Thanks, David Cameron. No, Really. | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, David Cameron. No, Really.

b0ing.me

93 pointsb0ing46 comments

I'm annoyed that all the attention is now directed at Cameron as if this whole thing was his idea. It isn't!

The Daily Mail have been running a very vocal anti-porn campaign for the last 2 years (at least). Forget child-porn, the Daily Mail have taken it upon themselves to rid the country of every sort of porn imaginable and have proceeded to flood the public concious with their weekly anti-porn propaganda.

The funny thing is, when they first started doing this, nobody took a blind bit of notice, the tone of comments on their earlier articles met the subject with bemusement. What's even more surprising however, is that still nobody cares! Read the comments on the most recent DM anti-porn articles and it's clear they're not fooling anybody. So why are they pushing ahead with this agenda?

The blocking of porn (opt-in or opt-out) is not the issue here. It's that we're letting our laws and policies be dictated to us by the gutter press! And that it's working!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/search.html?searchPhrase=por...

This is the same daily mail which regularly features almost pornographic images of children as well right next to their "kill all pedo's" articles.

The reason the DM is like it is stems from the fact that this country is full of vile moronic excuses for humans that will mindlessly buy and promote the shite that spews out of the mouths of that paper's writers (if you can call them that).

The politicians like these sort of people a they're easy to manipulate into voting for them.

Edit: apparently there was a nazi equivalent! http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer

You must be looking for, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI

More 'laugh at Daily Mail readers' fodder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPlEIryW8zA

Good find. Charlie Brooker is the only public voice of reason I've seen in the UK media. His work is hilarious and thought provoking and nothing in between.

Also responsible for some of the best television of the year so far (related): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTSc2nTYUGI

Agreed! Definitely one of the best things I've seen for a long time.

To put a very fine point on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9dqNTTdYKY

The Daily Mail is quite reprehensible.

It's probably because the Daily Mail is a newspaper. David Cameron is a prime minister. Those are two completely different things. A newspaper can sit and rant all it wants and be ignored[1] but if an MP/PM says they want to block porn, far more people take notice, likely because it can actually be enacted.

[1] Especially if it's the Daily Mail, a crazy, backwards newspaper nobody takes seriously.

But Cameron is just doing this because the Daily Mail have whipped up such a storm. He even credits them with being responsible for this issue...

‘The Daily Mail has campaigned hard to make internet search engine filters “default on”. Today they can declare that campaign a success,’ Mr Cameron said.

Source taken from a bizarrely self-congratualtory DM article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2372833/Net-porn-blo...

When I viewed this article last night the "Sidebar of Shame" had an article about one of the Kardashians babies wearing a string bikini, of course they were outraged "Is this appropriate?" but that didn't stop them publishing it.

Bunch of utter hypocrites

Unfortunately the Daily Mail is one of the most read newspapers in the U.K.

How the D.M gets away with preaching about this kind of thing baffles me though, especially because of their "side-bar of shame"

Maybe you preach about it so no-one attacks your "sidebar"?

To me this OTT response from the leadership is a sign that moral conservatives are dying off and fiscal conservatives are not replacing them.

I had to read your reply a few times. I thought you were accusing me of having my own sidebar of shame.

So you think the Daily Mail tactic is kinda like, Hide in plain sight?

Sorry, I was not talking about your own sidebar... nobody knows about yours... it is our secret :).

...

DM has been receiving some flack from their readers for it (the sidebar) so I suspect they are trying to make up for it but ultimately knowing it draws eyeballs.

If you think that this policy is not from Whitehall, but was drawn up by a newspaper with a circulation equivalent to ~3% of the UK population and then forced upon an unwilling Prime Minister, then surely that actually paints Cameron in an even worse light.

Unfortunately, the Daily Mail is very influential - their demographic fits extremely closely to the membership of the Conservative party.

> I’m completely behind David Cameron being vehement about keeping children and rape out of pornography, by the way. I don’t think anyone on earth is arguing “pro” for that one.

I'm "pro" both of those. I believe that people that have a liking for these things will seek to satisfy their desires, and I think it's preferable they do it through porn to them doing that in real life. In other words, I would prefer that perverts jerk off using images of kids, not actual kids.

I also see no reason why that kind of porn would not be digitally generated (except for the fact that it's illegal).

Also, due to the online surveillance and the general political atmosphere, I feel uncomfortable posting this using my real account.

Why was bandushrew's reply to this killed?

----

bandushrew 36 minutes ago | link [dead]

There are not enough studies into the effect of pornography consumption:

This one claims no effect - ie, that consumption of pornography does not appear to increase the likelihood of rape: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2032762

The one mentioned here claims that cases of rape are decreasing with the availability of pornography: http://voices.yahoo.com/online-pornography-helping-lower-rap....

Clearly nobody likes to think of perverts masturbating to pictures of children, but so long as no children are harmed to make that possible, who really cares?

I would love to see more studies done on the effects of pornography on violent crime - if we can decrease actual cases of child abuse by allowing, for instance, computer generated pornography of that type, then why not?

Uhhh, but what are the images of? Abused children who probably didn't want to be in pornography at the age of (not 18).

One possibility is having it be CG. Under current law that is illegal.

What will be extremely interesting is when one of these databases of people who have opted in to receive pornography is leaked. Especially if it contains the names of politicians and other high profile individuals.

I believe that's when the issue of privacy will start to be publicly debated and taken seriously.

Shouldn't politicians have extra ISPs that are not being monitored? I think politicians deal with so much sensitive information that they should be exempt from monitoring. Also, how are they supposed to form new policies on porn if they can't check it out unchecked?

Hahahahahah

Yes, and they should be given the right to judge and execute people, because they are in this special uncorruptable position that has the most information so it is best for society that they be able to weed out predators and parasites. They were voted for by the public majority, the voters have chosen! It's only natural!

They should not be dealing with sensitive information, unencrypted over a non-governmental Internet connection, so your point is irrelevant.

I wonder what will happen if David Cameron is found on that leaked list.

Or placed on that list?

We haven't discussed the security of the aforementioned lists as well either. It could be ruinous to be on it couldn't it!

I don't think such a database would mean anything though. If these new filters are anything like the filters that mobile networks currently have, there will be a bunch of false positives, and sites blocked that are sort of "for adults" but not actually pornography. So chances are any adult will want to turn off the filters fairly quickly.

People may find these links interesting:

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libido_(Psychoanalysis)

"It is this need to conform to society and control the libido that leads to tension and disturbance in the individual, prompting the use of ego defenses to dissipate the psychic energy of these unmet and mostly unconscious needs into other forms."

Say... consuming material goods?

It's not a given that people will revolt against that. There are lots of countries where people just became submissive to escalating moral terror. Now they have to run around veiled and are never allowed to strangers and stuff like that (simplified - just saying, our relatively free western culture is not normal and not something we can take for granted).

I hope it leads to more use of VPN and like. The added advantage would be that your ISP and GCHQ can not easily tap into your online activities, and you'll always have plausible cover of using VPN to hide your pornographic habit.

It is of course only a matter of time before the use of VPN becomes a regulated service, maybe similar to gun control. If you can prove that you need it professionally you will be added to a government registry and allowed to use a VPN. Otherwise, no.

There is not a single network protocol in existence that allows a signal (any data under control of the sender) that can't be used to run VPN over.

DNS. "Yes, I do lots of lookups for [long hex string].some.com", and my preferred DNS server is "[vpn provider in country which won't cooperate].com", what of it?

SMTP. IMAP. HTTP.

Pretty much any protocol allows realtime transmission of large chunks of encoded data sufficient to pass IP datagrams back and forth without much difficulty (by controlling both endpoints, so the servers might be "fake" servers - e.g. an smtp server that doesn't send messages, but accepts messages and returns overly verbose errors, or a DNS server where you constantly does "queries" that embed packets, and get responses that contains inbound packets whenever there are any.

If they were to go one further and require all traffic to pass through government proxy servers (including forcing us to knowingly accept them MITM'ing our SSL connections), then it'd be a bit more difficult, but not much: The IP datagrams would just need to be hidden in somewhat plausible looking requests and responses.

It might be slow, but it's impossible to stop because all we need is a way to pass data that they don't know to look for or can't stop. Ever read the April 1st RFC on "IP over Avian Carriers"? It's been "implemented": Print out packets as hex, strap it to a pigeon, have someone on the receiving end type in the hex digits. Obviously that is impractical, but it serves as a good reminder of just how hard it is to stop communication.

Before the internet, pirates exchanged pirated software by mailing floppies or tapes (and not just proper backup tapes - old audio tapes for home computer tape decks). That's how I got my first pirated software, 30 years ago. It got efficient enough that even before BBS's were common, pirated software could make it to pretty much every corner of the developed world in a couple of days, often beating the distributors of the real releases.

It'd also cause a surge in darknets. They keep getting surges in interests after each new attempt at restricting our freedom, and then it dies back but each time the base level of activity is a bit higher than last time.

Here's a network topology map of Hyperboria, an experimental "darknet" that exists as an encrypted network of tunnels over the existing internet, but using a new routing daemon that does encryption by default: http://norlin.ru/st/map.png - it's of course miniscule, but it's also grown from nothing to that size is a fraction of the time it took the ARPAnet.

For my part, I'm seriously contemplating experimenting with "dropping" solar cell powered wifi repeaters at a couple of spots along my commute to my local train station. I don't even have any nefarious purposes with it, nor any secrets I'm concerned about. I'd like to try it just because I'm annoyed with the quality of my mobile cell data connection, and because it'd be fun to see how long they survived, and tiny little suitable access points are getting so cheap that it's becoming viable to do just for the fun of it.

The only things stopping me are time, effort of finding suitable hardware, and that it'd need some work to be inconspicuous enough to not get some scared neighbour call out the bomb squad or something.

But we're on the verge of a situation where people can get a few grand together and get devices enough to cover a small town that are small enough and self contained enough to be "dumped" all over the place with the expectation that a high percentage of them will die or get removed every year.

The combination of more and more restrictions, and lower and lower costs brings us closer and closer to a situation where it becomes attractive and possible for small groups of people to simply start deploying their own darknets coupled with whatever tunnelling mechanisms are needed at the edges to get data to suitable exit points.

I don't even think that would be possible to enforce. What would you do, just block 1723/500? How about ssh -D? Going to block all TLS traffic?

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

To be honest, they'd have to regulate "computer networking" for that to work. It's not just VPNs, I can open an SSH tunnel to any number of machines to make web requests on my behalf.

I hope it leads to more people being open about their adult content consumption, personally.

Join the pervert list or the suspected terrorist list. Great options, both :(

Regardless of if you opt in or out, the ISP already knows if you watch adult content or not, I don't this makes much of a difference in that regard.

The filter on a well known website for popular file sharing from the main UK ISP is a complete joke: only lesser gifted users are blocked by from getting their daily dose of freebies. Drawing from this experience, one can predict that circumventing this new filter will be a kid's play. If one can be a bit paranoid, one would think this in only a way to expand and investigate the practicality to check the UK population habits on the interweb in order to later on, "direct it".

Regardless of whether this is the prime minister's idea or the Daily Mail's idea, it's a slippery slope that we're being placed on here.

If we treat pornography as something inherently wrong (morally) and something which people should be shamed for, sooner or later we'll end up with a society which names and shames people who, quite rightly, exercise their right to view pornographic material, even the most 'softcore' of it.

Wouldn't it be simpler to ban children from the internet?

I can't read text of this font and colors.

Really? It wasn't as bad as some of the others that I've seen.

When it's nearly unreadable, I'll just go to dev tools and quickly change the background to black or white.

It's almost the exact same scheme as Turbo C.

Oh you're right. Wow, that's a blast from the past.

Time to go reconfigure my terminal windows. I know what my next website is gonna look like heh heh :-)

I think the font shadow kills it. There is no sense in having it there. It is not like the white font needs to stand out from the background more by adding more semi-transparent white...

Sometimes I see the same thing when selecting text that I read (for some reason I select the text I read with a cursor...).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com