The Daily Mail Wants to Ban Porn

[0000]

Tiggsy said:

Because a TV is more accessible to a young child than a laptop.

Not in my experience.

[Starfighter]

I've just been arsing around with the Kaspersky filters on my PC - The wife is complaning that Mumsnet is blocked, Porn and Erotic material apparently. Blatant sexism, bhing and the mental I can understand but porn....?

[DanB7290]

Starfighter said:

I've just been arsing around with the Kaspersky filters on my PC - The wife is complaning that Mumsnet is blocked, Porn and Erotic material apparently. Blatant sexism, bhing and the mental I can understand but porn....?

This is perhaps the main problem, most filters I've experienced also block non pornographic stuff. I remember as a young lad, when we first got the internet (AOL, and you had to log in through AOL's own browser), my dad set accounts up for all 4 of us, and you could put different age ratings on there, which blocked content accordingly, if you didn't put an age rating on there, it was uncensored. Now, my dad put the 13-17 filter on my account, which worked well in blocking porn, but it would also block google, and many GCSE revision websites because the biology pages had pictures of naked people. No commercial filter seems to be able to ONLY block porn, it ends up blocking stuff that may not be unsuitable, but 'computer says no'. The only effective filters I've ever came across were at high school, and I believe they were custom jobbies, but even then there was the odd site which slipped through the net, just as my mate Tom found out when he went to the toilet in an ICT lesson, we'd have been about 14-15, came back and came out of his screensaver to see a guy taking it up the Oxo Tower from another chap. And before anyone asks, no, he has not grown up since then thinking that that is how it's done, he doesn't go round bumming every guy he meets, he isn't a socially awkward weirdo or a psychopath. Yeah, he got the piss taken out of him for a couple of days, but everyone forgot by the following week (partly due to a guy bonking his girlfriend against the rugby posts; and no, before the Daily Mail lot start howling, that had absolutely nothing to do with internet porn, that was because I went to a rather scummy school (we were actually in the news for giving out too many morning after pills, again nowt to do with porn or anything like that, we were just full of chavs and horny little fkers (not the best wording!)))

[remedy]

I understand and agree with Tiggsy's point of view. It is worrying that an early teen can search specifically for the type of porn even a dark-alley, secret entry sex shop owner of old would blink twice at (before putting it under the counter). Whether this is for a laugh with a group of mates or on their own out of curiosity it can, and will, change the view of sex and what is acceptable.

However, in terms of something that works, why not just demand that all porn sites go to .xxx or a similar domain-identifier?
This is much, much simpler to block and as porn sites (at least, I'd like to believe) aren't out specifically to warp young minds, they should be happy to comply.

[mrmr96]

AndrewW-G said:

Want to prevent your children looking at porn . . . . http://www.opendns.com/home-solutions/parental-con...

Job jobbed

And... it's FREE!

[otolith]

remedy said:

However, in terms of something that works, why not just demand that all porn sites go to .xxx or a similar domain-identifier?

Under what authority will you enforce it? Who will decide whether a given site is pornographic, by whose standards? Holland's? Iran's? The problems cited above with filtering mechanisms - those are intrinsic to the problem.

Personally, I do not want the government to establish the principle that it is entitled to censor our Internet access "for our own good". Thin end of the wedge using "think of the children" is a classic mechanism for state control freakery.