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Comment by Pitarou | Hacker News Reader

Oh for heaven's sake.

Isn't it enough just to install a blacklist system that blocks, say, the top 99% of porn sites? No. Apparently not. Some wiseguy with a smooth line in "meeting legal obligations" sold the ISPs an "intelligent" porn blocker, with all-too-predictable consequences.

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From the article seems like each ISP is rolling their own:

"TalkTalk's filter is endorsed by Mr Cameron but it failed to block 7% of the 68 pornographic websites tested by Newsnight."

"Sky's filter fared much better, blocking 99% of sites, but it did block six porn-addiction sites."

Anyone else still waiting for someone to jump out of the bushes and "April fools!" this whole thing away?

One of the "porn" sites Newsnight tested as Reddit.

There is a lot of porn available on Reddit.

The filter is a stupid idea. But including Reddit on an opt-out porn filter is reasonable.

So you need to block Reddit, imgur and tumblr... Oh and twitter, there's a lot of porn posted on there. There's a lot of porn on wikipedia too, including stuff that'd be illegal in most jurisdictions. Better block that. 4chan as well, most discussion boards. Most forums. What are we left with? disney.com?

There were many people who classified "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" as porn.

Apropos of nothing much, in the book it's based on, Jessica Rabbit is a porn star.

groups.google.com has tons of porn.

groups.yahoo.com...

I think that blocking children from going on all adult or loosely moderated sites is the only logical conclusion here, calling it a porn filter is dishonest.

The filter blocks the content for everybody who shares the internet connection.

That's the beauty of it - anyone who insists on opting in to this filter for their family will effectively cut themselves off from most of the internet.

Meanwhile their kid will get a Pay as you go SIM and "borrow" their parents credit card for five minutes to disable the content filter (just does a 1 pound charge and reverses it for most companies, so chances are they'd not notice) and get access to whatever they want.

The proponents of this filter are computer illiterate 50+ year old people, the conservative base. These are exactly the people that will not know about switching the filter off. Their children will get around the filters, but these dust-covered voters will believe that the internet is a little bit more cleaned up, and a lot less useful, than it really is. If you block porn you need to block user generated content, which excludes the vast majority of blogging and web 2.0 platforms.

Self-imposed irrelevancy for the computer illiterate. We'll block ourselves from being able to access these new scary things, and then pretend like we've solved a problem.

I think that not censoring is the only logical conclusion here. The government isn't your kids' parents. Keep them off the internet if you've got a problem with it, or supervise them.

Or teach them to use their own heads and respect the fact that children are mostly just small adults? Nah, who has time for that... Besides we really like the idea that children are somehow innocent and pure, the same way we dress up dogs and cats in cute outfits for our own amusement...

What age did you guys actively start searching out pornographic content? I'd bet for a big portion of the male population it is somewhere between 12-14.

I admit things have changed considerably from my days of watching late night tv in the hope of catching something naughty. I still think most young adults will self regulate their viewing habits.

If anything I think we should have introduced a voluntary meta tag for pornographic content. Perhaps even having ratings for different categories of porn.

Bringbacktheporn.co.uk ?

All of reddit? There is also a lot of educational stuff on there. If the filter works by blocking entire domains then this is clearly unworkable when you consider how much of the internet's content is hosted on a small number of sites.

> There is also a lot of educational stuff on there.

Not if you define "lot" by "proportion of the whole". The ratio of posts or megabytes of educational:not-educational is going to disappoint many people.

Obviously the flaw there is suggesting that not-educational is worthy of blocking. The ratio of not-educational-but-not-offensive:porn/hate-speech/trolling/other-filter-fodder is much better. I guess.

The same is really true for just about any website with primarily user submitted content. Sites like reddit/youtube/blogger have very diverse content so you have to make a massive portion of the internet inaccessible to anybody who uses the connection. If you don't want the porn you can't have /r/askscience or /r/learnprogramming either. This will be further exacerbated if more sites start switching to full HTTPS.

Google can also be used to find porn (removing the safe-search is trivial). Google also caches webpages, which could be used to circumvent the filtering. (I just tried this - yes, they index porn pages as well)

How is this magic bullet meant to stop kids looking at porn through things like Google Cache, Wayback machine, etc?

How about imgur. There is lots of porn there, but blocking it that does not make sense, I am just using it for sharing screenshots.

I stand corrected.

I'm pretty sure there are plenty of sane persons in the UK who are holding out hope that the entire Cameron administration is a giant "April fools" joke.

This underestimates the preposterous volume of porn - and the agility of site owners. 1% is still "enough porn" by any definition.

That's what makes this such a failure: not only does it stop legit material like sex-education and rape counselling sites, it also doesn't prevent access to porn. The only box that is successfully ticked is "something must be done".

Nothing stops access to porn. I grew up in Norway, which until recently did not allow sales of anything but soft core porn. Yet illegally imported German hardcore porn magazines that someone had thrown in the garbage circulated through my primary school class (mostly to the sound of "ewwww", before being thrown away again), and a few years later BBS's ensured that once we were old enough to not find it as disgusting, any of us who cared had trivially easy access (if willing to wait for the grainy GIFs to download with 2400 bps modems).

It does however give those in a moral panic a way of lulling themselves into the belief that something is being done.

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