> 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.
> > 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:
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".
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.
> 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].
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.
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?
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
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.
> > 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"?
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> 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,
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...".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
`The government today has made a significant step forward in preventing rapists using rape pornography to legitimise and strategise their crimes and, more broadly, in challenging the eroticisation of violence against women and girls`
What? In what world would 90% of ANY porn be legitimate?! I want rapists using strategies found in the fake garbage you can find online, at least then they will be less effective than they could be.
`And, in a really big step forward, all the ISPs have rewired their technology so that once your filters are installed, they will cover any device connected to your home internet account. No more hassle of downloading filters for every device, just one-click protection. One click to protect your whole home and keep your children safe.`
That's fucking censorship and I THOUGHT WE ALL AGREED THAT IS A SIGN OF FASCISM. Seriously, how many bloody times can someone use `FOR THE CHILDREN` as an a valid excuse? I hope this fellow gets put out of office with no pension. He is committing widespread censorship of an entire nation. And the people appreciate that. People also appreciated that Hitler brought Austria and Germany together in anschluss as well as the fact that he returned them from 40% unemployment. Funny how short sighted the people are.
`You're the people who have worked out how to map almost every inch of the Earth from space; who have developed algorithms that make sense of vast quantities of information. Set your greatest brains to work on this. You are not separate from our society, you are part of our society, and you must play a responsible role in it`
I see, you want the people who have been working for their entire lives to better the human race to take their valued time and put that towards your endeavors of censoring anything that could potentially offend the parents of children? I'm sorry, you are what's wrong with the world.
I say we should build systems designed specifically to undermine these authoritarian measures.
In one way we got what we asked for. Whenever the argument was made that Google, British Telecom, et al, had a "moral duty" to censor pornography, we were able to simply say that this was an empty argument and that the only duty the companies had was to follow the law of the land.
Now, by changing the law, the companies have a legal duty.
That is what I and others have wanted, censorship is something we are able to attack through established channels. The politicians are of the view that this wins votes, now we find out whether they are right or wrong.
That's fucking censorship and I THOUGHT WE ALL AGREED THAT IS A SIGN OF FASCISM
In America, all this type of stuff was completely illegal until relatively recent decades (yes I know that the internet did not exist yet but what difference does that make?). Showing "pink shots" in a magazine was completely illegal until 1978 (See Larry Flynt).
Wow, what a bunch of Fascists we had running the country for the first couple of centuries. This country had no freedom at all man...
He is committing widespread censorship of an entire nation.
Is optional censorship really censorship? I know what you will say in response though - it is only optional for now right?
>I know what you will say in response though - it is only optional for now right?
No! It's de facto censorship. As the game goes the "smart" choice will become agreeing to the censorship while keeping a vpn or something to route about it for fear of having your record requested during divorce proceedings or some thing like that. Maybe for fear the list would be leaked . It wouldn't look good for a teacher to be on the wrong list.
Making it illegal would be one thing but it sounds like this would damage the internet itself in the UK.
I doubt the Tories have a clean house in this regard. Every time some politician or other 'moral leader' starts pontificating about moral panic, I get suspicious that they're just trying to ban their vice. Clearly if they're so vocally opposed to it, they mustn't be partaking, right?
Glenn Loury and cocaine.
Mark Foley and the exploitation of children.
Eliot Spitzer and prostitution.
John Ensign and 'family values'.
Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, countless others and homosexuality.
The Conservative Party and Back to Basics.
A 2011 survey found that 80% of 18-24 males in the UK had watched porn online[1]. I'm comfortable assuming that a significant percentage of Tories have or do watch it as well.
Spitzer was a dem who became a target of banks and credit institutions afraid of his cracking down on their anti-consumer business practices. He was Elizabeth Warren before Elizabeth Warren, and deserves more respect than to be pigeonholed as a politician with his pigeon in a hole.
From Wikipedia: "Spitzer used this authority in his civil actions against corporations and criminal prosecutions against their officers." Damn shame.
Spitzer prosecuted people for both prostitution and the same kind of 'structuring' of large cash transactions that he himself did. He deserves his place on the above 'moral crusaders who turned out to be hypocrites' list, even if you happen to like some of his other crusades.
I worked for a company that Spitzer went after while he was attorney general, and he seemed more like he was running a political campaign than trying to uphold the law. He very effectively spread FUD through a willing media in order to coerce a settlement (and headlines). To this day, people in my home state are convinced that company did all sorts of things that they were never actually accused of. He was no prince.
Hypocrisy isn't a partisan issue. Sure, I feel some schadenfreude when the other guy screws up, but it's intellectually dishonest to give someone a free pass because you share their politics.
Spitzer was going after human trafficking and prostitution as AG and Governor while he was committing Mann Act Violations on the side. I want the folks on 'my team' to have integrity so their agendas don't get derailed.
It's amazing how politicians keep conflating these 4 things:
(a) Voluntary acts between adults
(b) Fantasy
(c) Preventing the use of porn by adolescents
(d) Protecting children (and others) from horrific crimes
In my view, the reason for that "mix up" is simply old fashioned prudery and religious fanaticism. (d) is the only thing that governments should care about.
Meh, they don't confuse these things. I suppose this is only a bullshit proposal to distract from something else. Online spying on their citizens, crappy economy or whatever.
For as long as there's politicians "protect the children" will always be B.S.. As if Cameron cared..
Are there any real studies on the "corrosive influence" of porn on children? I'm pretty sure every young teen boy has seen porn these days. The only actual studies I'm aware of say that porn reduces actually violent sex crimes. It acts as a substitute.
> In one study surveying 471 Dutch teens ages 13 to 18, the researchers found that the more often young people sought out online porn, the more likely they were to have a "recreational" attitude toward sex--specifically, to view sex as a purely physical function like eating or drinking.
> [T]he team also found a relationship between porn use and the feeling that it wasn't necessary to have affection for people to have sex with them.
However,
> [R]esearchers can't say for sure whether access to Internet porn causes certain attitudes and behaviors.
Also, I know it's outside the scope of this research, but it's yet to be demonstrated that a recreational attitude toward sex leads to lower well-being.
It's extremely difficult to quantify negative impacts or get people to accurately recall what they may or may not have seen. It's almost as difficult to approve studies on children.
Citation, please? Everything I've seen suggests that porn is pretty socially debilitating, especially for the current generation which has grown up with almost ubiquitous access to it (see for example http://www.internetsafety101.org/upload/file/Social%20Costs%...). And that's not even the really nasty stuff.
The report you linked to was produced by the Hoover Institution and the Witherspoon Institute. Do you have any reports that weren't produced by gay-hating Christianist organizations? Thanks.
Considering my mobile ISP (GiffGaff) thinks that the ThinkPad wiki is pornographic, I genuinely can say all this is going to do is break the internet.
The last thing we need is a broken Internet here. The economy is fucked enough already.
Add to that the whole is censorship right debate (it's not unless it's opt-in), the pre-crime list this generates and we're right into blatant fascism.
Where do we even start at fixing all this? I think we're helpless.
You can turn off the mobile filtering. IIRC you have to give them some form of ID that demonstrates that you're over 18. My memory says driving license number, but it could be wrong.
Yes, the mobile filtering in the UK is completely useless and blocks many, many sites that having nothing whatsoever to do with porn in any form, and probably fails to block the majority of the porn on the internet but that's where we are.
> The possession of "extreme pornography", which includes scenes of simulated rape, is to be outlawed.
Certain scenes in Game of Thrones might trip this rule. More interestingly, the show is partly filmed in the UK.
I guess Martin, Benioff, and Weiss are all a bunch of criminals. But all those scenes of people stabbing, slashing, and killing each other with all kinds of blades are not a major THREAT TO CHILDREN in a country with a knife-crime problem.
In Russia we have a special commission that bans every internet page containing anything relevant to suicide and drugs. For example, famous australian ad "Dumb ways to die" is banned in Russia. Yeah, seriously, these guys have zero sense of humor. Apparently, it's to protect children from killing themselves.
Suicide related materials actually makes some sense, depending on how extreme the censorship is. There's research (I don't have the reference handy, but it's described in Cialdini's "Influence") that estimates that in the US, each well published suicide results in an additional 48 deaths through suicides and murder-suicides, as people who are suicidal at the time appears to be more likely to go through with it in those conditions.
So if you are to censor something, suicide descriptions would be far more morally defensible to censor than porn, as to my knowledge there's little to no evidence that increased access to porn leads to increases in harm to other people.
I have a young daughter and I live in the UK. I think this legislation is bloody stupid.
Yes, some people might reasonably not want their children to run across pornographic material on the internet. Here are some other things some people might reasonably not want their children to run across on the internet: Anti-religious material. Religious material. Depictions of violence. Any mention of prejudice against racial minorities, women, etc. Websites offering do-my-homework-for-me services. News about upsetting things like tens of thousands of children starving to death every day in poor parts of Africa.
I hope it's clear that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for all those things. I think it's clear, in fact, that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for any of those things.
Yes, I hope my daughter will learn about sex in better ways than by stumbling across porn on the internet. And I hope she'll learn about those other things in better ways than by stumbling across them on the internet, too. It is not the government's, or my ISP's, job to make that happen by making things harder to find online; it probably won't work, and it will probably break other things (as such filters always have in the past), and it's the wrong way to solve the "problem" anyway.
And I also hope that if in the fullness of time our daughter wants to find porn on the internet, she will be able to, and she won't be (or feel) obliged to disclose the fact to her parents, and doing so without telling us won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
Having kids is no excuse to let your brain check out when someone tells you they're in vague, amorphous danger. When those kids grow up, they'll be inheriting a world where civil liberties can be (and have been) eroded by cynical lawmakers playing on their parents' fears of children seeing things that they consider inappropriate.
Having NO kids puts you in a better position to judge, because you are not emotionally attached. You should however impact the effect things have on your children.
And the only way to do that is to expose them to it ... You are not a bad parent are you?(Fallacy: Attacking the man).
The only ones remotely able to say 'think of the kids' are shrink that deals with children with issues/research.
I have kids, and I was a kid. My parents let me run quite unchecked, and at 12, a friend and I ran a BBS. This helped me learn about interactions and technology.
My daughters, since they've been a couple years old, have had unrestricted access to the Internet via tablets and laptops. Quite frankly, I'm far more worried about the impact of shitty cartoons and crap Disney productions than I am them watching porn. Indeed, if I discovered my daughters were viewing such materials, I'd take it as an opportunity to discuss and find out what's going on.
Hi, kid here. A world where I don't worry about the swat busting into my house at 3AM to arrest me for my playboy collection[0] is preferable to the one where I see pop up ads with double penetration in them when I'm 8. (Which I did, I'm fine.)
[0]: Or the government censors whatever they like with their filtering infrastructure.
I fear a world where my children cannot express themselves freely FAR more I do a world where I have to explain to my children that some people are just kind of weird...
I find it really weird that this is so often an argument. If anything, not having kids and hence not having a vested interest in the matter makes a person's opinion more objective, not less.
Readit News
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.
> 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:
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".
Deleted Comment
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
- 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.
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?
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...
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.
Why would that be Britain's problem ?
> 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"?
Still, it's a handy way to tar anyone complaining about online survellience as a rape-loving pedophile.
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.
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?
[1] http://health.india.com/diseases-conditions/international-wo...
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.
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.
It's not widely advertised because they'd like to claim such a thing is impossible, to avoid the music industry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...
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.
Can we expect films such as "I Spit On Your Grave" and "Once Upon a Time in America" to become illegal also?
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".
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.
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.
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,
Perhaps they could do that with blue movies :)
"If you've been fucked in the eyesocket"...
Dead Comment
[1]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/australian_por...
Edit: You're free to cite examples of children who "aren't that lucky" and had their upbringing maliciously altered by viewing internet pornography.
What? In what world would 90% of ANY porn be legitimate?! I want rapists using strategies found in the fake garbage you can find online, at least then they will be less effective than they could be.
`And, in a really big step forward, all the ISPs have rewired their technology so that once your filters are installed, they will cover any device connected to your home internet account. No more hassle of downloading filters for every device, just one-click protection. One click to protect your whole home and keep your children safe.`
That's fucking censorship and I THOUGHT WE ALL AGREED THAT IS A SIGN OF FASCISM. Seriously, how many bloody times can someone use `FOR THE CHILDREN` as an a valid excuse? I hope this fellow gets put out of office with no pension. He is committing widespread censorship of an entire nation. And the people appreciate that. People also appreciated that Hitler brought Austria and Germany together in anschluss as well as the fact that he returned them from 40% unemployment. Funny how short sighted the people are.
`You're the people who have worked out how to map almost every inch of the Earth from space; who have developed algorithms that make sense of vast quantities of information. Set your greatest brains to work on this. You are not separate from our society, you are part of our society, and you must play a responsible role in it`
I see, you want the people who have been working for their entire lives to better the human race to take their valued time and put that towards your endeavors of censoring anything that could potentially offend the parents of children? I'm sorry, you are what's wrong with the world.
I say we should build systems designed specifically to undermine these authoritarian measures.
Now, by changing the law, the companies have a legal duty.
That is what I and others have wanted, censorship is something we are able to attack through established channels. The politicians are of the view that this wins votes, now we find out whether they are right or wrong.
In America, all this type of stuff was completely illegal until relatively recent decades (yes I know that the internet did not exist yet but what difference does that make?). Showing "pink shots" in a magazine was completely illegal until 1978 (See Larry Flynt).
Wow, what a bunch of Fascists we had running the country for the first couple of centuries. This country had no freedom at all man...
He is committing widespread censorship of an entire nation.
Is optional censorship really censorship? I know what you will say in response though - it is only optional for now right?
No! It's de facto censorship. As the game goes the "smart" choice will become agreeing to the censorship while keeping a vpn or something to route about it for fear of having your record requested during divorce proceedings or some thing like that. Maybe for fear the list would be leaked . It wouldn't look good for a teacher to be on the wrong list.
Making it illegal would be one thing but it sounds like this would damage the internet itself in the UK.
I doubt the Tories have a clean house in this regard. Every time some politician or other 'moral leader' starts pontificating about moral panic, I get suspicious that they're just trying to ban their vice. Clearly if they're so vocally opposed to it, they mustn't be partaking, right?
The list of hypocrites goes on and on and on.[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/12918531
From Wikipedia: "Spitzer used this authority in his civil actions against corporations and criminal prosecutions against their officers." Damn shame.
Spitzer was going after human trafficking and prostitution as AG and Governor while he was committing Mann Act Violations on the side. I want the folks on 'my team' to have integrity so their agendas don't get derailed.
After all, that's what they want for us.
(a) Voluntary acts between adults
(b) Fantasy
(c) Preventing the use of porn by adolescents
(d) Protecting children (and others) from horrific crimes
In my view, the reason for that "mix up" is simply old fashioned prudery and religious fanaticism. (d) is the only thing that governments should care about.
For as long as there's politicians "protect the children" will always be B.S.. As if Cameron cared..
> [T]he team also found a relationship between porn use and the feeling that it wasn't necessary to have affection for people to have sex with them.
However,
> [R]esearchers can't say for sure whether access to Internet porn causes certain attitudes and behaviors.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov07/webporn.aspx
This study:
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2005.8.473
Showed a correlation between children who seek out porn on the internet and delinquency. However, there's no indication of causation.
> For most people, pornography use has no negative effects—and it may even deter sexual violence
The last thing we need is a broken Internet here. The economy is fucked enough already.
Add to that the whole is censorship right debate (it's not unless it's opt-in), the pre-crime list this generates and we're right into blatant fascism.
Where do we even start at fixing all this? I think we're helpless.
Yes, the mobile filtering in the UK is completely useless and blocks many, many sites that having nothing whatsoever to do with porn in any form, and probably fails to block the majority of the porn on the internet but that's where we are.
It didn't however happen for nearly a month after I made the selection so perhaps I'm now logged as a potential sex offender somewhere...
Certain scenes in Game of Thrones might trip this rule. More interestingly, the show is partly filmed in the UK.
I guess Martin, Benioff, and Weiss are all a bunch of criminals. But all those scenes of people stabbing, slashing, and killing each other with all kinds of blades are not a major THREAT TO CHILDREN in a country with a knife-crime problem.
can't believe that people still fall for this shtick
So if you are to censor something, suicide descriptions would be far more morally defensible to censor than porn, as to my knowledge there's little to no evidence that increased access to porn leads to increases in harm to other people.
Yes, some people might reasonably not want their children to run across pornographic material on the internet. Here are some other things some people might reasonably not want their children to run across on the internet: Anti-religious material. Religious material. Depictions of violence. Any mention of prejudice against racial minorities, women, etc. Websites offering do-my-homework-for-me services. News about upsetting things like tens of thousands of children starving to death every day in poor parts of Africa.
I hope it's clear that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for all those things. I think it's clear, in fact, that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for any of those things.
Yes, I hope my daughter will learn about sex in better ways than by stumbling across porn on the internet. And I hope she'll learn about those other things in better ways than by stumbling across them on the internet, too. It is not the government's, or my ISP's, job to make that happen by making things harder to find online; it probably won't work, and it will probably break other things (as such filters always have in the past), and it's the wrong way to solve the "problem" anyway.
And I also hope that if in the fullness of time our daughter wants to find porn on the internet, she will be able to, and she won't be (or feel) obliged to disclose the fact to her parents, and doing so without telling us won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
Having NO kids puts you in a better position to judge, because you are not emotionally attached. You should however impact the effect things have on your children.
And the only way to do that is to expose them to it ... You are not a bad parent are you?(Fallacy: Attacking the man).
The only ones remotely able to say 'think of the kids' are shrink that deals with children with issues/research.
My daughters, since they've been a couple years old, have had unrestricted access to the Internet via tablets and laptops. Quite frankly, I'm far more worried about the impact of shitty cartoons and crap Disney productions than I am them watching porn. Indeed, if I discovered my daughters were viewing such materials, I'd take it as an opportunity to discuss and find out what's going on.
[0]: Or the government censors whatever they like with their filtering infrastructure.
I fear a world where my children cannot express themselves freely FAR more I do a world where I have to explain to my children that some people are just kind of weird...
Censorship of the internet is NOT ok.