Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NeedMoreTea | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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