Questions about Cameron’s ‘new’ porn-blocking
paulbernal.wordpress.com
paulbernal.wordpress.com
Are you fucking kidding me? What's with this pseudo-shamanistic idea that viewing a picture of an act makes you a participant in it? Has everybody lost their mind?
A criminal offence. Stop making up thought crimes, you authoritarian zealots!
Rape porn is one of those areas where the lines between reality and fiction are blurred. It's highly unlikely someone accessing rape porn is doing it because they are aroused by the idea of simulated rape. By providing or permitting a similar echo chamber it is much easier for people to convince themselves their actions are perfectly acceptable.
That is the danger of almost any media that depicts this sort of behaviour. It's not exclusive to the Internet, but it's the diversity and complete freedom on the Internet which permits these echo chambers to form.
This is true as you say for a wide of variety of topics, but criminalizing those kinds of echo chambers is absolutely useless. Giving a person or agency the ability to criminalize those echo chambers in general creates a method of censorship backed by the law for any group of people.
> Rape porn is one of those areas where the lines between reality and fiction are blurred. It's highly unlikely someone accessing rape porn is doing it because they are aroused by the idea of simulated rape. By providing or permitting a similar echo chamber it is much easier for people to convince themselves their actions are perfectly acceptable.
This flies in the face of all statistical evidence we have. Violent crime rates are generally lowering even as violent media, including rape porn, is more accessible.
> That is the danger of almost any media that depicts this sort of behaviour. It's not exclusive to the Internet, but it's the diversity and complete freedom on the Internet which permits these echo chambers to form.
I don't disagree. The media we watch and consume affects us as a society, but banning media because of the fact that it does so isn't a solution. Stopping rape won't happen just because you banned legal depictions of it.
In this case it's not the echo chambers that would be criminalised, but the intention is to block the media that may influence people to seek out these echo chambers. I'm not convinced it will work but that is at least the logic used.
> This flies in the face of all statistical evidence we have. Violent crime rates are generally lowering even as violent media, including rape porn, is more accessible.
There are many theories on this but I am aware of no well controlled study into violent pornography. If the research exists I would love to read it.
> I don't disagree. The media we watch and consume affects us as a society, but banning media because of the fact that it does so isn't a solution. Stopping rape won't happen just because you banned legal depictions of it.
I don't claim that it's a complete solution, but to deny it could solve problems at all requires evidence. I can understand the logic behind prohibiting it, and have seen some (relatively weak) evidence to support the idea that pornography can alter a young person's behaviour significantly based on them trying to emulate what they see as desirable.
No, to make something illegal, you should have to prove that it is harmful. There is no proof that rape porn is harmful. You can't just throw out a hypothesis and then say "prove me wrong". That's not how science works, and it's not how law should either.
Do you have some evidence to support your opinion?
I'll assume that by "this" you mean rape fantasies. What if it is normal? Do you think there would still be harm in convincing people of that fact?
> It's extremely easy online to find an echo chamber where virtually every post will agree with you. These exist for mens rights groups, anorexics, conspiracy theorists, practically every topic.
So?
>Rape porn is one of those areas where the lines between reality and fiction are blurred.
Is it? How so? What about romance novels?
>It's highly unlikely someone accessing rape porn is doing it because they are aroused by the idea of simulated rape.
Not so fast. Are you assuming that anyone who would watch/read such a thing is trying to work up their nerve to commit/participate in a rape? Or that once they've seen a depiction that they'll be somehow compelled to go and rape someone?
Here is a quote from an article in Psychology Today: "Many men daydream about getting the girl by rescuing her from a dangerous situation--without the slightest wish to confront armed thugs, or be trapped in a fire on the 23rd floor." Thanks to speeder below for the link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/201001/wom...
>By providing or permitting a similar echo chamber it is much easier for people to convince themselves their actions are perfectly acceptable.
Rapists may indeed seek justifications for their actions, or may wish to merely blame some external factor. Is it your opinion that suppressing such material would prevent the behavior? Can you support that opinion with evidence? How about the fact that rape has existed before pornography? Or that rape occurs in other social primates' groups (I'm assuming that no pornography exists for non-humans.)?
>That is the danger of almost any media that depicts this sort of behaviour.
Is there some proof that viewing or reading such material will cause previously ordinary people to become psychopath/rapists? Or is it merely popular to want to externalize blame for one's actions?
>It's not exclusive to the Internet, but it's the diversity and complete freedom on the Internet which permits these echo chambers to form.
But you want to start stamping it out on the internet first?
Certainly, rape is one of the most offensive crimes imaginable.
> So?
So the danger is on the Internet you can easily tailor your social circle to agree with you where such a thing would be impossible IRL.
> Is it? How so? What about romance novels?
Romance novels as far as I am aware do not involve crimes.
> Not so fast. Are you assuming that anyone who would watch/read such a thing is trying to work up their nerve to commit/participate in a rape? Or that once they've seen a depiction that they'll be somehow compelled to go and rape someone?
Neither, simply that their fantasy is one of rape, not pretending to rape. If it's just a fantasy then it's creepy but ok, the danger is when an echo chamber is formed and no dissenting voice exists.
> Is it your opinion that suppressing such material would prevent the behavior? Can you support that opinion with evidence? How about the fact that rape has existed before pornography?
No of course I don't believe that suppressing such material would prevent the behaviour. The fact is that many rapists are mentally ill individuals. My hope is that careful management can reduce the exposure these individuals have to reinforcement.
> Is there some proof that viewing or reading such material will cause previously ordinary people to become psychopath/rapists? Or is it merely popular to want to externalize blame for one's actions?
The danger is not to 'previously ordinary people'. The danger is that people with predispositions can be convinced that they are right in their beliefs or feelings. For example, that feminism is against the 'natural order'. That is quite a common one.
> But you want to start stamping it out on the internet first?
Not at all, if there existed such a place where people with rape fantasies could go to discuss them together I would support its closure and perhaps even the monitoring of its participants. It's a fine line to walk but I take issue with the idea that it's either all or nothing. It isn't, responsible measures can be taken without silencing dissent or isolating the vulnerable.
No disagreement there, but I said "rape fantasy". Do you consider them the same thing?
>So the danger is on the Internet you can easily tailor your social circle to agree with you where such a thing would be impossible IRL.
What's that got to do with anything here in this thread? Are you suggesting that HN is an enclave of rapists and aspiring rapists?
>Romance novels as far as I am aware do not involve crimes.
I'm told they do offer depictions of crimes. What other crimes should the depiction of be illegal and censored on the internet?
>Neither, simply that their fantasy is one of rape, not pretending to rape.
Completely unproven. You may repeat it all you like but you've offered no evidence.
> If it's just a fantasy then it's creepy but ok,
If it is just a fantasy then it is by definition, not rape, not an intention to rape, or a crime.
> the danger is when an echo chamber is formed and no dissenting voice exists.
There is no "echo chamber" of rape advocates.
>No of course I don't believe that suppressing such material would prevent the behaviour.
Then what good can come of suppressing the material?
>The fact is that many rapists are mentally ill individuals. My hope is that careful management can reduce the exposure these individuals have to reinforcement.
Why? It is a terribly dangerous precedent to set for something that you just admitted would not prevent rape.
>The danger is not to 'previously ordinary people'. The danger is that people with predispositions can be convinced that they are right in their beliefs or feelings.
So, even though it would not prevent rape, you want the whole of society to have their internet censored and monitored so that a small fraction of mentally ill people cannot(assuming the censorship is effective) get from the internet what you perceive would be a validation of their supposed deviant beliefs?
> For example, that feminism is against the 'natural order'. That is quite a common one.
You want to also censor debate that disagrees with feminists?
> But you want to start stamping it out on the internet first?
>Not at all, if there existed such a place where people with rape fantasies could go to discuss them together.
Even if there was a place where women discussed their rape fantasies?
> I would support its closure and perhaps even the monitoring of its participants.
So you do, in fact want to start stamping out discussion of "deviant thought" on the internet. Should psychologists and therapists be required to report people who admit to having rape fantasies during counseling sessions, so the deviants can be monitored by their local police? Should they be marked with a tattoo (for everyone's safety)? Required to wear a tracking device?
> It's a fine line to walk but I take issue with the idea that it's either all or nothing. It isn't, responsible measures can be taken without silencing dissent or isolating the vulnerable.
Can you point to any past successes of censorship? Successful at either, preventing crime, or successful at not censoring unrelated content?
> the danger is when an echo chamber is formed and no dissenting voice exists.
Looking at the last two decades, I am willing to bet the freedom and diversity of the Internet is responsible for crushing far more dangerous "echo chambers." I am not sure how making a system less diverse or less free (as in speech) is a good thing. It is through diverse, open and free speech that echo chambers are canceled out. People searching out an "echo chamber" on the internet is no different than finding a church group or political group that exclusively prescribes to your views. History is filled with the negative effects of those social structures as well. The real "echo chamber" is a society that feels they know what is normal, appropriate and decent for everyone. It wasn't long ago that women were diagnosed with "female hysteria" and a bit longer since it was thought that whites and blacks couldn't interbreed.
"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still." - John Stuart Mill
>The danger is not to 'previously ordinary people'. The danger is that people with predispositions can be convinced that they are right in their beliefs or feelings.
This goes both ways. Someone predisposed to enjoy sex can be convinced that it is disgusting and wrong and there is something wrong with them. Someone with a predisposition to be open and trusting can be convinced that the whole of humanity is out to rape and murder them.
Did you ever hear anyone say, "That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?" - Joseph Henry Jackson
>Not at all, if there existed such a place where people with rape fantasies could go to discuss them together I would support its closure and perhaps even the monitoring of its participants.
You mean a couple's bedroom?
Considering the film Avatar literally has what can only be considered an animal rape scene in it and very few people noticed and actually took children to watch it I don't think 'rape culture' is a particularly egregious term.
I'm no uberfeminist, but I can certainly see how pornography is extremely abusive in most cases. There's a reason there is a genre called 'porn for women' whos primary draw is that there's no gagging or slapping or facials. Sure some women enjoy these actions, but why the heck is it everywhere in porn?
First, have you ever seen two animals have sex? It's almost always what humans would call rape. Second, the "animal rape" scene isn't any more rape than a human riding a horse is (I'm assuming you're referring to the Navi riding the dragon things). It depicted an activity that was normal for those species in their culture.
If you take out the "sexual organ" (I partially disagree with that term as it is also used for the transfer of thoughts) how is this any different than a human riding a horse? In both situations you have a sapient, intelligent being subjugating a "lesser" creature for their own goals.
Movies of that nature would face the same uproar, and indeed have (the idea of 'snuff films')
You watch boring movies.
Some are even torture porn with explicitly detailed and violent rape scenes[2]. These are also planned to be banned if I am not mistaken.[3]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatter_film [2] http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/03/15/a-serbian-film-sho... [3.a] http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/11/torture-porn-atti... [3.b] http://www.theweek.co.uk/film/50537/uk-film-censor-get-tough...
Your argument predicts that murder rates would rise after the arrival of the internet as people who enjoy simulated murder use online echo chambers to validate their belief that murder should be acceptable (it's highly unlikely that they are watching simulated murder for pleasure).
Except murder rates haven't risen since the arrival of the internet.
Why?
So stop giving a shit about where other people put their genitalia, unless it was not consensual.
In this context we're talking about rape, so unless you think that gay sex is rape then it's really not an appropriate analogy.
Real rape isn't really relevant since nobody supports it (to my knowledge).
Think of this scenario - you own a warehouse, and have a security system installed, with cameras on all sides of the building. A couple of nights later, you get a call from the police - a rape was reported outside your building from the night before. Your security footage would be useful evidence, they say - so you hand it over, not bothering to consult a lawyer first. The next week, you accidentally cut off the county prosecutor driving to work, and he files charges for "possession of rape video", based on the footage you handed over to police. The law has no provision for Mens Rea, so you are quickly convicted and are now labelled a felon and sex offender.
And that's just one of the reasons you shouldn't ban the possession of images/videos of an illegal act.
This isn't really hard to do, as you say, you can just include a "mens rea" bit. Laws include "intent" all the time.
Because you cannot show you were harmed to anywhere the same degree that being a rape victim could,
But even aside from that, why on earth should imagery of something be illegal? Producing rape images, sure, rape is already illegal (though sadly not always prosecuted as vigorously as it should be). But possessing an image of an illegal act is not the same as committing that act. Possessing images of a bank robbery, murder or other crime is not in any way akin to committing those crimes, and the Internet is full of videos of crimes being committed (many of which are hosted by large news organizations).
Now, that's a very different situation to either someone recording a crime for evidence which should obviously be legal (and I doubt anyone would want to hang on to the images/footage after providing it to the police anyway) or to actors enacting a fictional fantasy scene, which I feel should be legal with reasonable parental controls in place to stop minors accessing it. The law should be capable of differentiating between these situations, it doesn't have to be all or nothing.
The problem is that you end up censoring material because it offends someone. Never mind that in this case the offense is truly terrible and unquestionably legitimate, the principle is still the same. And if we censor something because one person is offended, how can we really say "no" to the next, gravely offended person who comes along? Where will it end?
Also, your argument about a slippery slope with respect to limits on free speech is in the classical form of a "slippery slope fallacy" because you imply there is no reasonable middle ground without providing compelling evidence. Plenty of countries set limits on speech and function just fine - most or all of the G8 besides the US I believe. (And even the US in this instance.)
As for examples, France is in the news for the ban on certain Muslim attire and Turkey is apparently sliding toward theocracy. The argument I'm making is similar to the argument against letting people have all the guns they want (which of course the US does, to terrifying effect): if you don't give people the tools to commit violent acts easily, they will commit fewer violent acts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
I think the UK is a great example that violent crime will happen despite restricting weapons.
Y'know this is Europe, not USA. We already have decent laws (going back decades) about lots of things that would not pass the free speech thing in the USA (e.g. privacy law, hate speech law). Claiming slippery slope isn't really a persuasive argument.
Porn is fiction and there's no victim. A depiction of a real illegal act is not what you would call porn, it's snuff video perhaps, and distributing it is already or should be prohibited under different laws.
Perhaps the focus on movie recordings is misleading. It's the same issue as photography, and on the still image side it has been and still is discussed to death: should image of victims be banned ? What can be broadcasted and what can not ? Shouldn't a rape victim's identity be always protected ? Or is it OK if he/she agrees with the publication of convicting pieces ? Or what if he/she kills the assaulter afterwards ? Is it OK to have private shots of events other people don't want published ?
There's hundred of questions we could think of in the lapse of a conversation, just making 'films' illegal won't answer them all.
Edit: skipped a word in last sentence
This is an unreasonably strong statement, and very likely untrue. There is no way for end-users of porn to reliably verify that performers in a specific video aren't under duress, aren't being trafficked, etc. Yes, if one knew that a crime was being committed, one could call it a crime, but this is effectively impossible for the vast majority of porn. At best one can hope that no one was harmed.
The parent's argument hinges on being able to clearly distinguish what people call porn from criminally-produced media. Essentially the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
My point is that it's basically impossible to do that, in practice. Sure one could imagine a conscientious porn consumer who only goes to certain trusted producers. Maybe that's what you're getting at with your PG reference?
The ancillary crimes happen when the core product is criminalized; that is, you get drive-bys and chemical plant and pharmacy robberies when drug production is illegal such that the only way to compete in the drug world is to commit other crimes to defend your market and get raw materials.
When the product is legitimized, as happened with alcohol in the US in 1933, the criminal element moves out because it can't withstand the scrutiny a legitimate business is put under as a matter of course. Any legitimate brewing or distilling operation is being looked at from too many angles related to food regulations and taxes and OSHA and so on to be able to risk having undocumented workers make bathtub gin in a basement while killing off their competition.
From this, we can predict that outlawing porn, or making some kinds of porn illegal, will only serve to make the production of that porn a nastier, more illegal business which does more overall harm to society.
In short: Crime breeds crime.
An analogy that comes to mind is the trade in animal parts from endangered species. If we legalize the trade, there is more of an incentive to kill the animals, even if the killing is outlawed.
This can be replaced by simulations using acting and special effects. Porn is about the fantasy anyway.
> An analogy that comes to mind is the trade in animal parts from endangered species. If we legalize the trade, there is more of an incentive to kill the animals, even if the killing is outlawed.
This can also be replaced by simulations, to some extent, but not like porn can be, because it's easier to tell fake ivory from fake porn, for example.
Ultimately, there will always be violence. Some of it will even be recorded for others. But outlawing stuff will just cause more and worse illegal acts to occur.
Although I believe that it's harder to detect fake ivory than it is to detect fake child porn, below a certain age.
And I also believe that legalizing videos of illegal acts encourages the illegal acts, provided the videos are willingly being made by the criminals and they are being used for entertainment as opposed to journalism or analysis. But this is really just a belief, and I do understand that you have the opposite belief.
I remember reading some articles about sex trafficking and porn production, but would have to dig them up to find some actual data.
I somehow doubt porn industry works like IT; I don't think you get to dump your video studio because the formerly free sodas you used for refreshment after the act now cost $.50.
It would be the same case for Nike shoes made by underage children, harvested donor parts masqueraded as ethical donations, fur mantles made with illegally hunted animals, black tuna fished from illegal waters etc. The product is not the problem, the process is to be condemned.
I understand there are some product more prone to abusive behaviors than others, and porn is not the industry with the cleanest image. But assigning the abuses on the products/industry itself is not looking at the root issues (the scumbags doing illegal/immoral things for money. They'd just do other scumbaggy things if porn wasn't worth it).
PS: for clarity, I think less stigma around porn would make it a healthier industry, and I believe there should be more checks to minimize the abuses we see today. It's unfortunate there's so many of them, and I wish porn could become a simple subset of entertainment contents in every way. For now game and anime porn would be the closest to this ideal, with people just doing their jobs in a professional matter with lesser social stigma.
Oh come on. Punching someone in the face is also a crime but I can happily punch a rapist committing the act. The law is not black and white and this sort of thinking only damages discourse.
For a start, even if this was the case, the CPS could not possibly bring forward a prosecution in the public interest. It's absurd on its face. Black and white thinking is usually fallacious and especially so here.
For instance, until recently it was illegal to make an audio recording of another person without his or her express permission. These laws were put in place to prevent criminal "wiretaps" (for purposes of blackmail and the like). Of course every parent who recorded his daughter's dance recital was also committing a felony, but since no one was ever charged for that, nobody complained.
But then the police realized that if they wanted to prevent someone from recording their illegal or embarrassing activities they could arrest the person for illegally wiretapping them. This led to a string of arrests and prosecutions for doing nothing more than documenting police brutality, incompetence or corruption. The point here is that laws have a way of being misused and some laws are easier to misuse than others. Censorship laws are in this category, so special consideration should always be given to the possible unintended consequences when such laws are considered.
Perhaps over-zealous or malicious prosecution doesn't happen in the UK, this seems a bit far-fetched to me, but maybe it's true. It certainly happens in the US.
Of course, if 1 in 6 men were victims of an attempted or completed rape, and if 9 out of 10 victims of rape were men,[0] I'm sure the conversations here would be very different.
[0]: http://www.rainn.org/get-information/statistics/sexual-assau...
So take statistics like that with a huge grain of salt.
I can't speak for the UK, but in the US punching someone that is committing an illegal act, however noble your intentions to interrupt or stop the act, doesn't give you immunity to any civil or criminal charges raised by whomever you assaulted. You might have a pretty good defense for your actions, but you're not immune and you're not on the "right" side of the law.
> A person is justified in engaging in conduct otherwise prohibited if he has legal authority to do so.
In obvious cases, the person may not be charged, or a judge may dismiss the charges at the outset, but some cases of legitimate self-defense will inevitably go to trial for a jury to determine whether the person acted in self-defense or not.
I'm not going to support or detract from those conclusions, there is an argument to have there in both directions.
But at core, that's the reasoning that is being used to push anti porn laws here much stronger than say a year ago.
The opt-out blocking, which is related, is apparently to an extent driven by mumsnet, the Anonymous of the middle aged.
Personally, I see the whole thing as a way of getting the UK's favorite defense contractor's IP filtering/logging equipment into local telephone exchanges. The story is [see el reg] - UK.gov wanted centralized logging/filtering, but that wouldn't get through parliament, so instead they are putting laws in place to make ISPs fit them. The ISPs are getting paid to do this, but need to be made to for the sake of public relations. But making it about porn rather than enacting EU mandated data retention, and putting government specced DPI equipment in every exchange is much more palatable. But I'm reading a lot between the lines here.
So there is no difference between a murder and a manslaughter in your eyes?
He points one out himself, The Accused which I haven't seen. Obvious other examples are The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Game of Thrones and the BBC's own The White Queen. The BBC censored that programme compared to the Starz cut, and we still see a young girl get raped. None of them should be opt in as far as I'm concerned.
I don't understand what wording can be used here to avoid banning legitimate stuff and can't easily be worked around.
In the U.S., there was a recent Supreme Court decision [1] throwing out a law intended to ban crush porn, in which a woman crushes a small animal to death with her feet. They ruled that it was over-broad and could outlaw, for instance, hunting videos. A new law was passed immediately after the decision that had more specific language, and it has not, to my knowledge, been tested in court yet. Meanwhile, the court has upheld bans on child porn.
It seems to me that there is no need to ban possession of images depicting actions that are already illegal, but courts seem to think it's OK in the U.S.
This is Europe. When it comes to "right to free speech" versus other rights, we don't have the dial set as far towards "free speech" as the USA.
Pornography is everything that gives a politician, cleric or judge a boner.
2 Do you understand and acknowledge the difference between pornography, child abuse images and images depicting rape?
See number one.
3 Are you planning to make all pornography illegal?
Only until people find joy in it. When the junior anti sex league is ready we will unban it.
4 What about Page 3?
Don't mess with the freedom of the press to make and break politicians. Yet.
5 What else do you want to censor?
Everything but the truth. There will be special government agency to decide what the truth is today.
6 What happens when people ‘opt-in’?
I will ask daily mail to kindly label them child rapists. Also will suspend the UK libel law for the Daily mail. Then I will offer a ritual sacrifice to the daily mail shrine in my office so the deity will bring more votes to me.
7 What was that letter to the ISPs about?
[Redacted for national security concerns]
8 Are you going to get the ISPs to block Facebook?
Facebook? Book with faces. We hadn't had such things in 1695, haven't kept up with the recent trends.
9 How do you think your plans will go down with US internet companies?
I will delay the tax pressure and they will cave. Too much PITA to chase the money to fund health and education anyway.
10 Do you really think these plans will stop the ‘corrosion’ of childhood?
No but it will give is critical tools in being able to delay or outright prevent developing of critical thinking and free thoughts.
On a serious note - if the kid is able to learn about the Holocaust, WW2, Gulag,Wikipedia pages on torture or Greek mythology with pictures at age of 8 (they won't be censored) and not be scarred for ever, his/her mind is probably strong enough to bear the sight of a consenting women and men having sex few years later. Even if it is in a bit weirder ways.
So, everything then. The ruling classes have the most profound and perverse paraphilias one can imagine. A friend who is a PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to a Tory MP reports that he is a horse fancier, however prefers to be ridden than to ride.
BAN HORSES!
So that would be animals (politician), children (cleric), and rape (judge)?
Making this filtering opt-out is a "soft ban". People will have to take that "uncomfortable", "shameful" step of "unbanning" it. If someone watches porn, they've gone to the trouble of getting it unbanned to feed their "filthy" minds.
That's the narrative behind the psychology of this ban being enforced.
The govt. will have a big list of people they can spy on to make sure they're not looking at anything they shouldn't be, and I hazard a guess that the govt. will change their mind on what's acceptable more rapidly now they have a handle on it.
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?
We all know how wonderful government registries are, because nobody has ever been unfairly prosecuted for sexual preferences and/or orientations, religion, race, etc...
It's just bafflingly bad. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03757cr)
I have no idea what Cameron means when he says it will be on all new computers by the end of the year, but he mentioned iPads. I suspect it's just his confusion about client / server, and that the OS will have no effect.
Android devices will be no exception, and families/businesses will be encouraged to install "lawful and compliant" software on all new computers. Any vendors looking to get a foothold in the UK will be jumping on this bandwagon, and I wouldn't be surprised if Canonical tries to get in on the action too.
1. Publish build-able Android source code for as many products as possible and incentivize OEMs to publish their source code.
2. Support strong encryption for storage and communications, including friendly key exchange and key-signing features. E.g. NFC-enabled key signing in Android devices.
3. Open source client software, e.g. an open source GMail client for Android and desktop, to build trust in their crypto implementations.
I was expecting him to say the filter would be "on" by default, because it will be. He's describing it as "off" by default - meaning "show me porn? [ ]" instead of "show me porn? [x]".
(Cultural note: 'ticked off' normally means 'unhappy' or 'dissatisfied'.)
(One of the major problems with the Blair years was this kind of closed loop between policy making and newspaper headlines; actual policy impact spewed out in all directions like scattered neutrons leaking from the policy reactor)
Step 2: Promise with your hand on your heart that this new censorship-machine will never be used for antidemocratic or subsidiary reasons, like saving the governments ass next time we have some of those pesky leaks showing massive government violations going on.
There is no step 3.
Is it? There's a system in place already for child porn images and while they've made some mistakes, they have yet to block anything political as far as I am aware.
Can you prove this is inevitable?
I'd call that a very clear example of mission creep.
It does seem that they want to regulate material 'advocating terrorism' though, which could easily be a slippery slope. Still, without evidence such an argument is fallacious.
The point is that a 'slippery slope' argument is fallacious, as anything can be twisted into this, for example:
ISPs knowing the destination IP address of our traffic? That's just a precursor to them blocking all anti government speech and therefore it is a bad thing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk-news/2013/jul/14/pricacy-campai...
> Documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden have shown that the government relies on vaguely worded provisions in Ripa to justify surveillance programmes such as Tempora.
or this:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/06/07/2119351/author-...
> “I have a big problem because the business records part of the Patriot Act, which is what was used to justify this, was designed for specific investigations,” Sensenbrenner told Fox News on Friday.
I guess what I'm saying is that not all slippery slope arguments are wrong, particularly when there are examples showing the opposite has happened.
In particular, I'm arguing for a form of the precautionary principle: don't make sweeping changes to the law unless you've really restricted the scope of those changes to exactly what you want to happen. That doesn't seem to be the case in this. It seems more like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Dogs_Act_1991#Critic...
Can anyone prove it is inevitable? One might be able to prove that it has always happened that way in the past. Or that all recent attempts ended up that way.
ACMA forced Whirlpool to remove a user forum link that pointed to graphic pictures on an anti-abortion website. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/03/17/1237054787635.html
Australia Censors Wikileaks Page http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/australia-censo/
What kind of hell will be unleashed on the poor sap who gets his/her personal webserver blocked mistakenly for the excuse of "rape porn"? I expect he/she could find themselves in a similar situation to this poor guy: http://abarristerswife.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/exhibit-a-th...
I also want to know why this has to be enforced by the nanny state, rather than provided for by already available software? Do the parents have no responsibility?
Actually, since this government likes to full-on lie about evidence [0] let's just wait until we have a chance to throw these demagogue idiots out.
[0]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/conserva...
- Access and exposure to pornography affect children and young people’s sexual beliefs
- Access and exposure to pornography are linked to children and young people’s engagement in “risky behaviours”
- Exposure to sexualised and violent imagery led to violent attitudes
[0]: http://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/content/publications...
I'd be amazed if there was actual evidence that violence in the media actually contributed to real world violence even in children, as I thought this had already been covered at length with the various computer game scares.
> Please correct me if the report is of equivalent quality.
A weary aside (I am not interested in arguing on the internet cf. http://xkcd.com/386/)
Your rudeness is totally uncalled for. If you excise that rude first sentence your post loses no value (in fact gains some.) I have a healthy skepticism when it comes to politically useful 'facts' like these and thus don't take government-commissioned reports even with many citations on face value. That doesn't deserve condescension.
I know everybody on HN likes to think they are an expert in everything, but reading 'reports' by think tanks or other political institutions, even ones that cite scientific studies, is a good way to confirm your own biases, but not a necessarily a good way to educate yourself about contentious issues. If you are not familiar with the area of research you won't know what has been missed or ignored or proven unrepeatable or flawed. A peer reviewed meta-study would be much more likely to include the full cross section of available research.
I'm biased because I sympathize with the "rude" commenter, in that I think discussions would be better on HN if people took more time to read linked sources and spent less time promoting their own preconceptions.
Also, if this community is as smart as it likes to think it is (no comment), it should be able to extract credible content from think-tank reports without succumbing to their intended conclusions.
I'm not as smart as many in this community think they are (the majority are also almost certainly actually much smarter than me), so I don't trust my ability to assess the scientific quality of the report.
I'm happy to have my preconceptions changed by the way, but I want to have some certainty - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the claim that pornography harms children in any significant way seems to me to be quite extraordinary, and very clearly full of confounding factors, so I want to see an extensive metastudy.
Surely it's sensible for somebody to be able to critique very strong scientific claims that come not from a scientific journal but a government sponsored report by a committee which might reasonably be suspected of bias? Or do I have to read all the literature every time to be able to question that?
It's obviously true you can say things about a publication without reading it e.g. a paper expounding cold fusion in some obscure journal. Knowing something about the circumstances of publication and difficulty of the problem gives you a priori knowledge that hey - it's probably questionable. But hey - in tptacek world, you'd have to read the whole thing before being able to say anything about it (even though you'd get nothing out of it unless you were a physicist.)
I think you've erected a straw man because you're pissed off about somebody not reading something.
Anyway, this whole line is just starting to annoy me and it's quite depressing to see a high karma user be so obtuse, so let's leave it at that. Arguing on the internet is such a waste of time.
I didn't read it because a. I don't have time to read a 20 page report which I have no skill to assess as correct or otherwise (as I said repeatedly above), and b. my reading it, though it would satisfy you, wouldn't actually get me anywhere, since like I said, repeatedly, I don't actually know whether it's valid or not.
Every criticism stings. They sting me even when I'm confident that I'm right, and even though a Markov 'tptacek could probably get 1000 karma points pretty quickly on HN. Don't confuse the sting of a critical comment with a breach of etiquette.
You probably find it less rude as you clearly have more of an issue with people not reading things than the issue at hand. On that point (unless I'm mistaken of course), let me point out I am happy to read TFA and do so all the time, but a 20 page report which I am simply not going to be able to reasonably assess is not quite the same thing, is it?
If porn has to be banned because it damages kids, why does religion get a free pass?
http://sexualintelligence.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/sex-skept...
If/when it fails he can then point fingers at the ISPs and say that it is their fault it didn't happen, which is probably why he is claiming that he is fighting them from the outset as it fits the later narrative better and means he can scapegoat them when the time comes to minimise the splashback.
The character assassinations and prospective employment undoings we've all read about over the past few years, due to (reasonably) tame publicly available information now may pale in comparison to the damage that could ensue if one were to be labelled a 'voluntary pornographer'.
I fear that what has historically been a 'right of passage' may in future be used to retrospectively punish those that can be traced back to such a compelling opt-in.
For those of us that can remember when porn wasn't a series of 0's and 1's, we took great delight in sneaking a peak at the 'forbidden' shows on pay-TV after Mom and Dad had gone to bed. We willingly exchanged a tasty sandwich during recess for a roughly torn page from the Hustler mag that little Johnny had smuggled from his older brother. And later, (0's and 1's) delighted in seeing that lush SERP, born from a 4 letter search phrase and the final 14.4k nod of KRSSHHHHHHH, Go for it, You're in!"
My right of passage was in the school music room, after hours with Drew Barrymore in 1994 - Lusciously posing for me on the cover December's Penthouse.
If Cameron had his way, that memory may now be a piece of data, just waiting to be exploited by a "hacker" collective who do it "for the lulz", or worse, a 1984 style release of public disclosure outing those who were once impure.
Who knows what may come now. (pun intended)
PM: Shall we have tea first, or shall we look at the list? Have you fetched me the list?
Aide: What list?
PM: You know, the list. The list of people that was created when we made pornography filtering opt-out instead of opt-in, and those who opted in to pornography automatically registered themselves in our database in the act of doing so.
Aide: Oh, yes, sir, I have it right, here. It's this volume right here. It is, ahem, quite long.
PM: How long?
Aide: Quite.
PM: (more sternly) How long?
Aide: It is several thousand pages, sir.
PM: Ah. Ok. How very disappointing. Have you scanned the list?
Aide: I have.
PM: And who, might I ask, is it comprised of? Degenerates, criminals, ne'er-do-wells, perverts, thugs, know-nothings, liberals?
Aide: Sir, well...sir....
PM: Spit it out.
Aide: It seems everyone is on the list, sir.
PM: Everyone?
Aide: Yes. Everyone.
PM: Do you mean everyone in Liverpool?
Aide: I'm afraid I mean everyone in the UK, sir.
PM: That's 60 million people.
Aide: Indeed.
PM: That's nonsense. The Britons are more decent than that! Next you'll be telling me that the Queen herself is on the list!
Aide looks down at his feet.
Aide: Um.
PM: Oh for God's sake, sir. Don't tell me that the Queen is on the list!
Aide: I'm afraid she is.
PM: Wait. So you're telling me that, when I turned pornography filtering on by default nation-wide, that every single natural born citizen of the UK, including the Queen, chose to get to their computers, logged into the filtering system, and opted in to pornography?
Aide: That's what it seems like, sir. Er, well...there is one who is not on the list. UK tennis player and Wimbledon champion Andy Murray is not on the list. He is as pure as new-fallen snow.
PM: National treasure, that chap.
Aide. Indeed. But everyone else is on the list.
PM: Ballocks. Ah well, I tried. It was for the children, you see. Now if you'll excuse me I have some porn I mean, er, ahem, important reading I have to get to, privately.
UK public did not really care about "Tempora" etc. as far as i could see it. (i hope i am wrong) And systems like these are just the front door approval to cover the other systems.
They tried to implement a system like this in Germany and failed miserable but every society acts differently we are still up in arms against the spying programs. But in most countries this topic already vanished from mainstream media.
But even with that there are obvious problems. Ann wants to turn the filter off, but Bob is the account owner, and Ann doesn't want Bob to know. Chas is their 15 year old child and he finds it trivially easy to bypass the filter.
And now Cameron has announced much wider plans, with many more flaws.
I'm annoyed and disturbed that Cameron is mixing in some measures against images of child sexual abuse and measures against normal pornography. They are very different problems[1] and should be dealt with very differently.
It would be great if image search engines could make reporting images to the Internet Watch Foundation[2] easier. That might go someway to appeasing the politicians. I doubt it would get much use. I search for a lot of images, every day, and I go down the long tail of the search, and I have never seen any images of child sexual abuse.
Perhaps search engines could provide some statistics of searches for certain words associated with child sexual abuse. This would have to be done carefully, but I'm not thinking of normal terms that every day people might use (someone doing research, or a child who has been abused) but some very specific terms that only people involved in trading images of child sexual abuse would know. I'm sure they have their own lingo.
[1] I say problem because that's the word they use, not because I think regular pornography is a problem.
[2] IWF are the regulators in the UK for this kind of thing and they coordinate with law enforcement world wide. http://www.iwf.org.uk/
"Anti-porn law" in plain words means this: if you happen to provide an internet connection to some people, you will have to do what we say, or we will bring people with guns to make you to or give up your property (and maybe put you in jail too). We may ask for suggestions in form of "petitions" and "voting", but only within the imposed framework which you are not allowed to bypass. E.g. you are not allowed to vote for not sponsoring this whole mess by not paying your taxes. And even if you can, there's a mob rule: 50%+1 will overrule you.
When Apple censors porn on App Store, no one really cares because Apple does not point guns at people. You may use any other device, any other distribution platform. You can build one on your own. Apple only tries to be nice to people and attract customers voluntarily. This 180º opposite from how government operates. Government does not really try to please people, that's only for decoration. Underlying principle is to force everyone to obey.
Luckily in the US at least, any inbred retard has a gun and can impose themselves on anybody. It's much better.
Same old crap, wrapped in some slightly different packaging.
You could call a referendum on this one and get it through, just by asking a thinly veiled question like: 'Do you think our children should be protected from pornography?'. Just flash a picture of Jimmy Saville visiting a hospital while you ask it.
I feel this country is getting less and less progressive at every turn and u-turn.
Some furore over some phone hacking - remember that? Remember that eavesdropping is a bad, bad thing? Then a few months later, happily talk about eavesdropping/filtering the nation. Sickens me, even more than Mandy's mutterings.
Boxed into a corner - will be wiping ballot paper on arse at next election.
Blocking pornography can only be haphazardly done at the ISP level, because porn sites like most sites do not encrypt traffic by default. (I'm still not sure why this is, but it makes it much easier to find out if people are browsing porn at work.) When you make this decision, some porn sites will use HTTPS and the ISP won't know what content is being transmitted. Are you planning on creating a database of IP addresses which will be censored? What will you do about the likely false positives, or the generous number of IPv6 addresses now available?
Each one of them seems to think that Google is the internet, and that if they don/t index something it doesn't exist. Each one of them also (intentionally?) conflates images of child abuse with images of consenting adults.
They come across as extremely ignorant. Unfortunately this isn't confined to a single party.
question 10 is indeed the most important one, IMHO blocking porn on the internet is not going to stop kids to have access to adult content so it's really pointless unless you want to have a start point for something bigger (censorship)
As little as ten years ago, you'd generally see kids playing outdoors, in the parks and in the streets, often unsupervised. Now, thanks (I can only assume) to paedo-paranoia, parents are unwilling to allow their children to play outdoors at all, let alone unsupervised. I'd consider this to contribute more to the corrosion of childhood than "access to adult content" - especially since they'd likely have less of the latter if they spent more time being kids.
So if Cameron want to stop the "corrosion of childhood", a crackdown on media outlets eliciting emotional responses to boost readership would be a better place to start.
Google and DDG and others seem to be working hard to reduce the amount of pornographic content shown to people doing searches. (A Google image search for [vintage beef] largely returns the YouTuber and Minecraft player, and not vintage naked men. Even without filtering explicit results it's just a few naked men, and nothing "horrible".)
Email is a lot better than it used to be, I think. It would have been nice if the UK had implemented a real anti-spam law when we had the chance. Existing law means it's only illegal to show porn to people under 18 if you do so for the purpose of sexual gratification. (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/12)
He forgot to research about it or something?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/201001/wom...
(I know psychology today has some issues... but the article cite its sources)
Seriously, a pubic morals campaign under the banner of "think of the children" looks antiquated in the 21st century.
And if anything it will make abuse harder to identify and track down - instead of sharing online it will be shady deals out of the boot of a car. The NSA can't intercept that (or can they??).
Only in Great Britain. A stuffy, red faced PM whipping up a righteous moral panic because images of this awfully taboo and horrendous thing called human sexuality are freely available to all.
Is this the beginning of a return to the Victorian era, with it's forceful sexual repression and the insidious forms of abuse that came with it?
Sad. Not the actions of an enlightened, open society.
Cost: zero.
Support from press: great (the Daily Mail has been campaigning on it for months already).
Support from senior citizens (i.e. people who actually get their ass to the ballot box every time): good.
Possibility of blowback in polite society: none (who's ever gonna discuss porn at dinner parties?).
Negatively affected in a direct way: nerds (don't move votes), kids (don't move votes -- in fact, if they protest, senior citizens will support it even more, so it's a win-win).
Economic benefit: likely net positive, since somebody will have to maintain these filters, these captive portals, these opt-in/opt-out forms, right?
What is not to like ? Ah yes, that "open society" thing. You see, this government is run by old money people; they were running the show when "open society" didn't even exist, and will likely keep running it for the foreseeable future. Openness and freedom were a necessary evil to win the Cold War. Now that XX century utopias have been dealt with, we can all go back to the old way of doing things, what what?
The only legitimate complaints are those regarding feasibility, like what counts as porn (do sites that allow it, but are not really about it, count, like reddit? or to a lesser extent, as already mentioned in the article, facebook) but hell, might as well just ask why all politicians make promises they can't keep. The article would have been way more credible if it kept to sane arguments, rather than trying to throw around random criticisms like #2, which makes references to porn that is already illegal, or #3 and #4, which would obviously never come to fruition. As for #10, which is a legitimate question, definitely not, but it's an aid towards it, with a significance in the long term that is yet to be discovered.
The internet is an amazing source of information. But currently it is not safe to leave a child alone on the internet. Is there a way to keep every one happy?
Or install your own filtering software / proxy / whatnot.
(At which point someone normally says "but those don't work" and the sane people go "and you expect a nationwide one to work instead?")
Either use categories or pick your own domains to block. If you want to block IPs, use a firewall or the hosts file.
You'd need to make configuring such things a little easier. Under Vista just trying to conjure up the IPv4 control panel requires an act of magic.
How is it not safe?
And then what? Well hey, we can try to block the encryption and tunneling protocols they use and make those opt-in too.
Inevitably someone who "opts in to use encryption" will have to answer for it in a criminal trial.
Why doesn't the ex politicians explain why they are on consultant payroll salaries from the big banks, why are they going to undemocratic Bilderberg group meetings with no public meeting agenda notes, why is CFR setting the agenda. What is the Trilateral commission planning, why are the members hand picked. Is it democratic? Why are new political leaders flown there on private jets? Why do we have central banks that central plan interest rates and ever increasing debts that make the bank owners richer for every round that goes around?
Why are we ordinary people being mass surveillanced in Stasi 2.0 fashion in the name of terror hunting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_von_der_Leyen#Blocking_...
The result was one of the biggest protests in Germany and a huge anti-censorship petition (signed by about 130,000 people). The law passed legislation nevertheless, but remained in a strange state between legislative and executive, because nobody dared to enforce this crappy law anymore. Some months later, the law was repealed - mostly unnoticed by press:
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number9.7/germany-internet-bloc...
I'm sure it was hyperbole, but how many guns do you really need at the grocery store? If it's not a zombie apocalypse, my vote is on a maximum of one, assuming you are licensed to carry it, of course.
Depends on who has it. Might need two.
* Amazon * YouTube * Reddit * GitHub!
Therefore anyone who sees this as a right-wing thing is clearly wrong as (people are frequently fond of saying) there are actually more Pandas in Scotland than Tory MPs. The Scottish Parliament is currently dominated by a left-wing nationalist party that wants to remove Scotland from the UK.
make it IPv4 only, that would finally speed up IPv6 adoption.
I'd love to be able to say that we'd never see this in the U.S., but there are certain former presidential candidates (mostly Republican) who I can easily imagine trying to implement something similar.
0) How will you do it?
The internet is HUGE. Detecting porn is a non-trivial task, but even if you solve it, you will still need insane infrastructure to crawl the internet and apply your magical algorithm to every image on every website.
1. You draw up a blocklist of offending domain names and IP addresses for child porn websites and get ISPs to block them
2. Force google not to return results for people searching for child porn.
Because politicians and their advisers really do seem to think it's that easy and that if it's not listed on google it's not on the internet. It's stunningly ignorant.
This move is to please middle England since they read all the headlines about '1/3 of kids addicted to porn' and stories about teenage rapists heavily implying porn made them that way.
I wish it was only one side of the house that was into this rubbish, but various Labour front-benchers have come out with very similar nonsense. Also the last labour government seemed to be full of "All Porn is Rape" style feminists * .
( * please note, I consider myself a feminist in as much as believe in absolute equality and free self determination for all humans, I just disagree with some aspects of some feminist philosophy. As do a lot of prominent feminists AFAICT)