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Comment by DjDarkman | Hacker News Reader

This is disturbing, and I can't really imagine how they want the ISPs to pull this off.

What counts as a porn site? Who will evaluate it? If I have a photo sharing site and some douche uploads a picture of a naked lady, does that count?

I'm ok with the child protection and all that crap, that should be parent's responsibility to begin with, but I think this is not the answer. They should at least ask everyone about this.

I really feel this is heading towards internet censorship in the UK.

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Perhaps instead of an opt-in for pornography, they could present it as a mandatory opt one way or the other.

All sites must register to be accessible inside the Great Firewall of Britain?

I'm all for child protection too. It can't be the parents responsibility though, for purely pragmatic reasons - i mean are there really any parents in the world who are able to put a filter on their net connection their kids can't get past? I'm 99% sure by the time i have a teen son, he'll be more tech savvy than me... Now if they could do this in a way that's open and honest, to allay concerns such as your point above about photo sharing sites. But i worry that it'll be a black box, and people with legit sites will one day discover that they've been blacklisted with no recourse.

Parental protection means a lot more than a filter on the internet connection. I know full well my kids can find a way to get what they really want to get whether porn, drugs, or whatever. My wife even found candy hidden away in my five year old's bed the other day (no candy after brushing teeth). Much more important is instilling values and helping them understand the reasons behind the rules. It is almost 100% the parents responsibility to do that.

You seem to think that the filter that the ISPs come up with is going to be impossible - or even difficult - to get past. I'm extremely doubtful about that.

> i mean are there really any parents in the world who are able to put a filter on their net connection their kids can't get past

No there aren't, which doesn't really give me any confidence that an ISP could do it either. Presumably all it takes is an encrypted connection to a server outside of the ISP's filter and you've bypassed the filter.

They just need a simple HTTP proxy that checks for the presence of the X-Is-Pornographic header.

It's the X-Is-XXX header, actually.

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