All major UK ISPs prepping network-level porn 'n' violence filters
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
"So when did you first get into hacking Mr. Famous Hacker X?"
"Well, I remember that, like a lot of the lads in my generation at the time, I was trying to get round my ISPs porn-filters."
There's no alternative to supervising young people's internet use. Teenagers will look up porn - it's best to be adult and intelligent about it, and protect them from its worst effects, rather than trying to filter the content itself.
Any law or measure that lumps teenagers and kids together is a sabotage.
Limiting kids' discovery of porn is a worthy feat, but trying to limit teenagers is poinless and stupid.
"Suddently porn" is an annoying issue on many sites in the web that are on the side of shabby. Take torrent trackers for example.
My assumption is that it wouldn't be of interest to them and they'd move on, but that's pure speculation.
By sex live I mean the whole mental picture. If you start drawing it from accidental porn, you'll get it distorted.
You will get it distorted anyway when you'll seek porn, but now it would be your own decision at least.
By making it require a work around to view even mild pornography, the work arounds will inevitably lead to areas of the most hardcore right in your face.
Say some 12 year old wants to look at naked ladies, what's he gonna be doing? Probably google image search boobs or some soft core pinup girls name, relatively harmless and have his curiosity satisfied. However if the lower levels of that are blocked the work around with inevitably lead to a much bigger source with the violent pornography just a click away from the more regular.
Same thing happened with P2P, we used to have services where it was easy to download a single mid quality song, companies put an end to those so we found a much more efficient way to shift much larger amounts of data. Now it's hard to steal a single song but really easy to steal a full 320 album rip.
Of which there are none. Nudity and sex are normal, not damaging.
This isn't to say that porn is inherently a bad thing[1]. The issue is that if the teens aren't getting good information elsewhere (other than the base 'here are some anatomical diagrams of sex organs' teaching), porn becomes a learning tool, which isn't necessarily a good thing.
[1] I realize that the production sucks in a lot of people that suffered from abuse, and it's debatable whether or not large 'porn houses' are just exploiting these people.
Being exposed to a variety of options and ways to have sex isn't bad. Anal sex can be quite fun, and if someone doesn't like it they're quickly going to say no. Rimming has its risks (like everything else) and isn't for everyone (like everything else), but it's pretty common and not horrendously unsafe. If you try to have sex without lube, you're quickly going to discover the problem. I can't speak for straight porn, but most porn that involves penetrative sex features condoms; if you're watching porn that was made in the last 10-20 years, it's really difficult not to see condoms in action.
Just about everybody reading this grew up with porn as teens (and possibly before) and we're not broken or messed up. Before the internet, teens got their hands on magazines and those generations aren't damaged by it either. If anything, I'd suspect teens today are better educated (and having better sex) than any generation before. Porn, together with improved sex education, has had a large role to play.
Saying that porn is bad because it teaches people different ways to have sex doesn't make sense. However, I will concede that the key here is sex education. If someone isn't receiving sex education they're not going to know about safe sex anyway, and restricting access to porn isn't going to make the situation any better. Porn should be supplemented by a decent sex education, and thankfully an adequate sex education is provided in the vast majority of the developed world.
If anything I'm grateful for all the porn I watched as a teen, and I think my sex life today is significantly better because of it. It taught me more than my prudish religious parents would (or could) and combined with my school's sex education classes, I was good to go have fun, figure out what was right for me, and do it without getting diseases along the way!
| Saying that porn is bad because it teaches
| people different ways to have sex doesn't
| make sense.
1. I am against censorship.
2. I don't think that porn by itself dangerous to humans in some sort of Puritanical way of thinking.
3. My thinking is that a lot of porn out there is all about the male dominating the female, and basically just using her. Allowing young children to have access to this shapes their views on sex. The older the child, the more prepared they are to deal with this. Taken with a healthy dose of discussion from parents that aren't afraid to talk sex with their kids this might not be so bad, but a lot of parents are averse to these discussions, so the child is only left with porn as a teacher.
4. Porn is all about fantasy, so if you are using porn as a guide (e.g.) for anal sex, you're not seeing the prep that is needed for the scene. There are videos out there of unprotected anal sex, unprotected ass-to-mouth, anal sex where the guy just jams it right in, etc. None of these show the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making those scenes safe (anal douching, warming up rather than instance penetration, etc), or are just showing people being unsafe without any context for learning. It's not meant to be a how-to guide.
5. I keep focusing on anal sex because it's so prevalent in porn now vs. the past. There are many other things that could also be bad[1] (e.g. skat), but it's less likely that kids/teens will come across them.
6. Many women are against anal sex because of bad experiences. If teenagers start engaging in more anal sex, it could just as easily have the opposite affect on 'uptake' of anal sex: inexperienced, uninformed teenage boys attempting painful anal sex with teenage girls that then grow up with a bad view of anal sex. Or teenage girls getting painful UTIs due to unsafe practice of anal sex, and writing it off.
7. I'm also envisioning teenage boys demanding anal sex, and teenage girls going along with it even though it is uncomfortable and/or painful as some sort of bid for acceptance or because they like the boy (possibly not even telling the boys that they don't enjoy it because this might be viewed as a bad thing; i.e. peer pressure to grin and bear it). I'll admit that this is not really based on any evidence and I (hopefully) wouldn't legislate based on just my unfounded opinions.
8. I'm often found to be a contrarian. If someone puts forth an idea, sometimes all I can see are edge cases.
9. Most of the porn that I found as a child was relatively tame, and there wasn't such free access to video porn as there is today with the 'tubes.
10. I realize that a lot of this isn't at some 'sky is falling' level like many anti-porn conservatives would have people believe.
| Before the internet, teens got their hands on
| magazines and those generations aren't damaged
| by it either
1. In a picture, you don't pick up on the manner-isms and general body language that you would see if you were watching the same thing in video form. E.g. you see an even starker picture of 'the woman is an object' when you watch a video of a guy berating a woman while dominating her vs. just seeing a few snapshots of the same act.
2. Going back to the anal sex example (yeah, yeah, beating a dead horse), seeing a couple of pictures of anal sex, you know that you're missing out on the full act and just seeing a snapshot. If you watch a video of anal sex from start to end, you could easily not realize all of the steps involved (before, after, in the middle, but cut out in post-production), and think that you now have a complete picture of what is involved and how it happens.
[1] Bad as in for health reasons in this case.
I have a feeling that in spite of all this teens google (or back in the day, AltaVista'd) how-to guides about what they're seeing. There are tons of resources online and, perhaps I may have been in the minority, but I was Lycosing all kinds of guides about anal sex, safe sex, different kinds of kinky sex, etc if I saw something that piqued my interest. Porn showed me what was possible and written articles gave me more details about what I was seeing. I tried all kinds of stuff because of the porn I watched and I believe I'm better off for it. I had a lot of fun because of it.
It seems that what you're really arguing for is not a restriction on adult content, but more of it in the form of better and broader sex education. If that is the case, I couldn't agree more. If half of these [1] books were available to teens as part of sex ed I think they'd be getting a better sex education because it's mixing naughty pics with good information.
I have almost no exposure to straight porn so I can't speak for that side, but I don't see this kind of degrading behavior in gay porn that you're talking about. Maybe there's some kind of difference here that's coloring my opinion but I really don't think I have a clue what you're talking about in regards to men dominating women in porn. (If you want to link to some examples, this might be the only time NSFW content is appropriate in a HN comment!)
What kind of porn did you watch as a teen, and how has it affected you as an adult? I'm willing to wager you watched a lot of stuff and haven't been negatively affected as an adult.
You really are looking for the edge cases and disregarding the general benefits of porn. It's hard to imagine that society is being horrifically damaged by porn, and in fact I'd argue that society shapes porn to a greater extent than porn shapes society. If women are degraded in porn (as you say they are), it's likely because that's a reflection of society.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1/175-4932095-5801103...
I wouldn't be so concerned with children stumbling across certain types of porn if the realities around the porn were explained to them via their parents and/or sex education classes. To use the anal sex example, if the sex ed classes addressed not just the 'pros and cons' of anal sex, but explained that the anal sex they might encounter in porn excludes a lot of things that happen off-screen (lest teens hear something in sex ed, but see something different in a porn, and think that sex ed class is just a 'bunch of bull' or fearmongering).
Note: When I say children I'm talking maybe 12+ or 13+ here, though I would probably prefer that they didn't get into porn until they were at least 15 or 16.
I don't support any censorship. But if you were a parent, you might want to think twice about giving your 12 year old free reign on internet porn.
If I were a parent I would have absolutely no problem with my kid accessing porn so long as they had a decent sex education. I don't want to essentially write the same comment twice, but I explain my position reasonably well elsewhere. [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_erotic_depictions
Having a child look at Playboy or those low budget late night tv softcore movies is one thing, or even something more graphic. It's not really about the sex or nudity that's the problem. But imagine children on 4chan. A lot of that stuff can't be healthy.
I actually believe that all pornography should be behind a paywall, and any which is not is blocked (somehow). And no I am not abdicating responsibily of my children to the state - they still need to be taught responsible online behaviour - as I agree above such material will always be available for those who make the effort to circumvent restrictions.
We don't not lock our houses because someone can still break in - but it dramatically cuts down on such attempts (and we still educate our children on why breaking into other peoples homes is a bad thing to do).
If I decide to post some naked pictures of myself online should I have to start processing credit cards and treating it as a business?
That's absurd! Really? Cutting off huge portions of the internet for 'safety' is both wrong and impossible. That's the beauty of the web: Nobody decides 'what gets put up' and what doesn't. Guess what would happen if a country implemented such a thing? People would just use international sites as many do already.
Personally, I decided to wait until I was seventeen to explore that part of the web, as I matured fairly late. I never "stumbled upon" sexual content by accident, despite making heavy use of the Internet. If people, regardless of age, are looking for sexual content they will find it. If they want to avoid it on the other hand, "accidental exposure" shouldn't be an issue either. There is no need to police the Internet.
You mean this?
http://uploads0.wikipaintings.org/images/henri-de-toulouse-l...
Or this?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Gustav_Kl...
This is particularly naughty, ought to be censored:
> Yet she multiplied her prostitutions, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt. For she doted on their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. Thus you called to remembrance the lewdness of your youth, in bruising your teats by the Egyptians for the breasts of your youth.
All they'd need to do is add in the 'adult' domains and that'd block the simplest workaround.
You could still set up a non-UK VPN and bypass it entirely though ;)
I consider this an abuse of the CleanFeed system.
Not on my ISP (A&A), though that may be the case for the big six.
As you say, the VPN option is an easy way around. <hat material="tinfoil">Until the government mandate that ISPs should block anything like that unless you have a license for encrypted traffic, of course.</hat>
Do you seriously suggest all people with kids to have a full-time job of watching their kids tap on their tablets over the shoulder? Who's going pay the wage?
Actually the internet is much tamer now than in the 90-s. And we survived somehow.
I've also heard there have been increased expectations of anal sex from teen girls due to its increased prevalence in porn.
Now, everything is starting to have internet access in one way or another including games consoles. Whilst very young children might need a lot of supervision regardless, I don't think 12 years olds are going to be too happy with their parents sitting in their bedrooms with them all evening while they play xbox.
I don't think network-level filters are the best way to address it. But let's stop pretending this is as simple as telling some lazy parents to get their act together.
Finding it really hard to sympathise with these people who can't look after their own offspring responsibly
I'm unaware of that, but that's a fair point.
>the next they're hijacking DNS and taking further measures to filter and control what I can and can't see. It's infuriating!
That's the thing: They aren't. It would only happen if you asked for it. They aren't filtering anything you don't want filtered.
You can circumvent blocking with proxies/VPN, your ISP would have to block all proxy/VPN services to prevent this.
Beyond the "semantics" (your dismissal of which indicates you don't hold much regard for the rule of law), you are sorely mistaken if you think state censorship will be used exclusively to guard our fragile, sexually frustrated youth from gangbang clips. This is how a marketplace of ideas becomes a menu of state approved thought.
Point being, I'm pretty sure the country isn't in favour of this. It's being thrust upon us because of two party system and a political class that seems to intent on listening to moral crusades. One can only hope Scotland gets a clue in 2014 but I'm not really that hopeful. :(
* In the UK the use of Cleanfeed was later extended to block websites that link to (without necessarily themselves hosting) copyrighted material distributed without its owner's authorisation.
The only reason I'm with them is because I get truly unlimited data and flawless coverage.
Change the APN to 3internet from three.co.uk
This hasn't caused me any problems on my "one plan" phone, I don't know if this will cause issues on lower tier plans.
Coupled with the English removal of right to silence (discussed a few days ago), the UK long ago became a scary place for anyone interested in freedom and justice. [Scotland retains the silence right but don't expect that to help you much.]
We're just seeing an extension of this as people have been prepared already so it is time to extend the state monitoring and intrusion as everyone now believes it is a Good Thing(tm) because they know deep down that they truly love Big Brother.
(edit:spelling, twice. That's embarrassing)
What passes as "parenting" in this country is an absolute joke.
Just set up broadband in a new house today, this news makes me ecstatic that I didn't go with BT and went with an independent instead.