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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40628909



sheesh, the Tories really do not quit, do they? After two failed attempts to ban and limit porn respectively, the UK Government now wants to restrict access to porn sites.
"But they are only doing it or the children" I hear some people cry, and a fair point this may be, but have you seen how they want verification? If the bill is passed you will now have to enter your credit card details into the sites to view your hardcore - not something one can see a lot of people wanting to do

Anyway my fellow British, now might be the time to get downloading - before it is too late

I've got to be honest, I don't mind this so much. I do think they are going after the wrong targets though.
The issue is that the search engine algorithms are so good that is is crazy easy to accidentally find a tonne of porn through a casual search.

I think we are starting to see the evidence come through now that too much porn can damage your sex life, especially in impressionable teenagers.
Whilst I can see that it is unfair to blame the porn industry for peoples lack of self control, we regulate other potentially damaging things like beer and ciggys so I think we should do something.

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.

Alcohol and nicotine are chemicals; they can be objectively identified. Pornography is a matter of subjective taste. Also, pornography is essentially "information" as opposed to being a substance. I understand that (some?) neuroscientists believe that there is only one model of addiction in terms of brain circuitry and that same model is responsible for both, for example, alcoholism and "porn addiction." However, this understanding of brain chemistry used as a justification for what is fundamentally a regulation of information, especially given that we're talking about value judgments here, easily spins off into all kinds of dystopian sci fi.

2 things immediately spring to mind:

They can't do squat for non-UK hosted sites, except ban access entirely.

They can't do squat for any proxy/p2p content either.

So this will either kill of UK producers, or just force them to run from some other country.

I'm not against the idea of restricting access better, but I'm not sure there's a viable solution beyond running a firewall at the access point level.

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.

There's still a responsibility on the parents, rather than on society.

Web filters come with most internet packages, so why aren't they being used?

Hi we're from the government and we're here to HEEEELLLPPP you

So, how many children can get their parents' creditcard info if they want?
Teens, that is.

Parents can set up filters and such...

Like with cheap or even free software, you monitor usage and come on, there's tons of parental controls on phones etc.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

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.

I always wondered what age I'd be when I had to start leaving nuddy books in the woods instead of finding them there.

The real problem is people considering sex to be bad, not that teens might see it.

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.

I don't like the idea of demanding credit card details to access information, or indeed the restriction of internet freedom. But as someone working in a school I can assure everyone that lot of teenagers are watching a lot porn online. It affects their language, attitudes and behaviour towards sex and the opposite sex. I've had 13-14 year olds talking about deepthroating and the like, in my class. Does that seem appropriate? It's 18 rated for a reason.

A lot of porn is just plain nasty, cruel, racist and viscious. Gone are the centrefolds of lads mags that are more suggestive than graphic. The free porn sites teenagers access today are an abundance of full frontal hardcore porn. Videos of 'small' white teenage girls being 'abused' by a group of huge black men is not healthy for growing minds, or frankly anyone in my opinion. Maybe I exaggerate, but a lot of Internet porn that is free and appears in popups and spam is highly dubious because of the sorts of messages is gives.

 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.

You can take my Porn away when you take it from my cold, dead, sticky hands.

The amount of Ned Flandering in this thread is quite staggering.

Much like how there is also a bill trying to be passed to restrict the purchasing of knives online, the responsibility is with the parents if they don't want their kids on these sites.

That being said, I'd better get downloading

On a different note, this kind of stuff tends to happen when digital illiterates are tasked with writing laws concerning the Internet.

Remember what the Internet is for in the first place dammit.

Again minus ban there's tons of tools already out there. Filters, defaults and more. Tons of versions, free, paid, built in, so so much ability no one uses.

There's also whitelist systems for youngest users, systems that ban sites at certain times and other specialist options.

And the basics... No unsupervised pc with kids... Watch they do online... God. Like your.. Parents...?

Socialism isn't going to fix social problems.

//

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

//

Truly one of Marxs greatest quotes!

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
A lot of porn is just plain nasty, cruel, racist and viscious. Gone are the centrefolds of lads mags that are more suggestive than graphic. The free porn sites teenagers access today are an abundance of full frontal hardcore porn. Videos of 'small' white teenage girls being 'abused' by a group of huge black men is not healthy for growing minds, or frankly anyone in my opinion. Maybe I exaggerate, but a lot of Internet porn that is free and appears in popups and spam is highly dubious because of the sorts of messages is gives.

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


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 jhe90 wrote:
And the basics... No unsupervised pc with kids... Watch they do online... God. Like your.. Parents...?

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.

The question then becomes if society does something to make sure that what kids do find on-line is within certain bounds. If we aren't okay with that, or don't think it is practical, then we probably need to come to terms with the reality that kids are gonna see some freaky gak.

I find it interesting anyone thinks they can keep kids, especially teens, from finding whatever they want online. Heck when I was in highschool we had the entire school network set up to play Counterstrike 1.6, had it uploaded to every person's profile on the main server so we could access the game wherever we wanted. We even used the school's own LAN for our games. School would add firewalls for Myspace or Youtube and it took all of 5 seconds to get around.

Putting this in place would just lead to a lot of disgruntled middle aged folks because it wouldn't be too long before someone worked out a way around it.

Heck even China can't keep their internet fully under control, what makes Britain think they can do any better?

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Heck even China can't keep their internet fully under control, what makes Britain think they can do any better?

Much like attempts to ban drugs, and alcohol, I think the moral guardians just have to get over the fact that if people want something they will get it regardless of its legality and considering how many people use porn I suspect this will become an even bigger policy boondoggle than Prohibition was. PornHub just one of hundreds of sources of easy access interracial gang bang videos is one of the most trafficked website on the internet globally, ranked #38 by Alexa right now. They're two ranks behind Ebay and get more traffic than Imgur, Bling, Twitch, Tumblr, and Microsoft. It's just not going to go away by banning it. All banning porn is gonna do is create a new class of criminality and another black market, and for what? Because parents are too timid to explain sex to their kids, or to distinguish fantasy from reality?

And think of the economy! Do you want artists who specialize in anatomically exaggerated female proportions and mollusc appendages to go out of business?!

It's a social problem that would be helped a lot more by mandatory universal good quality sex and relationships education in schools rather than by probably futile attempts to restrict access.

 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.

Also, all of these porn sites would now be required to have all of these credit card details stored, though we don't know how long. So these sites will now be a prime target for hackers looking to steal credit card information.

As it is now many of these sites offer a premium service which you have to pay for but massively increasing the amount of credit card data on store will draw more interest from those looking to steal it and the more people are trying to get at it, the more likely it is that some of them will succeed.

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

 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?