The PM told the minister to do it. The minister (who's reasonably tech savvy) told the department. The department told him it was a joke - it wouldn't work, and the government would get blamed every time a legitimate site was blocked, or a kid got caught bypassing it.
It's political suicide. They will be blamed every time a teenage boy figures out how to bypass the filter (hint - they all will). They will be blamed every time they block a non-porn site. Tech sites will publish "10 ways to bypass the government's joke of a filter" articles. Current affairs programs will have concerned parents shocked that their unsupervised 14yo boy filled their computer with smut (probably passed around on a USB). The next time an MP or celebrity gets arrested for really shady stuff, they'll say the filter failed. They will look like idiots, and waste millions doing it.
While I have no interest in pornography, this is one step closer to fascism. I worry what will happen next. Journalism filters? Blog filters? International video filters? And if this is the case, then what is the result for neighboring countries? Will they decide to be as totalitarian as well?
I know this is mainly the ISPs' decision, but I can't help but feel that government influence is a large factor in the filters.
A bigger problem is the "he's a terrorist" issue - if there are not severe and well-defined repercussions for using a filter with false positives, and an active watchdog enforcing them, what's to stop, for example, anonnews from suddenly finding itself declared as pornography?
Once one thing is censored, you may as well consider everything else already censored as well not just as a slippery slope but as a fact, because anything else they want censored will just mysteriously get pushed into the same pile.
Absolutely anecdotal evidence but I have noticed that men prefer generally their porn visual while the women in written form. There is reason why the slashfic writers and consumers are mostly female.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is more population exposure(and thus consumption) of novels such as 50 shades vs any yaoi. Why is there more exposure? Because it is delivered what women want(thrilling erotica)Is it just because Yaoi hasn't broken out into mainstream? Perhaps, but there are always erotic novels featuring a handsome men at the checkout counter.
Venomsnake mentioned slash specifically -- yaoi is much more mainstream than slash, especially in Asia.
If you want to talk about more mainstream material, particularly what appears at the checkout counter, one confounding factor is that written material in general is less restricted and stigmatized than visual material. There is no ESRB or movie ratings board for books, and parents who would never allow their children to watch an extremely violent movie or a porno will let them read absolutely anything at all. So written pornography can be put out at the checkout counter in a way that visual pornography can't. Women who want visual porn get it online or on late-night TV.
You can't. You just transfer a blob of random radio noise data to a server in Canada.
I have always thought that every encryption system must have constant transmission up/downstream rates no matter if you are sending or receiving any data. You connect and begin sending 1Mbit every second. And it will just filter the nonsense packets for when you send receive real data.
It doesn't have to be a perfect technical solution. They can outlaw VPNs - they just make it a law. Enforcement will be selective, although I guess for some well-known handshakes they could perform blocking.
If they detect something like what you described, they can flag your account, ask for justification, use as "evidence", etc.
This should article should be taken with a piece of salt. Firstly this was a debate outside of Parliament. Secondly Claire Perry isn't really anyone of note, and certainly doesn't have the power to force this through on her own.
Also I don't think this was in the queen's speech.
There isn't even a draft bill yet. Also depending on the press, this could be silently dropped. The only people that really want this are the daily mail, and the rabbid anti porn lobby.
"Secondly Claire Perry isn't really anyone of note, and certainly doesn't have the power to force this through on her own."
I quote the fifth line of the article: "As ISPs are voluntarily rolling out filtering technology, it will require no new legislation or regulations."
I'm curious how this works politically in the UK. My limited understanding of the issue is pr0n censoring is a purely protestant religion hot button mostly in the US, and the relationship between church and state in the UK is the opposite from the US, where we pretend they're separate and pretend not to let our clerics rule us, however with a nod and wink that our neocon party is pretty much the political wing of our evang church and they're pretty activist, in the UK they've got a state religion where the clerics directly rule them, but they take a much more hands off approach than the USA such that they meet the criteria for figurehead-hood. Or is their particular brand of church/state merger more like liberation theology which would be a bit more leftie explaining why .uk has a civilized healthcare system but the .us does not. All of this speculation could of course be wrong, which is why I ask any .uk folks (or people that understand .uk folks) how this all works politically in the .uk. For example is pr0n opposition a primarily evangelical religious issue like in the states, or how much teeth do your clerics have over your .gov, or is this manufactured news to get on TV as a stunt, or manufactured news to get the neocons in .us excited as the local population yawns/laughs... It sounds from the "no new legislation" line much like if the FCC declared a ruling in the USA, no legislation required or permitted, but that doesn't mean its not going to be vigorously enforced.
It's a think-about-the-children issue rather than a religious issue. They think this will play well with (e.g.) middle class parents. This isn't a particularly hot-button political issue at this time which is why it's voluntary industry self-regulation.
Often in the UK the first pass at regulation will be inviting the main companies in an industry to form a voluntary self-regulation body and come up with their own code of conduct. It's generally in the industry's interest to do this as legislation is certain to be heavier-handed and less flexible; and it's in the government's interests as it needs less time, procedure and public debate. On the other hand, there are fewer opportunities for politicians to grandstand on the issue, and companies don't have to join the voluntary self-regulation body.
Even if industry self-regulation fails, it can take several years before it's clear it's failed, so this is also a way to kick things into the long grass on issues like the under-representation of women on the boards of large corporations.
This issue stems from a campaign by the likes of the daily mail (a right wing by UK standards news paper dedicated to the middle class woman.) With the recent murder trails of child killers, certain charities have tried to link viewing of illegal images and yearning to kill children.
Other interested parties have jumped onboard to manipulate to their own ends. To start with, the Prime minister was very anti opt in filters. However a front page spread from the daily mail was enough to change his view.
As he is seen as weak and uncaring, some grand gesture to "save the children" is what he's looking for. (especially as his recent idea to make political capital from the murder of a serving solder is resulting in needless community unrest) he also doesn't have the time (to schedule the debate) or the political capital to back it. As there will be the inevitable "prove that this will help" argument.
We have bishops in the Lords (the upper house) however they are a tiny percentage of the total membership. The lords is a revising chamber, and ironically is much more progressive than the commons (the lower house where the PM officiates and the main political parties do most of the battling)
Also the Bishops are from the church of england, who by definition are significantly more liberal than any pastor in the US. They also generally do not vote with any political party.
Religion is almost never an issue in UK politics. The only time it really came into the national conscience is when Tony Blair converted to Catholicism. Even then he was treated with a suspicious eye. (mainly because the UK have never forgiven him for the Iraq war.)
to British eyes, having the specific religion of a candidate on TV is very unusual.
To address your first point: the way the state religion works is a few bishops have seats in the House of Lords. That means they have the power to kick back legislation, but nothing else. That doesn't exclude the influence the Church of England can exercise indirectly through lobbying/high profile members issuing statements of course.
The advisor's statement is correct: this filtering does not depend on legislature. The proposal was to compel ISPs to filter porn by default. If all the ISPs sign up there's no need to create laws to force it. I don't get the impression that this legislation is religiously motivated beyond the puritanical underpinnings of the British public; it's based on "think of the children" rhetoric alone.
"it's based on "think of the children" rhetoric alone."
If I'm reading you right, the .uk cultural outlook is something like pr0n jumps off the screen and gives the kids cooties, so we have to block it like a vaccine? Kind of like how some of our own .us leftward people blame inanimate guns solely for violence, therefore ban the gun... Or perhaps more of a "they'll end up addicts unless we stop them" type thing?
Culturally wrt to pr0n, waaaaay too many "journalist" stories about the self proclaimed guardians of our morality getting busted while combining pr0n with "think of the children" (creepily, I mean it literally) so its awkward enough to totally avoid talking about. Its seen as hyper politicized in that the neocons are simultaneously about 95% of the people both getting busted for the hard core stuff while also being the ones working up an absolute froth about banning the relatively mild harmless stuff. So its very difficult to provide a "balanced news report" if one side makes fools of themselves all the time and the other just sits back and points and laughs.
We (as in .us) generally mostly do the anti-pr0n thing via "Jesus personally told me to force you at the point of a gun to do this because I will judge you, not God, therefore no pixs showing bare ankles" type of thinking, or something like that. There's more than a little hint of "no one believes this, but we're all going to agree to say we do" going thru the motions. I'm not sure how any of that is Christian as I understand it, but it doesn't bother them, so it doesn't bother me, as long as they leave me alone, which they see as a holy obligation not to do, so I guess it does bother me after all... If this doesn't make any sense to people outside the .us, don't feel bad, it doesn't make any sense to us mere consumers either (we used to be citizens, with rights, but now we're just consumers)
When I was a kid (a while ago) there was some "journalist" coverage given to feminist opposition to pr0n WRT exploitation / degrading or whatever, but thats pretty much disappeared from media thus disappeared from consciousness in the .us. We're lucky to spin up any agitprop over actual violent sexual assaults much less merely a picture or two. It was sort of the refer madness approach to anti-pr0n and it backfired and swung the opposite way, I think. Does the .uk have much of that flavor of opposition?
I'm not sure I can really make an appropriate generalisation of the broad attitude towards it. I can, however, cherry pick Diane Abbot's views because she's often called upon for soundbites and political debates. As a consequence, my comment is a subset of reality.
In this case the fears stem from the perception that children viewing porn and sexualised content is damaging. In Diane Abbot's case [1] the concern is that sexualised environments might construct inaccurate attitudes towards women/sex in children.
I suppose that falls in the first and final scenarios you gave.
That's an interesting cultural observation because in the .us we have about the same attitude toward nudity, but not toward actually doing it. For example there was a huge outcry about a half time entertainment show during a major sporting event featuring a topless woman (although she wasn't having sex or anything like that, just singing and dancing). But we have plenty of TV drama shows and all that which seem to revolve primarily about having sex, and they show almost everything except the fun parts (as mentioned above) in action and that's considered great family viewing.
So in summary maybe the cultural difference is in the .us we don't ban the action but try to ban the object, but in the .uk its the opposite and they try to ban the action. That probably has some implications WRT dealing with internet censorship by avoiding the whole topic, or maybe why it seems to be hard to avoid offending someone somehow on one side of the pond or the other.
If the filtering applied by mobile phone operators is anything to go by, this will be completely obtrusive. For example, Reddit appears to be filtered by default by Vodafone. Soon it'll be time to vote with your feet, or setup that VPN virtual host.
Yes, I do think it's wrong. I disagree with filtering in the first place, but also I'm on a contract which if I were a child I couldn't have legally signed.
It's certainly possible to opt out but only by providing ANOTHER set of personal information (a credit card number) which there's no good reason for them to have. More tracking possibilities, more data...
This is a good thing. Filtering of porn, malware and other undesirable content _if that's what the person paying the bill wants_ is a good thing. Asking people to install protection on every device in the home is unrealistic so having the ISP providing an on-network solution is excellent.
Of course, this is only true if the service is available on many networks and opt-in. Otherwise it becomes censorship by stealth which is hopefully not where this is going.
The existing filtering reported to apply to 95% of British households [1] is reportedly implemented as IP-level routing of traffic through a transparent proxy. This is how they were able to censor only specific images on Wikipedia without blocking Wikipedia entirely.
A VPN would be a superior way of bypassing the filter - assuming teenagers too young to have a credit card can figure out how to pay for a VPN.
> A VPN would be a superior way of bypassing the filter - assuming teenagers too young to have a credit card can figure out how to pay for a VPN.
This comment makes me very sad. It was a huge upgrade to my quality of life when I got a debit card and was able to buy things over the internet. We almost went to a system of paying cash for prepaid credit cards, but somehow prepaid cards are generally not usable over the internet, which is a damn shame for children who have nothing but cash. I don't think the ability to attribute purchases is worth the (yes, minor in the grand scheme of things) immiseration of everyone too young to have a bank account.
Off topic, but I just want to say that I love HN - anywhere else, and you'd be getting a bunch of crude comments about this. Glad that we're sticking to the technological and censorship aspects :)
The PM told the minister to do it. The minister (who's reasonably tech savvy) told the department. The department told him it was a joke - it wouldn't work, and the government would get blamed every time a legitimate site was blocked, or a kid got caught bypassing it.
It's political suicide. They will be blamed every time a teenage boy figures out how to bypass the filter (hint - they all will). They will be blamed every time they block a non-porn site. Tech sites will publish "10 ways to bypass the government's joke of a filter" articles. Current affairs programs will have concerned parents shocked that their unsupervised 14yo boy filled their computer with smut (probably passed around on a USB). The next time an MP or celebrity gets arrested for really shady stuff, they'll say the filter failed. They will look like idiots, and waste millions doing it.