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| British Government Abolishes Freedom of Speech |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2011-10-11 15:22:36 |
| "BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin will be asked to offer customers the option to block adult content during subscription According to new measures to be announced by Prime Minister David Cameron, online pornography watchers will have to place a special request with their Internet Service providers (ISPs) to watch pornographic or sexualised content online. The prime minister is holding a summit at No.10 today with 30 media and retail executives, including broadcasters, magazine editors, trade bodies and advertisers, said the Daily Mail. Cameron is expected to announce the crackdown after Mothers Union charity chief executive Reg Bailey submitted a report on the matter after six months of study." The fact that this can happen in Great Britain just goes to show how brittle concepts like freedom of speech really are. Where people in the Arab world fight for the kinds of freedom we have, we in the west just hand them over to extremists. Un-frakking-believable. Any British folk in here? How on earth did you guys let this happen? |
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| RE: Question |
| By Kivada on 2011-10-11 17:10:50 |
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And having kids matters how? You should never give up everyone's freedom just because of your own misguided prudishness and laziness. Especially since it's so easy to control what your kids can access online with such an incredibly small amount of effort. Linux + Firefox + not giving them the root pass or the Firefox pass + any of the multitudes of porn blacklists online loaded into the router blacklist and you're done. Though you have to be careful with your blacklists since many also like to put non right ring news sites and blogs in the list. |
 - Score: 4 |
| RE[2]: Question |
| By MacTO on 2011-10-11 17:39:32 |
|
Is this going to cover cellular Internet access? As far as I know, client side blocks are usually impossible there. And if you think that circumventing the ISP's filters makes them a joke, then most client side filters must have you laughing on the floor. After all, why circumvent it when you can just turn it off? And what about privacy issues related to third party client side filters? Some of them literally pipe every request you make to a third party server. So not only will your ISP know every site you visit (which they will know anyway), but a third party. Yes, you can avoid that by choosing filters carefully -- but how many do. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Question |
| By MacTO on 2011-10-11 18:19:01 |
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Giving up freedom? You are free to ask to have the filter disabled (or enabled, depending upon who you believe). It is also incredibly less restrictive than broadcast standards were in the past and less restrictive than they remain today. There was a time when certain types programs weren't produced, then a time when you had to watch certain types of programs at certain time, and even today we have things like ratings and the v-chip. All they are doing is saying that you have the option to block sexually explicit material at the ISP level if you want to protect your children or protect yourself. If you think that's stripping people of freedom, you clearly haven't been reading real newspapers and history books. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: Question |
| By Kivada on 2011-10-11 19:14:51 |
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Simple, you shouldn't have to ask big brother if you can have access. Further more, who's to say what counts as porn and what counts as art? Whats to stop them from expanding upon it? Will it be admissible in court that you wanted access to porn and are thus a sexual deviant in any case you end up in that has anything to do with sex? It's just like all of the CCTV cams there, they've done nothing but make everyone guilty enough to be on near constant surveillance whenever they're outside their home, this just adds more to what they can keep tas on you for. |
| - Score: 4 |
| Freedom of speech? |
| By Berend de Boer on 2011-10-11 19:20:34 |
| The bigger question is: how did society degenerate that it can call watching porn a freedom of speech issue. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: Question |
| By Kivada on 2011-10-11 19:23:25 |
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Why does a kid need a cell phone in the first place, let alone one that does more then you know, make phone calls? You nanny staters are all the same, "common sense is too hard for me! Please watch my kids for me because I can't handle even the most basic concepts of keeping after my kids let alone be able to talk with them about anything that makes me feel icky!" I swear you guys are nearly a justification for sterilization since you clearly can't handle kids. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Freedom of speech? |
| By Kivada on 2011-10-11 19:25:48 |
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> The bigger question is: how did society degenerate that it can call watching porn a freedom of speech issue. Obvious troll is obvious... |
| - Score: 2 |
| Say what? |
| By fretinator on 2011-10-11 19:28:38 |
| The internet has porn? |
| - Score: 3 |
| Comment by lucas_maximus |
| By lucas_maximus on 2011-10-11 19:33:10 |
|
While it is f--king stupid law, how are they going to censor things like rapid share links and Google images? This doesn't work with my organisations WebRoot censoring ... as I found out while testing whether Android VM in Win7 worked ... there was a panic "ALT+F4" moment. TBH I was living with 4 of my step brothers who are all under 18 (12-17) ... and I used to be basically be in house tech support ... and not once did any of them check any porn out, since all the traffic went through my soekris box running OpenBSD ... in fact they were more interested in chatting to girls they knew from class on MSN and Facebook. I wonder whether the House of Lords will actually accept this? Internet Explorer has a set of parental controls built in Since Windows XP ... If parents are worried they should just give advice on how to enable this. TBH kiddys that wanna check out porn will ... Top shelf mags you can easily get some bloke or an older friends that looks "old enough" to go into the shop and get you the stuff ... same with booze and fags. Edited 2011-10-11 19:36 UTC |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE[5]: Um? |
| By sagum on 2011-10-11 19:57:22 |
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> The proxy logs probably wouldn't tell you much unless you can map ip-addesses to subscribers. The telephone bills are interesting, though. Seriously, why aren't they leaked? Any ideas? Mapping ip-addresses to subscribers is exactly what happens when people are taken to court for bittorrent copyright infringement allegations via file sharing. Chances are if someone is to leak the logs, they'll also have leaked the information that matches them to the subscriber... or they'll gointo the subscribers account and retreive the logs for that account and leak those logs. Whatever happens, its not very nice for anyone involved. Even more so if their machine becomes infected and they get nasty popups for a few days until they get it in the shop to be cleared... Edited 2011-10-11 20:06 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
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