos that mascarade as pop music videos these days.
I agree, but the point I was making is that the OPs outrage seems somewhat misplaced at something which is hardly new.
I think this is fine actually - it is optional so if you want the extra security you can. What you say about censorship is an interesting point but I very much doubt it will be exploited - if it is someone's going to find out about it aren't they? No Government of any political hue in the UK ever wants to be accsued of censorship on that scale. You could put the computer in the common area of the house but what fun is that for the kids with their parents constantly looking over their shoulders to see what they're doing? This option allows a bit of proivacy etc. but with the safety of not being exposed to things their parents donlt wnat them to be.
Google blocks out porn by default unless you are searching for porn explicitly - and the amount of times I casually happen upon porn when not searching for it would indicate that it's nearly impossible to filter everything. I'd like to see BT or Virgin Media doing a better job than Google. These things shouldn't be done at ISP level anyway, they should offer software which can be installed in clients instead, or even at the router level.
It's not exactly an issue. the whole point of the .xxx domain name is to make blocking easier. If you have a .xxx then you're a porn site and can be filtered. Your outrage would seem like they'd banned porn all together not just made it harder for kids to stumble upon a picture of a girl with a lucozade bottle up her twat (as I did, purely accidently, at aged 12 ) EDIT: And for those interested, it was a 2 litre bottle, not 500ml.
ISP's banning porn? It's a PR stunt to get families to sign up with them. No more no less. What they are offering is an impossibility and they know it. Depending how they go about attempting it will provide some measure of success but most will still get through. It works on SKY for example because tv sgows and movies are required to be rated so they can easily be blocked. The Internet doesn't work that way. Sure, some rating schemes (suchs as PICS) were tried years ago but are voluntary and therefore doomed to failure. Doing it programmatically, for example scanning for, and recognising, pornographic material as it travels through the ISP's network would take huge amounts of resources (and therefore money) and is far from 100% reliable anyway. The easiest way is for the ISP's to maintain blacklists/greylists/whitelists of IP's of servers that are known to serve pornographic material. Servers come and go. IP's can be changed. Porn will get through. An effective way to do it is to enforce a rating on every site/image/video. Like I said that's been tried and failed. It's a PR stunt in my opinion.
Those solutions you mention are all impossible, unless it was only a handful of websites that hosted their own material that were allowed to do it (ie the BBC) . You can't scan video content for porn, would never work. The scary thing answer is that they're planning to 'break-up' the internet into bits that they can charge access for, it's been an idea circulating for a while. What's most likely is that it's a feeble Tory PR stunt that the ISP providers will make money out of. The internet is fine as it is, people that can't use it properly can **** right off. And Jack **** off with the Daily Mail style 'The government are taking away our freedom' bullshit
Erm, that's what I said. I think me using the word "impossibility" at the start of my post should have clued you in. Dafty. I mentioned a couple of 'solutions' and their weaknesses to back that up.
Sorry only skim-read what you said... Was my birthday yesterday, only 34% of my brain is working today...
Nothing teh matter with this... It's your choice if you want this service! As ST says, you can do it on SKY etc so why not with your broadband provider!
