What with the recent announcement that Google and Bing will block 100,000 search terms and issue warnings on a further 13,000 search terms are the days that internet service providers and governments treat all data on the internet equally numbered? I'm not against preventing the sharing of child abuse images, but we are told most of this sharing takes place on the dark web so will blocking certain search terms have much impact ? or will it drive more people into the dark corners of the internet exposing them to even more criminal content. And then there is the matter of what the 100,000 search terms will be, it seems like a lot of words to me (but what do i know) are we going to find legal search terms being blocked, like trying to find TOR and other software or information on how to circumvent this blocking ? Is the internet going to reflect RL in that governments create a criminal underworld and once someone enters they may find all kinds of other illegal content that they may have never know existed ? are we just going to push illegal and other objectionable content onto the dark web where im guessing its harder to monitor, trace and arrest people who break the law ?
The fact they are starting with child abuse images should be highlighted as a huge positive. Problem is people who want to get access to such a thing will find ways around it either way. Its what else they will block acording to the wills of the goverments that id be worried about.
I like how the media suggests that child porn content wasn't being blocked before. So many negatives to this it is unreal, may also spell the slow death of the 2 search engines. False postives, people searching for help on the banned subjects and as already mentioned the people it will hinder most will be the innocent. Similar to drm to battle piracy in games. Personally im hoping theres alot of uproar against this and the net is fought for to keep neutral. But also as mentioned "what do i know"
I can see where they are coming from, but not only does it potentially show the start of a rather slippery slope, but it also could mean more/all of the content will move to places like a darknet/deep web so that it won't stop it, people will get around it and may be exposed to more things they wouldn't normally be as a result.
The thing that gets me is that its 100,000 search terms being blocked, i mean maybe im showing my lack of knowledge on the subject of kiddy fiddling but i would be hard pushed to think of 50 words. 100,000 is roughly %10 of words in use as of January 2012, and even though i have tried i cant find a list of the words that will be blocked probably because it wont be made public. Will we have two Internets in the future, one highly sanitised with various words and sites deemed by governments to be offensive. And another internet with unrestricted content that gifts the individual with the intelligence to make their own mind up on what to view. Do politicians come out with these proposals and actually think it will prevent people from access what they want, or are they just doing it to win votes from the vast majority of people who probably think blocking these search terms means the problem is solved ?
Ignorance is bliss. People go all maudlin' about the good old days because they think they were better. They weren't; stuff was just swept under the carpet more, not spoken about in decent company. There are people who think that the internet should be the same.
Children should not be allowed to use the internet imho without parental control or supervision, you wouldn't let your child wander around the west end of London or SoHo on their own late at night. Yet people seem to think its OK to let children wander around the internet posting details about them selves for the whole world to see and hanging out with strangers. If we tried to sanitise our streets in the same way as governments are trying to clean up the internet there would be a public outcry, but for some reason because its the internet its OK. I guess we should just get used to Google and Bing censoring %10 of the English language, or just use another search engine where people are not treated as criminals for simply using words listed in the english oxford dictionary. EDIT: In an Interview with John Carr, online child safety advisor to British government, we are told this is a "huge experiment."
Its nothing to do with page 3 girls, or porn for that matter. This is simply another way for the government to bring in state controlled censorship of the internet, don't like the headlines of "Pleb Gate", "Chris Huhne", or any other news story ? Simply add the words you don't like to the block list so people don't get results, don't like what a blogger is saying about your new policy ? just add it to the list. Want to go to war but fear there will be public outcry, add it to the list so people cant find other like minded people.
This will just make it harder for the people trying to stop the "bad areas" like child abuse and black market traders. The more the government intervene the more people scream about other methods and before you know it, those methods are common knowledge as it gets shared about in a **** you government gesture. People who shouldn't know end up knowing and the only people who are suffering are the normal users.
For me, the most important use of the internet is for research and education, and as a result, I've googled just about every sundry and immoral thing on the face of the earth. Honestly, my Google search history is like a catalogue of the full spectrum of humanity's sins (until I clear it, then it only exists on MI5's servers). All things evil are worth writing about, talking about and learning about: the more enlightened we are, the more empowered we are to prepare for and deal with problems. An internet which no longer allowed us to learn about, think about and discuss the "soft white underbelly" of humanity (to borrow a phrase from rotten.com) would lose half its value. Daily Mail mouthbreathers see the internet as only serving prurient and base interests. They assume that anyone who looks for X, Y or Z must be a huge fan of X, Y or Z or have a huge fetish for X, Y or Z. The possibility that there are reasons for looking at something other than leering curiosity or arousal doesn't occur to them, because those are the only reasons they ever look at anything. They also build on the assumption that ideas, practices and beliefs are somehow contagious: that discussions of violence and terrorism will promote those things (but not drive people to oppose or reject them); that bizarre fetish material will create perverts (but not enlighten and broaden peoples' sexual attitudes); that accessible information about illegal drugs will encourage people to take drugs (but not to think about them or understand their side-effects); that open expressions of racism, sexism or homophobia will promote those things (but not motivate people to speak out against them). At its foundation, censorship assumes that people can't be trusted to digest the world's information and have moral responses to it. It's self-defeating and hypocritical, because the people deciding what's censored and what's not have already digested those things and are, by their own claim, making sound moral judgements based on all of it. If they can do it, so can we. edit - And to state the obvious, defending censorship by appealing to the need to stop child porn is a false dichotomy. Politicians love them: "you're either with us or against us". Don't let anyone tell you that you either approve of censorship or approve of child porn. I agree with the rooting out and blanket banning of child porn but condemn internet censorship and control in most other regards. Is that hypocritical? No. Child porn is just a special case, because it's especially damaging. edit 2 - I got reading the rotten.com FAQ and found this gem sent in by a critic: I think that sums up the motivations behind censorship quite well. "I can't handle this and want to pretend it doesn't exist, and I demand that you do the same."
That's because that is how Daily Mail mouth breathers themselves think; this is the crowd who read tabloids that have page 3 girls and sexualise fourteen-year-olds after all. They are not all that good on critical thinking and understanding things.
Oh, I absolutely agree. My comment was more in response to the idea that government leaders would support this kind of thing in the name of protecting children from seeing naughty pictures, and how as a society our views on sex are terribly inconsistent. For what it's worth, I'm still not convinced this has much to do with child porn. Given all of the recent revelations of NSA spying and government shenanigans brought forth by various whistleblowers, you kind of have to wonder why they suddenly need to filter 100,000 search terms. Though that may just be my tinfoil hat talking. EDIT: I think that's rather well stated.
No tin foil hats present hear. David Cameron: GCHQ will be brought in to tackle child abuse images What worries me is that if a search term, web site, or other form of censorship stops me from viewing a site or reading something, and i then use some method to circumvent the blocking am i going to be painting a big target on my self and have GCHQ spooks staking out my house? GCHQ has now been given the green light by Cameron to monitor all internet communications, suspects may be brought to trial only to find out the evidence against them can't be revealed for security reasons. To me it seems that Cameron is using something we can all agree on, protecting children from sexual abuse and porn to usher in wide ranging censorship and surveillance of the internet. Because the actual figures reveal we are failing to protect children. Child sex abusers evade justice as police send fewer cases to prosecutors
How many perverts google their kiddie pr0n? Yeah, I know there's more to it than that but I have serious doubts about the efficacy of these measures. I do have concerns about the accessibility of some content on the net and problems with providing smart parental control filters. i.e. how to differentiate between educational sexual content and pr0n. (apologies for using "pr0n", our IT content filter is insanely touchy and it's hard to know what will set it off).
According to the daily fail.. Although what illegal content and where those figures come from is anyone guess, maybe he is quoting what search engines and ISP's have been doing to report and block child abuse content for since 1996 with the founding of the IWF, and the establishment of cleanfeed in 2006.
'A recent deterrence campaign from Google led to a 20 per cent drop off in idiots trying to find illegal content via google, so we know this sort of action will appear to make a difference.' FTFY
