Comment by random878 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by random878 | Hacker News Reader

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I read through this article, plus the ones linked in it, but there's very little information regarding what is actually blocked.

It's says porn in the title, but there is frequent reference to blocking 'adult content'. In this regard 'adult content' can be a very wide net. Sometimes blocking things which are not 'adult content' at all...

The Guardian article contains quotes which[1][2] raise my suspicions about the validity of this issue. I'm not an expert, but surely for such a large amount of users (plus, what I'd imagine is an easily accessed guest WiFi) the amount of block access attempts isn't that high?

Aside from that, why should I care that someone looks at (shock! horror!) 'adult content' on their phone? I'm surprised that this puritan attitude to pornography still persists. I also thought we progressed beyond the whole sex lives of politicians nonsense too.

[1] "A parliamentary spokesman said of the figures: “All pornographic websites are blocked by parliament’s computer network. The vast majority of attempts to access them are not deliberate. The data shows requests to access websites, not visits to them."

[2] “There are 8,500 computers on the parliamentary network, which are used by MPs, peers, their staff and staff of both Houses. This data also covers personal devices used when logged on to parliament’s guest wifi.”

There's a couple of reasons to care about people accessing pornography while at Westminster.

1) There's a long running problem of absue and harassment at Westminster. Staff describe abusers viewing porn in front of them, or sending them porn.

2) They're at work, and they're paid from public funds. They're always banging on about "efficiency" in other workplaces (education, healthcare, law-enforcement) so the hypocrisy is a bit hard to take.

1) That's an absurd leap to equate porn viewing with being an abuser. Perfect example of the puritan mindset that is very out of date.

Correction - there have been isolated, but high-profile, instances of abuse and harassment at Westminster. Same as pretty much every industry.

2) As I mentioned, the figures are suspect. Sure, there probably are some people actively checking out pornhub or whatever. I don't care about that any more than if they were looking at reddit or eBay or Facebook.

> 1) That's an absurd leap to equate porn viewing with being an abuser. Perfect example of the puritan mindset that is very out of date.

You misquoted your parent post. The parent did not say that viewing porn is abuse. The parent said that sending porn to other people, or watching it in front of other people without their consent, is abuse.

So, to state it outright. Watching porn is not a form of abuse. Watching porn in front of someone, or someone sending you unsolicited, unrequested porn, is a form of abuse.

Why is that abuse? Is looking at porn on a bus abuse for anyone who catches a glimpse?

How about a roommate having sex when you walk in?

I’m baffled by the hardline conservatism that permeates society today, often by the very people who consider themselves liberal. The intolerance they have to anything and everything is frightening.

You're still not understanding. Deliberately sending someone porn or intentionally viewing it on front of them in such a way that you intend them to see it in order to make them uncomfortable in the workplace is sexual harassment and a form of abuse. Is that so hard to understand? Intent matters. It has nothing to do with a conservative or Puritan mindset.

It's abuse when an abuser does it with the intent to abuse another.

Is abuse such as non-physical abuse actually a problem? Is yelling at someone when you’re angry problematic?

I see and hear a lot of things I don’t want to experience. Instead of being a victim and demanding trigger warnings, I move on.

Maybe the unsavoriness of the world is just the natural state of things that we should get over.

There are many unsavory things some people will do when they can get away with it. Instead of just "getting over it", we fight it, and make laws.

Brigandry was once a noble profession, but is no longer. In fact, killing random travelers on the road and robbing their stuff is dealt with most harshly nowadays.

Slavery was once the natural order of things, and many people no doubt "just got over it", but not all. And now it's illegal.

Pinching bottoms and feeling women up in the workplace or on trains was once part of a perfectly normal day, and the argument at the time was "What? We're not raping them or beating them! They're not getting pregnant or anything! No harm done!". And many women no doubt sucked it up and "just got over it" because it's "just the natural state of things". But not all. And now it's illegal.

Just because abuse is rampant doesn't mean you're obligated to tolerate it. You can choose to fight it, and should you succeed, others who would not or could not, will thank you for it.

I believe in right and wrong. I guess I just don’t think sending people porn is wrong.

I would however fire someone from sending porn to other people st work.

I think it’s very important to disambiguate what is wrong, what is illegal, and what is in the interests of shareholders.

And some people would think it's wrong and would not be happy if you constantly sent it to them.

I also believe that Parliment outlawed porn / made it more difficult to access recently.

Their aim was to make it more difficult for children to access it. Not quite the same.

These hits could include a grown adult looking at an adult model's pics on twitter, on their own phone, in their own time.

"Recently" as in 2015, in fact, the last government not this one.

It was due to take effect as a law next week, but it's been delayed for unknown length.

It's a stupid idea that has very little public support, but that's Theresa May all over (she was Home secretary - whose purview such a law falls under - at the time it was made a law, before becoming PM)

Based on how bad firewall filters work I wouldn't trust a bit any statistics like this one.

Also, I feel like there are reasonable motives for visiting porn or porn-related sites in this case. It may sound like a joke but if work at legislative body responsible for creating new laws you should be able to do research.

If it's about efficiency, every activity is an issue, from shopping online to reading news.

> The vast majority of attempts to access them are not deliberate.

What does that even mean? The only cases I can think of are: an ad loaded from a site which is not blocked, and a legit typo. (like ripe.com was a porn site in the past, when I meant ripe.net) But "vast majority" sounds really unlikely...

Mobile networks in the UK will, unless you ask and show ID, default to blocking "adult" content - ostensibly brought in for porn. This is schizophrenic at best, verging on brain-dead/bananas most of the time.

Porn sites are blocked as you'd expect. It's rare to end up on one of those unintentionally, barring typos / odd results in search. But...

archive.org is blocked. VPN companies were blocked until very recently - but not VPN endpoints. Image hosting sites are blocked on a coin flip - deviantart is blocked, imgur fine - both seem to have a similar level of adult content, the rest seem to be 50:50. Reddit, including any and all 18+ subreddits, and reddit image hosting are fine... So it goes on. It just discredits the whole process.

I bump into it far more often than I'd ever have predicted, and get annoyed by it regularly - yet I have never once, in a decade of mobile net use, tried to get knowingly to pornhub or whatever. Mobile phones are too small for porn. :)

> This is schizophrenic at best, verging on brain-dead/bananas most of the time.

Given how many people have let their kids drain their bank account by letting them play on their phone, I disagree.

You are mixing up two separate things.

Clear proof that the majority of parents have neither the effort, the energy, nor the inclination to pay attention to what their children do while on their phone, to the extent of losing thousands of pounds of money (or in some cases, hundreds of thousands of pounds)

and,

the children's ability to access porn through their parent's mobile phone over a phone network,

are unrelated?

That doesn't seem the case to me. In my experience, even very innocent searches can (unfortunately, and unexpectedly) bring up porn-related material.

How is that related to the network's brain-dead/bananas blocking of completely irrelevant discussion, blog or art sites 25% of the time, or not blocking sites or subreddits that are often just as iffy as any xxx site?

Regardless of view on whether "for the children" blocking of porn is good or bad, everyone doing so seems to have proven utterly hopeless at it. Hopeless for those who prefer to see it, and those who prefer not to. It's inept all around.

We have some sort of filtering software here at work and I bump into into it quite regularly just following links to/from random tech blogs. The error rate on these filters is pretty huge. Although it also filters for all kinds of 'illegal' sites/content and not just porn.

My experience mirrors that of dagw who also replied. I have experience of accessing the internet via hospital and military systems and there is little sophistication to what they block. On the other hand, access via my university accounts seems completely unrestricted (although I'm sure it's monitored).

An example I read the other day was of a woman who had a new phone account locked down for 'adult content' as per new rules. She was complaining that it was flagging things like mumsnet as adult content.

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