News Porn filters criticised as BT goes opt-out

News flash: kids are supposed to be inquisitive. They are supposed to be influenced by peers. Parents need to deal with that. As Corky42 says: like it or not, parenting is hard. You can't park your kid in front of a TV and then expect someone else to monitor what they'll see. You cannot throw your kid the internet and then leave it to someone else to monitor what they'll find. There is no technological fix for parenting.

In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman explores how society (and in particular religious authorities) deal with the difficult issues of people having thoughts, feelings and desires that cannot be controlled by them. In his fictional parallel universe, on an Earth both very similar and in some ways different from ours, people's spirits exist as separate ethereal beings outside of their physical body; life companions that are connected by an inseparable psychic and metaphysical bond. They manifest as sentient animals, the shape of which says something about the personality of the human. They are called daemons, and they are considered deeply private parts of a human being. One would not touch someone else's daemon any more than one would touch their genitals.

Before puberty a child's daemon is constantly changing and can assume the shape of any animal. During puberty the daemon "settles" into its final shape, illustrating the adult that the child is becoming. A daemon is one's spirit, one's soul, one's source of creativity and passion. To not have a daemon is inconceivable; one would exist more than live; indifferent, soulless, passionless, devoid of free will or empathy. For reasons of their own some authorities would prefer people like that, because it would create a society that is ordered, neat, obedient. To create such a society, the (religious) Authority starts to experiment on children, finding a way to break the psychic and metaphysical bond with their daemon: to "cut their daemon away" from them.

Pullman's comparison with the genital mutilation practiced on our world seems inescapable:

It may seem rather far-fetched to equate internet porn filtering with genital mutilation or the societal oppression practiced by fundamentalist religion. But let's consider what Pullman uses Dust as a metaphor for. Dust largely ignores children, but clings to the pubescent and to adults. Dust is suggested to be the (self-)awareness and knowledge of life that we acquire as we grow up; the knowledge that the 'tree of knowledge' in Adam and Eve's Paradise refers to (note that when they eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they are condemned to go through life "crawling in dust", like the snake that tempted them). The stuff we worry about innocent children finding out about too soon, but also the stuff they need to learn about in due time to become functional adults. The stuff that children quite naturally start to become inquisitive about and want to find out more of as a natural part of growing up. The stuff that causes them to ask difficult and awkward questions, and that makes them autonomous (sometimes rebellious) beings in their own right. Many parents would much prefer their children to remain obedient, compliant innocents.

Dust is knowledge. Books are full of Dust, which is why they are frequently subject to censorship, banning and burning. The media is full of Dust. The internet is full of Dust. When we are talking about censorship, we are talking about the control of knowledge; the control of Dust. If you think that the internet is dangerous, you are basically saying that TV is dangerous, radio is dangerous, books are dangerous, knowledge is dangerous. It can be. But it is also life. Knowledge, like life, can be both beautiful and ugly; both protective and dangerous. And as parents we both delight in our children growing up, and fear for them doing so. We want to both raise them to independence and keep them clutched safely at our bosom forever. Parenting is difficult.

You cannot find an engineering fix to this. You cannot shield children from Dust, from knowledge, from life. You can only teach them how to engage with it wisely and delightfully. If you start looking for engineering fixes to the problems of parenting you are effectively trying to cut their daemons from them.

 

Well, no its not. You still end up with unrestricted access to porn which defeats the purpose of the filter in the first place.


Has anyone started using a vpn because of all this?

 

UK Anti-Porn Filters Might Screw Up League of Legends Patches.
http://kotaku.com/uk-anti-porn-filters-might-screw-up-league-of-legends-p-1505050867

 

I can just imagine the tech support call: "Have you tried turning your porn filter off and turning it on again?..."

 

I imagine there may be some League of legends players at the ISPs who will, upon reading this dramatic news, exclude that exact URL from the filters. Or at the very least someone will have by now complained to the ISPs and asked for a comment - as such, ISPs will have excluded that exact URL.

Drama averted!

(Added)

Side note. I just had a thought. I know all you guys think the .gov is trying to control your brains, and you may be right ... However, the NSA and GCHQ already have the past data collections, and I expect they are still raping it as we post on forums, but filtering out the worthless stuff must be real hard for them. Therefore, all those who are using the filter to block out everything, can be ignored, and those who turn off the filter will be watched!

Dun dun derrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!

 

"The man who laughs has not yet been told the terrible news" --Bertold Brecht

You keep focusing on the practical detail, not the principle. China has internet censorship; Iran does, North Korea does. Western politicians hold half-hour long eloquent diatribes on why that is a bad thing. But when we do it, it's OK, 'cause it is to protect delicate suggestible minds from morally objectionable content. Except that's what Iran says, too.



The other, to me more relevant point is that it still allows parents to abdicate parental responsibility to a commercial company. After all, when you are concerned about what your kids get exposed to, the best thing to do is trust a remote stranger to look after them, no? It is a way of thinking that the government, and commercial business, would love for parents to embrace. What better way to control what people think than teaching them from the cradle that they are the only true, safe source of information.

 

You mean like all the other mistakes that the automated systems have already made, and all future mistakes. What about all the lesser known web sites that don't even know they have been filtered by mistake ?

Yup, already covered

If you opt-out you may as well place a neon sign outside your house proclaiming you are a miscreant.

 

I get where you guys come from, and every time a URL is blocked, or might get blocked, I imagine Corky will triumphantly blow his horn and post about it, but I've opted out, and I'm not worried about anything ... Yet.

The issue will be when the suits in charge want the internet to be just like Iran etc. We will need a nine/eleven moment to convince the populace they need it ...

 

The thing that confuses me is that a recent Ofcom report (warning PDF) that has been summarised on the open right group wiki found that...

Like i said im confused
Is the report saying only %15 of parents use no form of parental controls?
Because if so are these default on internet filters being brought in to cover that %15?
If so it seems a very expensive and problematic solution for only 1 in 8 parents.

I also have a question for the %85 of parents that do use a combination of techniques to protect their children online and that is if the introduction of the default on internet filters has changed the way you keep you child safe online ?

Have any parents uninstalled your existing filtering software instead preferring the network level one ?

Are you talking to your children more often than before the filter or less?

Do you now allow them to access the internet unsupervised or have you relaxed your rules on when and where they may use the internet ?