No more porn for UK

tbd

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/11/pornography-internet-service-providers

Biggest four UK ISPs switching to 'opt-in' system for pornography are BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin. Customers who do not opt in to adult content will be unable to access pornographic websites.

tfdesign

It's not quite "no more porn". It just gives parents the option to allow these companies to withhold access to what they deem as 'inappropriate'.

You have to ask yourselves when it is 'appropriate' to allow others to think for you?

I am a parent of two young children and I won't be signing up for this. I believe in free speech and no censorship. Let people use reason and make up their own minds!

Gaieus

Also, at least of TalkTalk I know that in order to "collect info" about websites (so that they can "rank" them), they scrape all sites in a way that it can even crawl the site to a halt.

At least the TalkTalk crawler is banned from here. I hope it does not cause problems for visitors from the UK. If so, change ISP!

tfdesign

Indeed!

john.warburton

Strange how people report or interpret things in different ways.

As I understand it, most users of these ISP's will find no difference whatsoever in the service. None.

All that has happened is that the ISP's have made it possible for parents who want to use the facility to implement blocks on content of a certain type.

If you don't want the facility, you just don't use it. That simple.

Gaieus

True John - on a user side. On our side it did actually happen a couple of times that I saw TalkTalk crawler online (a whole bunch of instances at the same time) and until I banned it, the whole forums was extremely slow.

If they want to provide a service, they should not do it on others' expense.

Khai

block porn.

mind if I laugh hysterically at this point? trying to block porn on the internet is like trying to hold back the tide with a teaspoon.

I worked for a time as network administrator at a school.. for every 1 site I'd block to stop the kids seeing it, another 10 sites would open. no exaggeration. and that's just the "kit" sites, not the mainstream sites....

there's only one way to block porn on the net. turn the net off.

IdahoJ

Khai hit it on the head. I too ran networks for years and was in a constant running battle to screen, filter and block not only porn, but a lot of other junk off the 'net. Same for email. No sooner would I get filters in place, then the scammers, spammers and script kiddies would find new ways of getting around them.

The best offense to this kind of junk is to make a personal stance to just stay away from it. That, and keep a good virus and malware scanner running in the background ...

Cheers.

tim

The stupidest part of this is that the filtering systems just about always completely fail to block what they claim to block - and do block things that they shouldn't.

When I installed stuff for my brother-in-laws family I refused to activate any blocking for them after demonstrating that it made it impossible to get information on little things like, oh, breast cancer. Given four nieces in the family - who are all fairly likely to have, y'know, breasts, I though a little exposure to nekkid people having fun was a little less harmful than dying of ignorance. Now it may be true that filtering is a bit smarter these days but… nah, ain't gonna happen.

john.warburton

@idahoj said:

Khai hit it on the head. I too ran networks for years and was in a constant running battle to screen, filter and block not only porn, but a lot of other junk off the 'net. Same for email. No sooner would I get filters in place, then the scammers, spammers and script kiddies would find new ways of getting around them.

The best offense to this kind of junk is to make a personal stance to just stay away from it. That, and keep a good virus and malware scanner running in the background ...

Cheers.

One of my freelance jobs took me away for 3 days every other week to the offices of a major international company.

I used webmail so that I could still retrieve my email. Then the company decided to block access to webmail for security reasons. I'm no hacker, but it took me less than a minute to get round their first blocks (which were based on using a list to block specific sites.)

Then they got clever, and implemented a system that blocked all webmail, regardless of address. It took me just 10 minutes to get round that one.

So yeah, it is probably true that people who really want to defeat internet security can do. That does not make it a worthless exercise to implement systems that help to cut down accidental or casual access to porn sites by your youngsters.

Anssi

The small municipality where I have my summer cottage is a frequent victim of filtering. It's name is "Pornainen" that is a Finnish version of a formerly Swedish name with a meaning that, naturally, has nothing to do with the four first letters.

Anssi