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Comment by conroy | Hacker News Reader

> Every household in Britain connected to the internet will be obliged to declare whether they want to maintain access to online pornography

These declarations will only be used to shame public figures once the list is leaked.

> The possession of "extreme pornography", which includes scenes of simulated rape, is to be outlawed.

Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own. With this on the books, it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.

> The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) is to draw up a blacklist of "abhorrent" internet search terms to identify and prevent paedophiles searching for illegal material.

A single search can now land you on a government list of accused pedophiles.

Yikes.

View on HN

> > The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) is to draw up a blacklist of "abhorrent" internet search terms to identify and prevent paedophiles searching for illegal material.

> A single search can now land you on a government list of accused pedophiles.

Also, I foresee a sudden rise in rickrolling along the line of:

    <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=kiddy+porn">Funny Cat Video!</a>

Or 0x0 iframes injected into well trafficked of sites/forums.

Play nice! Only inject the IFRAME when you detect a visit from a government IP address.

Good plan. Perhaps it's time we started blacklisting government addresses?

Dragnet as a Service? Sounds like it has potential.

Best idea I've heard since PRISM broke.

we can use this list: http://www.peerblock.com/

I call this sort of thing a "singing frog".

And the inevitable google-bombing and re-definition of various words.

Anyone googled "santorum" recently? The Wikipedia article has a nice rundown on how a US Senator's name ended up thus: 'The word santorum, as defined, has been characterized as "obscene", "unfit to print", or "vulgar".'

I eagerly await the day a Google image search for "David Cameron" starts returning furry-rape-sex pictures, and "Conservative Party" some even more "abhorrent" & "illegal material".

Perhaps 4chan will come to the rescue! I'm sure "Cameroning" will take on a new meaning soon :)

As someone with the first name of Cameron, I really, really hope not. (Although I could be convinced on the furry-rape-sex.)

Beyond redefinitions, it turns out people are really good at creating codes. The french Argot was such a code, designed by thieves and criminals. It created a whole new wealth of dangerous words. Instead of Internet search tracking, they feared eavesdropping.

That law is pointless. You're supposed to use Internet searches as bait as long as it works, not force criminals to create a new language immediately! There were paedophiles before the Internet! And I question the idea that porn makes children go paedophiles to begin with, which I understand this "Think of the children" argument builds on.

This reminds me of the last days of Napster when they started filtering on lists of artists' names and you had to iterate over various misspellings to find the "consensus" on how to "properly misspell" names.

Is it still called rickrolling when the "surprise" is agents at your door?

It'll be a new variation of swatting: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Swatting

Might be a good countermeasure. If people are bold enough in numbers, everybody put the evil words into Google search, rendering the data useless. Though it'd have to be done on a regular basis, which is not going to work out.

That's how I think we should combat things like PRISM. If there was a mass protest every week, by millions of individuals, all searching/texting/emailing "kill president" "home made bomb" "chemical explosion", that data would become really really heavy. They might have to cut back on drag-netting everything and focus on specific targets.

Meh. I'm sure it's fairly easy to turn off their indexer for a specific period of time, say, the 3 hours the protest is going on.

Not only that, the real problem isn't being noticed today. The real problem is how much shit they have on you when they do eventually notice you. After they pull the string on a US Attorney's back and point her in your direction, she will use every scrap of data available to make as ridiculously overblown case a case against you as she can. Which problem these sorts of protests seem to make worse.

Coming up with some statistical filtering beyond `grep' shouldn't be too hard..

while they claim that such data is used for "fighting terrorism", i really doubt that's actually the case - its more data retention, and availability when required for intelligence operations against targets that benefit the administration. So such polluting wouldn't really help imho.

    <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%6b%69%64%64%79%20%70%6f%72%6e">Funny Cat Video!</a>

Or use of any url shortener.

> A single search can now land you on a government list of accused pedophiles.

The other day I used Google to find info about a movie called "How to Make Money Selling Drugs"[1]. As I typed the words, I thought to myself "I hope that doesn't get me on a government list." I can't imagine having to think twice before Googling "Lolita"[2].

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276962/reference [2]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056193/reference

I now do searches like this using Tor Browser. Just in case.

That probably doubles your chances of making it onto some list.

Now see, that's why everybody should use Tor now and then! :) That way this unique characteristic will become common enough for a generic filter on Tor users to become ineffective (by their measures). If you don't want to be seen connecting to Tor directory authorities and to relays directly, use a Tor bridge. Better yet, run one yourself! If you are using obfuscated bridges, you can (as of now) fool even pretty sophisticated DPI boxes which won't be able to fingerprint your traffic. (cf. continued Tor developers' battles with China's intense DPI infrastructure)

https://cloud.torproject.org/

https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges#RunningABridge

Honestly though, "Tor user" will probably remain an interesting / valuable (by their standards) enough heuristic for a long time to come.

Can I suggest next time you have a perfectly normal and mundane need to access any government website - you fire up TOR Browser first? Go look up your local representative's name, or the garbage collection days for your suburb, but do it over TOR, and leave the trails in their logfiles.

As if Britain didn't have real problems to deal with:

- Long term unemployment is at a 17 year high.

- Government debt is at 90 percent of GDP.

- Violent crimes is worst in EU.

For years Britain has feared loosing sovereignty to the European Union. To me it seems like they should maybe worry more about American influence with all the wars they fight, the spying on their citizens and now the neo puritanism.

> - Violent crimes is worst in EU.

Why would that be Britain's problem ?

I think you read that wrong. That Britain has the worst violent crimes in the EU is definitively Britain's problem.

Indeed, I read "worse" instead of "worst". My bad.

You should parse that sentence as "Britain has the highest occurrence of violent crime in the EU," which is very much our problem.

I think what OP meant was that Britan has the highest rate of violent crimes in the EU. This was all over the news a few years ago, and it's still fairly high, but it's important to note that the UK is very lax in what it considers "violent crime". Whether that's a good thing or not is another matter.

He means that Britain has the worst level of violent crimes of any country in the EU.

Worst != Worse

What do you think is easier for Cameron:

To fix the above, or to push through moralistic laws that will keep the media busy and get positive treatment in papers like Daily Mail to draw attention away from the problems?

He will do the latter and prevent larger problems (protests, growing opposition) with his new censorship infrastructure. Which, in my opinion, is his main motivation.

I have no doubt he'll do the latter. But I don't think he'll dare use it to prevent protest - if he does, he will face much larger opposition. Heck, I'll take to the streets if that happens, and the only demonstration I've taken part in in the last 15 years or so was a single anti-Iraq war demonstration that happened to take place across the street from me...

If we get that far, I'll also throw 10k towards darknet infrastructure if someone comes up with a viable project.

For some perspective:

Rates of murder and violent crime have fallen more rapidly in the UK in the past decade than many other countries in Western Europe http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22275280

Homicide rate is less than loads of EU countries (and Canada!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

Murder rate is one of the best proxies for comparing violent crimes in different countries because it's usually defined more similarly than other violent crimes.

At 1.2 the UK still has higher murder rate than most of its neighboring countries: Germany (0.8), Denmark (0.9), Norway (0.6), the Netherlands (1.1), France (1.1). In that end of Europe, only Belgium (1.7) and Ireland (1.2) is doing worse or equally bad.

The "loads of" EU countries doing worse are mainly some of the new member states from Eastern European, which are much poorer than the UK. Only Belgium and Finland seem like countries the UK would like to compare themselves to that are actually doing worse.

I think it's quite interesting how uniform are the murder rates across western europe.

Your original comment was "Violent crimes is worst in EU." This is clearly not true.

If you'd like to reword your comment to "UK violent crime is worst in an ad-hoc collection of countries I've decided on" I'll withdraw my comment.

> "- Government debt is at 90 percent of GDP."

Describing debt as percentage of GDP is a subjective anti-debt framing of the issue. Here's why:

Units of debt: $ (here pounds). Units of GDP: $/year. So, units of debt/GDP: years, not percent.

Since "100%" sounds like a high number, this way of framing the numbers is useful for scaring people. Putting it mathematically correct "11 months" sounds much less scary.

Yes, though of course, the numbers should get their scare value from something more objective. I.e. some kind of study about how much debt is actually harmful (or not?).

The problem with that is that it's very hard to get a substantial body of empirical evidence in which you can isolate the variable. There was incredibly high debt during and after WW2, and the UK survived that, but then there's the elephant in the room of the uniquely united nation having just fought off a very real and direct existential threat. We don't exactly have that level of common sense of purpose today.

GDP is a measure of the size of the economy to allow comparison between different years and different countries. Putting things in fractions of GDP allows the same comparison to be made meaningfully.

> Putting it mathematically correct "11 months" sounds much less scary.

Yes, and for exactly this reason it's dishonest: It implies that you could, if you wanted, repay the debt in 11 months - which is impossible.

Anyway, 90% debt is only scary if we decide that there is a threshold below 90% that is un-scary. If the threshold was 150%, then Greece is scary but UK isn't. If it's 10% then everywhere is scary.

Personally, I'm more scared and/or outraged by the way the money is wasted than by the exact size of the debt.

100% agree with your last sentence.

Now, I'm not really replying to you as such, but I don't quite understand the alarmism over, say, a debt of 100% of GDP.

UK tax revenues are 39% of GDP (so, very naïvely, the government's "income") and with a debt of 90% of GDP, that's 2.3x income. Or a typical £25k earner having a long term debt, like a mortgage, of £57.5k.

I confess this is an extremely naïve analysis since personal and government budgets are chalk and cheese, but it doesn't strike me, as a taxpayer, as being a number to get alarmed over. Or am I totally missing something?

What you're missing is the fact that having a mortgage implies having an asset (a house) worth something more than the mortgage principal. The government does spend on investment, but the vast majority of the budget in sunk into running costs. Then, the more appropriate comparison would be a £25k earner with £57k in credit card debts, which is obviously a lot more scary - but again not completely comparable as the guy would be paying 20-30% interest while the government pays close to 0%, mostly because they have the power to raise their income on demand if they need to in order to service their debts.

> Yes, and for exactly this reason it's dishonest: It implies that you could, if you wanted, repay the debt in 11 months - which is impossible.

It does not imply that. It's simply the mathematical truth of the units. I'm arguing that using percent is factually _false_, with as aim scaring people. I prefer truthful facts with explanation. Feel free to use a different thing than debt/GDP, but don't use something that's equivalent to claiming that 1+1=3.

while i understand the unit, what does 11 months _mean_?

When you put debt as a percentage of GDP, it is understood to mean the "size" of the debt, with the implied "size" of 100% being bad (whether this is true or not, i m not sure).

... because the government is one person, unable of accomplishing multiple tasks at the same time?

> > The possession of "extreme pornography", which includes scenes of simulated rape, is to be outlawed.

> Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own. With this on the books, it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.

Even without such an extension, aren't there plenty of Hollywood movies which include "scenes of simulated rape"?

I can't speak to Hollywood, but this presumably means it will be illegal to watch "Irreversable" online.

Still, it's a handy way to tar anyone complaining about online survellience as a rape-loving pedophile.

I'd forgotten all about Irreversable - I purchased the DVD, then later on sold it on eBay... does this now mean I'm a 'user' and distributor?

We'll have to see for sure, but it seems to suggest that the legislation only applies to videos that couldn't even get R18 (sex-shop only) rated - but I would have thought possession of those was illegal anyway.

There are a ton of films, legally classified as 18 in the UK, that have scenes that graphically depict simulated rape, torture, murder, and so on.

i always maintain that the classification is merely suggestions. I would propose that anything not classified should not be illegal to sell - just illegal to sell to minors (ie., same as the 18+ classification).

I'll have to dig out and destroy my copy of Death Wish.

Forget "modern" cinema, they should go all the way back to banning stories coming from Ancient Greece:

> Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces, or rapes, Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta.

From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_and_the_Swan

Might as well ban the Bible while they're at it for stories of rape, incest and sodomy.

I have a copy of A Clockwork Orange, so I would be an abhorrent pervert owning illegal extreme pornography?

These are 'Strange Days'.

A bit of extreme nahstiness, yes?

IIRC, the UK's existing pornography laws make a distinction between, for example, partial nakedness (page 3 of the sun - not regulated) and sexual nakedness (what you think it is - regulated, restrictions on who can buy, what a licensed shop is, etc). There is also a separate rating above 12, 15, 18, which classifies films as subject to pornography controls or not. Internet sites are completely unregulated compared to video tapes/DVDs, under these laws, which is why they're updating them.

I suspect that films (girl with the dragon tattoo springs to mind) would not be subject to it because they aren't presenting the rape as sexual; it is seen as a crime in the film, which isn't primarily a film about rape/sex (obviously I can't speak for all films.)

The grey area and line drawing are a problem with laws like this, though, as several people have pointed out - I am sure there are films (horrible ones that I haven't seen) that come close to glorifying rape, or depicting it as desirable/sexual - whether those would be part of the law would be up to either parliament to specify, or up to the courts to decide later in case law.

A Clockwork Orange springs to mind.

Most folks I know who have actually watched it think it's horrific (at least in parts). It was banned for a long time due (IIRC) to the fact that you could watch it 'straight' and see it as glorifying all sorts of stuff. Especially when you take into account that the second half of the film is about government conditioning and then un-conditioning our anti-hero, so that by the end he's once again able to commit atrocities.

This is a large category.

There are tricky cases of defensible portrayals of sex involving children, e.g. Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum (which was banned in Canada as child pornography), and narratives that document the child sex industry, but they are rare by comparison. With artistically and morally defensible portrayals of rape, the range is huge. sspiff mentions A Clockwork Orange; even Jeffrey Archer (former senior Tory politician) wrote a novel with a rape scene. I also recall that when Virginia Bottomley (another former senior Tory politician) was asked to name her favourite film, she named Hitchcock's Rear Window, which is quite voyeuristic, and Hitchcock has filmed what I would class as morally indefensible rape scenes. The idea that moral guardians go about forbidding various classes of transgressive art forms that they themselves admit to enjoying is quite ironic.

For the sake of having some sort of a list: Bandit Queen, Deliverance, and Leaving Las Vegas all have hard-to-watch, defensible, and narratively necessary rape scenes. The victim in Bandit Queen I think was supposed to be prepubescent. And didn't Slumdog Millionaire have a child rape scene?

The solution to this problem is DRM! The article says it will be illegal to own such scenes. With DRM, you don't own anything. </sarcasm>

In Bollywood (the Hindi equivalent of Hollywood in India) pretty much any mainstream commercial movie used to have at least one rape scene [1]. The formula had variations : villain tries to rape heroine and hero saves heroine, villain rapes hero's sister and hero takes revenge etc.

[1] http://health.india.com/diseases-conditions/international-wo...

The Sopranos come to mind.

The BBC's censored cut of The White Queen includes a scene that would pretty obviously fit the bill, and while it's not explicit it's based on history and she would be classified as a child too.

I wish he would have at least nodded his head to the idea that creating censorship infrastructure today, even for the right reasons, might lead to problems tomorrow. Also I wish whatever reporter wrote the story had asked his take on that.

Hilarious. In which fantasy land is every outcome of a law predictable before it gets issued.

The land which the politicians don't want.

They're not ignorant to the outcome here - it's exactly what they want and has been planned that way.

This is a serious fucking power grab.

I think this is an attempt to please the party base.

Which is never an excuse...

  > This is a serious fucking power grab.

Better explanations:

* They realize it could be used for bad in the future, but they have delusions of, "bad things couldn't happen here." [ Sort of like the idea in America that, "Fascism could never happen here." ]

* They are more comfortable with creating said power because they are currently in control of it, and are short-sighted enough to not realize that this won't always be the case (i.e. the 'government' will control it, but they aren't guaranteed to be a part of the government).

I don't think they're that stupid. They know the endgame is censorship and control.

The next step will be court sanctioned page blocks against the terrorists followed by the usual propaganda in the shite rags...

Another possibility, avoiding Hanlon's razor: They honestly have trouble understanding how or why someone could in good conscience disagree. They don't want control or censorship in the abstract; they just want to legislate morality on this one issue because their position is so "obviously" right. Using laws like this to censor things that don't harm kids would be unthinkable, but harming kids is clearly bad, so this law neither is nor opens up the door for censorship. They don't see the slope because the motives look completely different.

They honestly have trouble understanding how or why someone could in good conscience disagree.

That should instantly disqualify them from a career in politics!

>Hilarious. In which fantasy land is every outcome of a law predictable before it gets issued.

Probably in the same fantasy land where the parent described "every outcome" of the law, instead of just a few. If you wanna employ "hilarious" and "snark" better first get what the other guy said right.

I'm not even sure what your snark is supposed to be based on.

For one, nobody above claimed they can predict "every outcome" of a law.

Second, of course we can we can predict SOME outcomes of a law before it gets issued. Often times, we can even tell that a law is good or bad before it gets issued.

Predicting the outcome of laws is what the legislation process itself is based on: in the idea that the legislators draft laws in the way that they _predict_ will bring upon a possitive outcome. They don't draft random statements and see what sticks.

Now, because a lot of stuff can hamper the legislators (e.g private interests, appeal to get votes, ideology and partisan politics, fad moral opinions etc), a lot of times the public can tell a law is crap even before it gets issued.

What do you think his intention is, to do the right thing?

He knows what he's doing and there's no reason to expect him to acknowledge the "side-effects" of an evil regulation.

And the reporter is not responsible for realizing this; you are.

So the reporter has no responsibility to uphold journalistic ideals? Good to know.

I'm glad I was able to educate you without either of us resorting to sarcasm.

The problem with this thread is that it's entirely possible to read it as both my post and your reply are sarcastic, or they both aren't.

If you really require me to be explicit, I can spell it out for you:

* Each person has an individual responsibility to realize such things for their self via critical thinking.

* A reporter has no legal responsibility to uphold journalistic principals.

* A reporter should have an ethical responsibility to uphold journalistic principals.

This, to me, is the equivalent of victim-blaming:

  You walk past a dark alley and see someone being
  assaulted. You are under no legal obligation to
  help the person, therefore you do not help the
  person. The person has no right to be angry at
  you because they should have been responsible
  for *their own* safety and shouldn't rely on
  anyone else. The person being assaulted is the
  person that is *really* at fault because they
  failed to protect their own personal safety.

If you wanted to have a serious conversation about journalistic integrity, you would not begin with sarcasm and continue with condescension. That's why you didn't deserve a serious reply, and still don't. The entire thread you started is also off-topic and as worthwhile as your thoughts in it.

In your original post, you stated that it was the reader's responsibility to do the critical thinking necessary to realize that the censorship controls could be used for 'evil.' This view implies that people without the requisite critical thinking skills are irresponsible, and therefore deserve what they get[1].

[1] Couldn't think of a better way of putting it. I'm not saying that you're stating that sentiment directly.

His view also fails to acknowledge the fact that press is not either cheap propaganda / sensationalism, versus well written and researched articles. There are also well written and researched manipulative articles that even a reader with good enough critical thinking skills might be mislead by.

It's easy to blame the reader when what you read is "too good to be true" or "so obvious that it's not", but when a fabrication makes its way into a rather respected journal, or when a more or less respected author gets something unusually wrong (which you're not clever enough to spot because it's not your expertise), then one can't be blamed to have believed it in the first place.

You started the conversation with statement that arguably defends shoddy journalism. Instead of backing it up, you claim the response to your comment is off-topic and proclaim offense at sarcasm and condescension (both useful devices for eliciting emotional responses in debate...). How about taking the high road?

There's a whole seperate article in the opinion section on why the law doesn't make sense http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/21/david-came... The 'quality' UK papers generally try to seperate opinions from factual reporting. Maybe the NYT WSJ etc do this as well?

There are plenty of criticisms of this law that are perfectly factual, like "Cameron doesn't have a God damn idea how the Internet works," or "No censorship scheme on the Internet has ever remained effective against the dedicated for more than a few minutes," or "Cameron has entirely failed to describe what he means by 'violent pornography' in a way that is specific enough to be legally actionable or differentiable from pornography/the Web in general." Not including any such facts in the main article is dishonest.

What do you think his intention is, to do the right thing?

Win votes. That's the definition of success in politics.

> These declarations will only be used to shame public figures once the list is leaked.

LOL. On my Twitter account I have a public list for porn. It used to be a private list but most of those girls are pretty cool so there's no reason to be ashamed.

I'm not a public figure of course but I think this shame toward sexuality is a generational thing. It's only taboo for older people.

And on top of this, they want to create a database of all of child porn. ( What could possibly go wrong?)

Most law enforcement agencies have something of that sort. From what I understand, what they distribute is a database of hashes to identify files. I don't know if the original material is preserved.

We already have that in the UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...

If I understand the link correctly, Cleanfeed operates at the http level, while the proposed new system would work on the content level. ( Granted this is speculation based on a non technical article, which reports a speech of a politician.)

American ISPs have such a shared database through NCMEC.

It's not widely advertised because they'd like to claim such a thing is impossible, to avoid the music industry.

If the database just contains hashes of offending images, I don't see the harm. Similar databases exist for copyrighted movies, television shows, and music.

Edit: The harm is combining such a database with broad internet surveillance. Also, since the database is only hashes, false positives are likely. YouTube, who probably has the best content matching algorithms, can't even get it right all the time.

And that database never has false positives?

The problem is, that they have then equipment to monitor web traffic at the content level. And it is nowhere clear, if the hashes are actually offending images, either maliciously or because the database is just on a similar quality level as the various databases for copyright violations. [1]

[1]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120806/11053019945/curio...

There are several harm factors which are hidden from plain view.

Commonly used hash algorithms are too rigid. A detection system shouldn't be bypassed just when a single bit gets flipped in a large file. The algorithm need to be fault tolerant, give few hash collision, and be proven by the passage of time. This of course a contradiction in terms.

It also need to be maintained and safe guarded against abuse. Who will watch the watchers, and how do we control what gets defined as offending images if there is no public reviews?

How is legal rights handled? How should appeals be handled, and peoples right to face ones accuser.

How do we control scope creep so "unwanted" political competition don't get suppressed under anti-propaganda laws? How is the slippery slope argument handled?

And last... but far from least, is the classical argument of 20th century political environment: Practicality. What does the cost-benefit analyses say about such filters and databases. Is the maintenance that those databases require cost more than they provide to society? What other options has been thought of, and how does the databases compare in efficiency and cost?

So if we think about it, maybe the harms are not that well hidden.

Actually child porn images are probably much easier to detect than YouTube blocking videos. One aspect of copyright infringement that makes content detection hard is that there is fair use. There is absolutely no fair use for child porn.

It's weird how pornography is "corroding" but the endless streams of horrific behaviours shown in reality shows is A-OK with the Daily Mail and Cameron.

> The possession of "extreme pornography", which includes scenes of simulated rape, is to be outlawed.

Can we expect films such as "I Spit On Your Grave" and "Once Upon a Time in America" to become illegal also?

Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own. With this on the books, it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.

I'm no lawyer, but it already is, if they're in a pornographic "context": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Just...

This 2008 act outlaws possessing or publishing explicit and realistic imagery of acts that threaten life, would cause serious injury to certain genitals, etc.

So fisting, simulated murder, or simulated necrophilia.. already illegal. Rape, borderline allowable, although if I were a lawyer testing this act in court, I'd say that rape is quite clearly an act that is "likely to result" in "serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals".

> So fisting ... already illegal.

Actually there was a case in 2012 of someone tried under this law for having fisting videos. They weren't convicted. This is strong evidence (and precedent) that fisting per se would not fall under this law.

I read a story like that and it seems to be the usual British approach of actual convictions coming down heavily on judges and juries' sense of what's wrong and right rather than what the law says or suggests. (A good thing IMHO!) :-)

That it even made it to court meant there was a case to answer but the actual outcomes seem to be more sane and based on the context than the law itself.

Well that law, like lots of laws, is open to interpretation by judges/the legal system/etc. That's how laws and judges and trials are mostly supposed to work. The judges/jury didn't ignore the law, they merely had to interpret the law and see if the facts of the case fit it or not.

I believe the crux was that the law said it was illegal to have porn that showed damage to the anus, so does fisting fall into that category or not? The outcome was no, fisting doesn't count as damage to the anus. The "stupid law" wasn't ignored, it wasn't a case of "people using their own moral compasses", it was a jury & judge interpreting a law, like normal.

That it even made it to court meant there was a case to answer

The cynic is me notices that the accused was a lawyer who helped prosecute corrupt police officers.

> it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.

Which includes pretty much every action movie these days. Maybe the irony will be that Hollywood will step up with a campaign to fight this, because they see it as an eventual threat to their bottom line.

> These declarations will only be used to shame public figures once the list is leaked.

Actually it's the common person I'm more worried about. Applying to work as a teacher? They might ask you (or the Government body with the details) if you watch porn. "We can't let someone who watches porn teach 5 year olds!" will be the excuse.

> Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own.

This is already the case in the UK, with violent and extreme pornography, a new law that (I don't think) has any convictions yet.

> it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.

Again, other way around. They made porn of that technically illegal a few years ago AFAIR,

I take it noone will get raped on eastenders then.

Well Eastenders gets away with it by putting a helpline number at the end of the program with the text "If you've been affected by the issues in this program, contact 0845...".

Perhaps they could do that with blue movies :)

"If you've been fucked in the eyesocket"...

I think they have taken a good step in the right direction. Kids are exposed to too much crap these days. Kids growing up with involved parents and teachers turn out alright, but there are a whole lot of kids who aren't that lucky.

That's not a government issue. You're welcome to control your own children's internet use, but it is not your right to control how any other family deals with these situations.

Edit: You're free to cite examples of children who "aren't that lucky" and had their upbringing maliciously altered by viewing internet pornography.

If governments want to protect poorly parented kids from obscenity (which is not an ignoble cause in itself), there are ways of doing it without building lists of everyone who wants uncrippled access to the Internet.

These laws will not help. Outlawing content will not make it suddenly disappear, it will just be a bit harder to find. Any attempt to filter content will be circumvented. Australia's attempt failed miserably back in 2007[1]. I agree that children are exposed to too much "crap" today, but using children as an excuse to censor material is a political move.

[1]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/australian_por...

I grew up in a country with mandatory web filtering. ("For pornography", but naturally, dissent forums always end up in that list.) Virtually every kid I knew was comfortable using Tor, Bittorrent, or a plain old web proxy (in the early days) to get around it.

These filters are just an inconvenience, and if your child is too stupid to work around them then you've got worse problems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

  > Do you have kids?

@Sven7: I do have kids, but I'll refer you to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_state

Posting the same reply 3 times got your replies dead. On e would've been fair. Before I had kids I kind of thought: anything goes. Now? Pretty much the same. The worst crap that kids are exposed to is situations where people treat each other like crap, so the worst influence is almost always going to be the commercial news. I seriously doubt the asshole that held those women captive in Ohio was a product of the depravity of the internet or media in general. Sometimes, people are just assholes.

And people seem to think kids can't separate fantasy and reality, which amazes me given that everyone after all have been children themselves, and many of them do have their own.

My son is four. He watches a lot of stuff I was never allowed to as a child. He acts out scenes of decapitations with swords, for example, while playing. When his mom and I occasionally gasp or ask him to tone it down because we think it's going a bit far he goes "it's only pretend" with a condescending voice, as if we must be the stupidest people around to not realise that these things are just fantasy.

But if we as much as raise our voices to each other, he gets upset, tells us off and demands an explanation and wants to know who is angry at whom and why. Once we had an argument before his bedtime, and I left the room. The following night he wanted assurances from me that we were not going to argue again before I was allowed to sit down by his bed. He also understands well enough that so much as raising a hand at someone is unacceptable to the extent that when he is really upset, he has experimented with using the threat of it to try to get a reaction out of us (e.g. sitting on the sofa and calmly saying "I am going to hit you"). None of the stuff he's seeing in movies or his cartoons etc. has ever "crossed over" to non-play/fantasy situations.

I don't worry about movies. I worry about advertising. He can tell movies are fantasy because of how it is portrayed, but advertising makes claims intended to be believed, and from what I see it's effect is far stronger. Thankfully he's learned to detest advertising, and now get upset if we watch live TV because he wants to fast forward past it...

Are you out of your mind?

As a parent, I'm far more concerned about the crap kids are exposed to on mainstream TV over and over again, than the stuff they might accidentally stumble across a handful of times as they grow up, decide is gross and move on.

Can I just point out, there's some irony here. HN users are attempting to censor this comment by making it difficult to read because they don't agree with the opinion.

HN filtering is not about "censorship". It's about elevating interesting material and hiding braindead crap. Which is what it's doing in this case. "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!" Really?

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