'Porn lock' heralds death of WikiLeaks, internet, democracy, universe

impossible to block

Mobile phone companies pre-fetch pages as standard before allowing some pages to display certain words. (And most unlock it almost immediately to do normal stuff as the filters block nearly everything)

On broadband the system is very different, it would create chaos to implement and drag decent networks to a crawl.

And finally its impossible to block anything on the net, a tiny encryptor and plugin for a browser would render the block ineffective (works well in china)

Is he serious?

"I think it is very important that it’s the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children."

What, like finding responsible parents for those children?

Now, come on guys - I don't want to have to legislate.

One can imagine the pope saying the same thing to Galileo.

Parents like porn to.

So if they manage to get over all of the technical issues and roll this thing out, who says it will have the desired effect? I would not be surprised if quite a few parents opt out since, just cause you have kids, does not mean you don't like looking at porn. You would be a bad parent if you opted out, which is dumb since isn't this system aimed at bad parents who cannot be a$$ed to learn about parental controls etc. So the parents the system is aimed at are likely not to used it, great plan....

Request part of the Internet before you can reach it?

I don't know anything about the law, but I wonder if this is more about finding excuses to remove legislation than to add it. Currently, would an ISP have to have permission from the customer BEFORE discriminating between different hosts the customer tries to reach?

Imagine the next step here too. When it becomes apparent that some people are circumventing the block it will be suggested that any traffic whose exact purpose can't be determined by routers it passes through (with the exception of some whitelisted ssl services like for example the major banks' online banking websites) must be dropped. That means deep packet inspection if we want to be really certain - and we can't be too careful when there are cocks flying around the 'net. That in turn means that, oh dear look at that, we'll have to very reluctantly demolish privacy laws, which of course nobody ever wanted to do. But every second we waste on quaint notions of privacy another million cocks slip through the net.

I'm not really worried though. The idea that the Government would want ISPs to do DPI for them - and keep the huge logs they extruded of everything they've digested in the process - no matter the practical difficulties, cost, privacy violations or illegality is just plain silly.

The exercise of power without democracy

This is standard underhanded political practise in the UK. It's called "the rule of the threat of law". A minister declares a problem and the "hope" that industry will respond, threatening legislation if they don't. The industry then panics and implements some kind of "self regulation system" which can then be used by the State to impose whatever it wishes. The odious IWF is already an example of this in regards to the internet.

One early example is the BBFC; set up by the early movie industry to avoid threatened state legislation, it immediately became a pawn of the government and made Britain the most censored country in the "free" world.

Governments of both Left and Right love this mafia style "if you don't play ball something nasty might happen" system as it saves them the hassle of having to be democratic, like pass a law. It is pure political thuggery. It also allows them to claim that there is "no state censorship" because in a purely technical sense the censorship is voluntary and private sector. Try reading the Hansard debate over the 1984 Video Recordings Act for instance, full of MPs crowing about how it wasn't State censorship because the "indepedent" BBFC were doing the censoring.

No doubt OFCOM and the IWF are rubbing their hands with glee at this, and no doubt they've lobbied hard already for it. The IWF desperately want the carte blanche power over the internet that the BBFC have over movies, and have been angling for it for years. Every website required to apply for an age rating certificate or be blocked by CleanFeed? Coming to a "free" country near you, shortly.

opt in for porn and...

...then apply for CRB clearance to work with kids. In fact, may as well treat the porn opt-in as a request to be placed on the sex-offender's register.

Apart from that my ISP provides every subscriber with a security package, not necessarily "best of breed" but it does includes a content filtering option. I would not be happy if my choice in respect of that option were to be recorded by the ISP for possible future accidental, wikileaked or required disclosure to third parties.

Personally I find the female form appealing - to the extent that I married one of my own (there were other considerations too...) but I understand the representations of ladies on the internet do occasionally deviate from the artistic appreciation of feminine curves. I use ODNS to put a level of content filtering/monitoring in place for the household.

Who really wants this ?

It's clear by the comments here, and on the Daily Mail web site, that hardly anyone wants this.

As for the government, they'd do well to remember that *we* are supposed to be the masters, not them, and to consider what happened to John Major after "Back to Basics".

There could well be a censored feed made available to the ladies of "SaferMedia", and their ilk but would they pay the cost of it ? NO they think WE should pay, even though there are perfectly good solutions out there.

My solution for my (now 17 and 19) children (when they were younger) was to install VNC on their machines, so their mother and I could randomly remotely look in to see what they were up to. If they disabled it, they would face instant disconnection. They knew too, we could look at their cache and history etc.

We never had a problem but we were alwayts honst with them. They knew when we were looking as the VNC icon turned black on their computer.

If you don't understand all this stuff, either learn, or keep the family compute where you can see it!

Wide scope

Until yesterday, I had left the "porn filter" set on my smartphone expecting it to be of no great concern. Then I tried to access an article about Alexander McQueen, the late fashion designer, and found it was labelled as porn! Now I know he sometimes clad ladies in slightly revealing dresses but hardly pornographic. This is the problem; who decides what is unacceptable.

BBC article

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12041063

TrickiLeaks or WikiBollocks.

If WikiLeaks were truly agents of change; exposing state crimes, openly publishing secret information, an independent platform for whistle-blowers, would there not be some tangible evidence of this in the material they release? Instead, it is clear no lasting damage has been done.

For those who work a little harder assembling the raw material, opinions and facts, from which they draw their own reasoned conclusions, other than just entirely drawing a ready made paradigm from a compliant 'mainstream media', WikiLeaks is being broadly decried as nothing less than a sham. A propaganda operation with a clear agenda.

There are not two but three conclusions to draw of WikiLeaks; 1. they damage 'western' security and interests, 2. they are providing an important 'check and balance' - exposing misdeeds, or 3. they have been deliberately feed information and the process of (so called) 'redaction' is a further control in the process to manage the effect of the release for optimum political effect.

The key rafts of independent 'truth' opinion, available almost exclusively via the internet, study and consider apparent falsehoods behind; the attacks of 9/11 including subsequent events, man-made climate change and, steaming from both of these, the recognition of a drive toward an authoritarian neo-socialist global governance. WikiLeaks is no ally to these campaigns to expose these truths.

WikiLeaks has made statements which clearly attempt to deny the veracity of such truth movements and has not ever been first to release any documents which assist either movement's case. Indeed it is now becoming evident WikiLeaks has been and continues to be fostered by some of the very elite considered to be the forces serving and behind the agendas these truth campaigns have set-out to expose.

Aside from the immediate political agenda actually being served, by the managed release of these selected and censored documents, the wider danger is the resultant demand for a new series of international legal mechanisms to police the content of the internet.

Registered porn viewers?

I wonder how long it would take before an unencrypted copy of one of these registered porn viewer lists gets left on a usb stick on a bus.