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Comment by timje1 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 ?

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