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Can you bypass the ban if you censor specific body parts like the Japanese do? A sudden influx of that "ten tickle" porn they are all raving about might be good for the Brits.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Chute82 wrote:
Make the kids wonder through the woods looking for porn mags like we did. The old fridge in the woods was always a good place to check. Of course I only read the articles

That makes me wonder, what would you say now caught watching internet porn?

I only surf here for the comments?

Hey, some of them are pretty good

That is useful advice!

Why is he boiling lasagne pasta sheets in the first place? They cook from the heat of the sauce when you bake it. And what is up with people calling pasta noodles?

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
Why is he boiling lasagne pasta sheets in the first place? They cook from the heat of the sauce when you bake it. And what is up with people calling pasta noodles?

Thats why the mediterranean has the best food in the planet.
We boil our lasagna

 LordofHats wrote:
I only surf here for the comments?

No no, that is even more degenerate.

 Manchu wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I only surf here for the comments?

No no, that is even more degenerate.

I mean, not that I would know but I highly suspect such a claim would quickly fall flat on its face (because the comments are pretty bad, again not that I would know )

[user]

 Peregrine wrote:

 sebster wrote:
I agree, but I think the best answer is going to come from increasing the amount of non-nasty porn, not bans.

This. There is plenty of porn, even hardcore porn, that is not nasty or morally questionable. It's just pictures and videos of consenting adults doing sexy things. A cultural shift in favor of better porn (and understanding why it matters, and why bad porn is bad) is a lot more likely and productive as a solution than a pointless symbolic ban that won't actually ban anything.

I agree parents need to play a role, but saying they should be 100% aware of everything their children are doing on-line is not sensible, nor would it be healthy to accomplish.

It's possible, and the best way to do it is to whitelist certain sites that are appropriate for children and only allow unrestricted internet use with that filter in place. If you want something outside of the list of approved sites you ask your parents to let you do it. By the time kids are getting old enough to spend enough time on the internet to be really constrained by that they're probably old enough that worrying about porn is obsolete.

Umm. Easy, you use a white list filter when younger and slowly open that wider until a safe seach type system , keep the main pc in main room, use access and content control on tablets etc.

All this is free or low cost. Of course this requires effort on parents part but once set up its low maitence.

After a certain point you can just run say a horror, gore a porn filter with homework time blocking social media a few hours after school etc.
Then disable totaly.

Easy as pie.

If your paying the cell phone bill on contract, just have em block adult content.
Easy.

All well within anyone with a normal level of technical computer skills.

 ulgurstasta wrote:

 44Ronin wrote:
Socialism isn't going to fix social problems.

//

Spoiler:

Truly one of Marxs greatest quotes!

I guess these morons have never heard the expression "Wrong hill to die on.". Pick something worthwhile to fight against.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I suspect the hand of Richard 'Dirty' Desmond, owner of the Daily Express and purveyor of Bongo Mags behind these attempts.

After all, when I can get free grumble online, who wants to pay for a Jazz Mag?

Though on the Brightside, it may herald a return of the heady days of Bramble Mags, when a young man's first encounter with Scud was usually via railway sidings and woods.

This might be the single most British post in the history of this entire board.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
This isn't banning porn, it's keeping porn out of the hands of underage persons. Or at least attempting to.

Allowing for how heavy handed legislation, and public opinion, is regarding underage sex, this is not an illogical move.

It is illogical because it's laughably ineffective. The UK has no jurisdiction to require all the porn sites (and every blog/forum/etc that has porn) to follow the rules, so the effect on limiting access would be negligible. It's a stupid and pointless attempt to show certain voters that Something Is Being Done About This, nothing more.

Actually it has.

UK porn sites will be forced to register, those outside will no longer be accessible from inside the UK. The UK government has already banned classes of sites so that UK based ISP's will not be able to access them.
There are ways around that, but not commonly available, satellite internet will work, but satellite companies generally comply with these requests anyway.

The porn industry is OK with this as most people don't pay for porn anyway, if porn is restricted, registered outlets will have a level of market access which is not currently realistic.

The UK and other countries want to end the open nature of the internet, often for reasons going far beyond what legislation is vocalised over. The Chinese models is touted as successful, even though it 'apparently' banned far more political content than it does adult.

The UK government haven't done that yet, but across parties they want to, and frankly that has me far more worried than a porn ban. They have already rolled out the first stages by blocking access to warez. While not and never will be entirely successful it has been successful enough that it has caused recovery in legitimate media industries most hit by online piracy. Accompanying legislation has also been beefed up. People thought that was unworkable, thing is, it's working....

The porn ban is just to get the tips of the toes in....trojan horse...

no need to Ban, use GOT!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4717214/Game-Thrones-makes-porn-viewership-down.html#comments

One site had a 4.5% traffic drop during the episode lol

Orlanth wrote:
There are ways around that, but not commonly available, satellite internet will work, but satellite companies generally comply with these requests anyway.

Wouldn't a VPN service circumvent the whole idea? A ban would create a small inconvenience and just establish a few rent seeking middlemen (companies that provide VPN services for Britain). On the positive side it would probably lead to VPNs that are even easier to set up so those companies can target the biggest possible audience.

 Orlanth wrote:
They have already rolled out the first stages by blocking access to warez.

This isn't really a valid comparison, for several reasons:

1) Piracy and porn have completely different infrastructure models. The critical mass required for file sharing means that successful piracy depends on having a small number of sites, each with a large number of users. That gives a single target that can be blacklisted, without having collateral damage to anything that people who don't pirate stuff would notice. Porn, on the other hand, is distributed across a huge volume of sites. And many of those are individual blogs, social media users, etc, which can't be banned without blanket bans on the entire service. For example, reddit has countless amateur porn sections and a "no real-life details" policy that would make it unlikely for them to ever buy into the credit card requirement. So do you ban all of reddit in the UK, simply because someone might find porn there? That's the kind of thing that people notice and get upset about.

2) Piracy is illegal, porn isn't. If you're blacklisting piracy sites you can count on having cooperation from the IP owners and governments in other countries. If you ban a UK-based piracy site they can't just immediately relocate to the US because the US government is going to shut them down as well. So you end up with most of the piracy being concentrated on obscure Russian/Chinese blogs, where it can be cleaned up without hitting much else. But that's not the case with porn. The porn the UK wants to ban is 100% legal in most other countries. If a US-based porn site declines to participate in the UK credit card rules and UK users find ways around the filter the US government is going to do absolutely nothing to help. And with vast amounts of income available from non-UK countries there will be plenty of porn sites still in business for people to find.

3) Internet porn is an ideal product, piracy isn't. This isn't the golden age of piracy anymore, where legitimate digital distribution was limited or nonexistent and pirating something was much more convenient even if you had the money to buy it. There was lots of incentive to pirate a new game instead of waiting until you can make a trip out to the game store, but that incentive is gone now that you can just click the thing you want on Steam/Netflix/etc and have it immediately (and with none of the screwing around trying to get a crack to work). So yeah, there are still people who will pirate everything out of sheer stubborn refusal to pay, but for most people if piracy sites are unavailable they're not even going to notice anymore. But the same is not at all true of internet porn. Internet porn is the best product available, and anything that limits access to it is going to immediately be noticed by huge numbers of people.

While not and never will be entirely successful it has been successful enough that it has caused recovery in legitimate media industries most hit by online piracy.

I would be extremely skeptical of any claims about this when the rise of legitimate digital distribution is busy destroying the demand for piracy. It's quite likely that any "success" was going to happen anyway, now that piracy is no longer the most convenient way to get something.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Mario wrote:
]Wouldn't a VPN service circumvent the whole idea? A ban would create a small inconvenience and just establish a few rent seeking middlemen (companies that provide VPN services for Britain). On the positive side it would probably lead to VPNs that are even easier to set up so those companies can target the biggest possible audience.

Yep, VPNs are one of the obvious problems with the idea. A filter that requires using a VPN to evade it is effective against most piracy because, in the age of Steam/Netflix/etc, piracy is already so much less convenient than the legal product that even small additional decreases in convenience can shut down its appeal. But with a porn ban that requires massive bans on forums, social media, etc, there's tons of desirable content locked away and lots of incentive to get the tools to evade the filter.

 Kroem wrote:
I see your point about the banning a specific substance rather than a type of behaviour. That can get a bit murky, as who defines what a desirable or moral behaviour is exactly.
But I see it more as closing a loophole, you would get IDed when buying a lads mag in a news agent but not when looking at the same pictures on the World Wide Web.
You get loads of protection from fraudulent charges with a credit card, so it is a pretty safe way of checking if somebody is over 18.

Maybe I am a bit sensitive on the issue. But I've seen it affect people I have otherwise respected.

I had a Physics teacher, a nice jovial chap with a wife and children. Completely normal essentially. What we didn't know is that he was diving real deep into porn on the internet, and his tastes were getting more and more extreme.
In the end he got nabbed trying to solicit naked pictures from a bobby pretending to be a 14 year old girl, tried to hang himself, his wife saved him and he had to admit to her and the kids what he had done.
Scared the gak out of my as it literally destroyed his life and I could totally see how it could happen!

I remember another time, when my Grandparents were supposed to be looking after my brother and I, and I walked in on my Grandfather watching porn on the PC!
I mean how addicted do you have to be to porn to watch it with your young grandchildren in the house for feth sake!

And again. I don't think the government should really be responsible for a persons lack of integrity or moral fibre, but if an age check reduces the amount of young people being negatively affected by this stuff I think it is a reasonable pragmatic approach.

But putting in your credit card info doesn't merely verify your age, it links your real identity with whatever pornography you're watching, and there is a LOT of porn out there which is perfectly legal but remains extremely socially taboo. This system opens people up to shame, blackmail, potential job loss, could end relationships even - better hope you never decide to go into politics or become even slightly famous if you've watched some "dodgy" porn, every tabloid sleazebag in the land will be trying to sniff around your card info - so why should adults engaging in an entirely legal activity have to take that risk because Little Timmy's parents aren't capable of doing some basic parenting?

We're not talking about alcohol or porno mags here, those have enforced age restrictions on them because the "gatekeeper" to those products is a profit-seeking business out of a child's parents' control. Kids can only access porn via electronic devices they can only get access to if parents permit them access, and which can be configured to control what content will be displayed.

As usual, this has knob-all to do with children, it's regressive socially-conservative Tories using "think of the children!" as a way to bypass reasoned debate, because they know and everyone else knows that if you stand up in public and argue against this sort of measure in that context, you can be easily painted as a monstrous pervert(usually with sly implications that the only reason someone would oppose such measures is that they want children exposed to porn and so are probably some kind of pedo), which prevents a lot of folk from trying at all and helps them discredit the rest.

The Digital Economy Bill is a shambles, an unholy alliance of social regressives and corporate lobbyists exploiting people's ignorance of technology to push their agendas.

Yodrin and Peregrine both echo my sentiments, especially Yodrin. This is not the first time that the Government has tried to ban porn in the UK, as I mentioned in the OP. What is notable though is that each and every attempt has been by the Torie Conservative government, and they have tried to push said attempt out using the slyest possible means at their disposal.
In this case they are attempting to use, as you rightly said Yodrin, the "think of the children" arguement to push the law through again, and it is utterly disgusting, especially when you know just how low and evil the Tories are and what depths they are willing to stoop to to get their way.
I will say it now: Porn is a good thing. There is nothing wrong (despite what certain people think) with watching a quick bit of spank, indeed it is quite natural, and I do not know anyone whom has not done so. However letting children watch it, or risking them having access to it is another matter, but one that is easily fixed with (as others have said) the proper use of administrative programs and blacklist/whitelist sites.

The problem we have is the Conservatives. They have decided that they know best and they now wish to firce their vision on everyone else. They do not care about democracy as anyone whom lives in Lancashire or Yorkshire can attest to, and they are quite happy to go against the will of the people to get their way. And in this case it is very easy to do so - as Yodrin pointed out, who wants to be labelled a child molester?

I will say it now: Porn is a good thing. There is nothing wrong (despite what certain people think) with watching a quick bit of spank, indeed it is quite natural, and I do not know anyone whom has not done so. However letting children watch it, or risking them having access to it is another matter, but one that is easily fixed with (as others have said) the proper use of administrative programs and blacklist/whitelist sites.

Well, that probably needs some qualification...theres a lot of fethed up Porn out there that can't be healthy for anyone to see.

This is nothing to do with banning porn. It was never anything to do with banning porn.

It's merely testing the waters for even more censorship and surveillance of the British people.

Our lame duck PM is notorious for banning things and locking people up without trial.

If porn sites want to allow content in the UK, then they should operate out of Saudi Arabia, then our government will say it's in the UK's national interest to turn a blind eye...

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Well, that probably needs some qualification...theres a lot of fethed up Porn out there that can't be healthy for anyone to see.

The same is true of everything, really. TV, music, etc, there's bad stuff everywhere. I don't think porn is any worse than average, so it doesn't deserve special treatment.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Well, that probably needs some qualification...theres a lot of fethed up Porn out there that can't be healthy for anyone to see.

The same is true of everything, really. TV, music, etc, there's bad stuff everywhere. I don't think porn is any worse than average, so it doesn't deserve special treatment.

Well obviously. I'm not arguing in favour of censorship of Porn - I'm off the opinion like DINLT that its simply a false flag to increase Government powers.

I was just disagreeing with a blanket statement.