All major UK ISPs prepping network-level porn 'n' violence filters

Won't somebody think of the adults?

Title says it all.

Fanfiction blocked.

A couple of year back I switched to T-Mobile in the USA and discovered that their "adult content" filter defaulted to on and that it blocked fanfiction.net ... preventing my daughter from reading and updating her Dr Who stories.

So naturally the first thing I did was turn the filter off.

My guess is that while web content filtering does block some bad stuff, it will block so many sites that people want to visit that most people will turn it off. Thus everyone will be happy.

Who decides...?

As has already been seen with other filtering systems and the Australian Great Firewall, who will decide what should or shouldn't be blocked?

How is a legitimate business like mine (selling affordable Leather Products and BDSM equipment to consenting adults) going to be classified? I already have Adults Only on the front and links to various filtering services, will that be enough or am I going to find it on someone's centralised block list and suddenly see my customer base plummet (meanwhile my potential customers will simply switch to the ones which aren't filtered).

And what happens when the puritains start deciding that *other* services or websites are "morally unacceptable" to them? Will the list of blocked sites be publicly available? What methods of appeal will available? How much will they cost and how long will they take?

Cui bono?

So, presumably, premium-rate phone numbers

will be blocked by default ?

No.

Hypocritical cant then.

Violence Included

So this includes sites promoting violence. In that case I will be expecting facebook with its beheading videos and Youtube with the Russian car smash and bits of people flying about videos also to be blocked. Somehow expect these sites to be allowed though.

Oh good

Brilliant! Now parents will feel that it is perfectly safe for their kids to use the internet alone. Awesome news for the groomers out there.

It may or may not be unhealthy for kids of a certain age to see pornography, but it is definitely unhealthy to allow them to communicate with literally anyone in the world without supervision.

Whatever happened to don't talk to strangers eh?

The internet is not a safe place for children to wander alone

Giving parents a false sense of security is just fucking stupid.

Ludicrous.

Violence? Like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Pokemon? Or war & crime reporting on BBC Newsround?

Nudity? Like the Sun? Or the National Gallery? Or sexual health sites?

It is absolutely ludicrous to suggest anyone can make these distinctions effectively... it has to be a question of parental responsibility.

I choose what is suitable for my children to view, not a fascist Government.

Hopefully they will also block tree hugging propoganda nonsense under the false guise of a newspaper, such as The Guardian.

"In places where books are burned...

...people will be burned." — Heinrich Heine

So will it be opt in or opt out, with *unfiltered* being the default.

But remember Lenin.

"Push the bayonet in. If it hit muscle, pull back. If it hits fat, press harder."

Peril Sensitive Sunglasses anybody ? Peril Sensitive Sunglasses !

How about spending the money on improving schools / education / childcare & active child protection. Ahh - forgot - that actually works and couldn't be (ab)used against the internet users / citizens / taxpayers

Porn is not the problem...

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/women-who-stray/201305/porn-is-not-the-problem-you-are

Whole home?

Well I'm relieved to know that my smart fridge won't be downloading pr0n in future.

Now what about mobes?

What happened to the Big Society?

Dave seems to have forgotten all about his little tirade against 'silly regulations' and 'governement quangos'...as leader of a party that traditionally hates regulating (or threatening to regulate), he doing a lot of regulating (or threatening...).

Where do I start? On a broad level it seems the pace of technology is faster than the general populaces ability to actually know how to use that technology. In my experience most people frankly don't have a fucking clue how to use any of the shiny gadgets they buy, and they don't really understand how the Web works. They also seem to fail to understand the ethical and moral implications of enforcing ISP level blocking (and on a side note they also fail to see the issues around giving police and GCHQ greater powers in the wake of a brutal terrorist attack, but that's another story...).

Just because Esther Ranson has been bleating in the government's collective ear (Ranson and most of the government also don't have a fucking clue how any of this stuff works) doesn't mean that access to (crucially legal) material and information should be blocked, just because parents can't be fucked to learn how to use said shiny stuff.

Here's my solution: the gov should try and run educational programs / or contract out such lessons/material/TV programs to teach people how to set up simple blocks on PCs/tablets/networks. They should also teach kids in schools (starting from now) on how our increasingly complex elctronic world works so that in the future we don't have a nation of clueless fuckwits and we end up in a simlar situation when those kids grow up. Instead, Michael Gove thinks that lessons on a long since faded empire are the solution to all of our educational woes.

This whole thing is by an old buys PPE educated club in government, and we need more scientists, engineers and academics in charge to give balance, because the House of Commons right mostly does not understand any of the things they are regulating and acting on.

Even simpler answer...

Got kids?

U banned from Interwebs until they leave home!

Fortunately.......

.... no kids or perverts know how to change their DNS settings to something like google dns or any other open dns...

Who gets to . . .

(a) know that a particular person has opted in for porn?

(b) define what is porn and what isn't?

I am a naturist, and naturists as a group are worried about censorship, in case our perfectly normal, natural and healthy way of life, to which several websites are devoted, will be swept up into some all-embracing "porn" classification on the basis of frequent references on the same page to "kids" and "nudity".

Well...

I hope you enjoyed the days when the web was free and unedited. Now that they are aware of the web, our political masters will tell us what we can access, and what we can't. After all, most people make bad decisions when left to their own devices (SUV's, real fur coats, Big Macs, etc). We obviously need them to look out for us, and wrap the world in foam rubber, so it will be nice and safe for us. All we have to do is...OBEY. Simple. They say it - you do it. BTW - did you pay taxes on that internet purchase, citizen ?

We're from the government, and we're here to help you !