David Cameron cracks down on online pornography(guardian.co.uk) |
David Cameron cracks down on online pornography(guardian.co.uk) |
And serious they might be indeed, considering they need some cheap win after years of economic mismanagement. The economy keeps stalling and the 2015 General Election is getting closer; considering bureaucratic timescales, if you want anything to actually be done by then, you need to start now.
Sigh. I guess it'll be a win for Swedish VPN providers.
Let me guess, David Cameron is going to appoint himself to head some special committee to dole out who gets to access to said database…
This is going go down well in history…
See http://www.nuigalway.ie/hbsc/documents/godeau_2008_contracep...
However, when we were kids, we traded pornography on floppy disks, so this solves nothing.
Then, people that want uncensored internet access can simply state that they liked to get to the innocuous cat pictures site - and that porn access wasn't part of their opt-in reasoning. Minimal-plausible deniability...
Of course, if someone is attacking this plausible deniability thing, then the question is "What do you gain from knowing I dislike censorship?".
Let's talk about what this really is. It's just the governments way of telling us what porn we should watch and banning anything they think is "not normal".
And if some legitimate sites get mixed up in this this filter we're suppose to believe it's an honest mistake right?
Stay away from my porn Cameron or I'll fuck you up.
Which presumably means that the legislation will have to use the term "child abuse imagery". Which means that it will be impossible to look up the legislation using a search engine. One has to wonder how we are expected to know whether or not we are complying with it given that we shan't be legally allowed to search for it.
/sarc
I'm wondering if a sizable number of the public is brave enough to get their names into the opt-in as a virtual "I am Spartacus" and two fingers to Cameron.
Irreversible?
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?
Once Upon a Time in the West?
A Clockwork Orange?
Titus Andronicus?
Remember when RIPA was only supposed to be for terrorism?
Pedophilia is just like any other sexual orientation. It is not something you just turn off, pedophiles need counseling and ways to relieve their sexual frustration. Things like CG porn and Lolicon for example should be legal. It is just not realistic to tell pedophiles to just stop and then put them in prison for the rest of their lives when they act on their desires, they will most likely be stabbed because even among criminals pedophilia is the worst of the worst and you are more likely to be stabbed if you raped a 15 year old than a 16 year old.
And this whole argument that watching fake rape porn will turn you into a rapist is bullshit. It is just like the argument that violent video games turn you into a violent person.
Isn't this just telling parents that the internet will suddenly be safe, a government sanctioned message to that effect is quite a bit stronger than your ISPs salesperson. Of course, the filter will either resemble China or have holes so assuming the latter any responsible parent will still want to monitor their children's usage.
The effect of this law seems to be constrained to making David Cameron (and other not-very-technically-knowledgeable parents) feel that he's a responsible parent, but to be honest I'd rather taxpayers pay for a nanny for him than for this ridiculous law - cheaper and much more effective.
In any case, blocking access to an HTTPS site is not a significant technical problem.
I somehow don't think they're planning on that though.
Blocking access to https://www.google.com/?q=nasty+goat+sex while not blocking access to https://www.google.com/?q=how+to+vote+conservative+in+the+UK requires some technical chops that while not impossible, would put the UK right up there with enlightened democracies such as China, Iran, and Egypt in terms of interfering with their citizens internet use.
I eagerly await the spectacular demonstration of incompetence and misunderstanding of basic internet operation that'll be the fallout of this - perhaps it'll make my local government's own similar mistakes seem less obvious and stupid: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/how-asics-a...
But this isn't about "protecting the children" from porn, is it?
I'm on the wrong side of 40, and I've been online for 28 years. Professionally involved in the software and bitplumbing of "the web" for all of my adult life. I saw jwz's camo cube and montulli's fish tank with my own eyes, and years before that, wrote software alongside visionaries guided by the promise of building online communities and the freedom of information.
It wasn't supposed to turn out like this.
The people making these rules are incapable of building the surveillance apparatus without our involvement. Take this opportunity to look hard at what you're creating, and examine the motives of the people you're building it for.
b) He singles out Google as needing to do more. Google has received a lot of bad press recently due to tax avoidance. Therefore, criticizing Google will go down well with a lot of people.
>> "You're the people who have worked out how to map almost every inch of the Earth from space; who have developed algorithms that make sense of vast quantities of information. Set your greatest brains to work on this. You are not separate from our society, you are part of our society, and you must play a responsible role in it."
Do I read this right? So they don't care how expensive or hard the problem is to solve they just demand it to be solved. And even if the solution is bad or expensive, both customers and taxpayers must still pay to have it implemented. Got it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/books/fifty-shades-of-grey... (not even a new idea)
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/493829.SM_101
Dear Mr. Cameron, you just saw how the gay marriage issue went and you where quick to jump on board. You really want to be on the wrong side of this issue?
Beware the Red Menace--er I mean child pornography (insert fear of the moment mongering here).
> I'm a social worker, and once this goes into force, I will know that any household where the kids have access to porn has come from a parent making a conscious choice to let it happen.
Just don't get dragged into a for/against pornography discussion, it's pointless in this context. Even if you're naive enough to believe Cameron is actually trying to censor pornography, ask yourself whether such an infrastructure can and consequently will be abused.
"Without changing what you will be offering (ie active-choice +), the prime minister would like to be able to refer to your solutions [as] 'default-on'"
active-choice+ is a set of filters that may be enabled on request.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/21/david-ca...
Just look at life before porn existed. Never any healthy societies or sexual relationships then - they did not even exist. What harm could porn possibly cause anyone? Putting into someones mind a fantasy of how sex really can and should be? How could that ever cause any future sexual relationship to suffer in any way?
How could putting sexual assault video or images into any 10 year old's mind - images that they will never come out, how could that ever cause any potential problems with their natural sexual development? Inconceivable.
People in a truly free country should be able to get their free porn on YouTube whilst buying their methamphetamine (legally) outside (or even inside) of the local welfare office. Now that it the country that I want to live in...
Just look at life before facebook existed. Never any healthy societies or social relationships then - they did not even exist. What harm could facebook possibly cause anyone? Putting into someone's mind a fantasy of how easy socialising really can and should be? How could that ever cause any future social relationship to suffer in any way?
How could allowing a child to interact with somebody who could be a paedophile cause any potential problems with their natural sexual or social development? Inconceivable.
People in a truly free country should be able to sit at home and speak to people on facebook without ever speaking to people face to face. Now that is a country I want to live in...
I wonder what you'd say when the list gets leaked and your name is there by mistake. Can't happen, right? It's not like the UK government ever leaked private info[1]. Maybe the moral busybodies will press to take your kids from you.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2000/jun/25/futureofthenhs...
There were pornographic cave drawings.
Sure, it could be. Might not though.
We're all gamblers when it comes to the truth, and you have to be holding some cards to be taken seriously most of the games worth playing.
Could is not a strong card. It really doesn't mean much when it comes to promoting a strong or extreme position without a high probability of harm or benefit attached to it. It's the start of an argument, not an argument of itself.
"Oh it could be... the aliens plotting to invade could be in his garage... sure it could happen that you win the lottery."
'Possibly' is like 'could' - almost directly interchangeable in fact:
"Oh it's possible... the aliens plotting to invade are possibly in his garage... sure it's possible that you win the lottery."
But, probably not.
Possibility alone is not an argument. Almost anything could possibly mess someone up, almost anything could possibly set a murderer off for instance. Have your read some mass murderers' messages? There's stuff in there like the women exercising at the gym made them realise how they'd never get anyone to love them and then they got snubbed by a woman and went mental.
So, possibly my going swimming will make someone kill someone, best not go swimming any more then!
Of course, you probable wouldn't suggest that women stop swimming because it might set some random nutjob off. Because the pleasure that many women take in swimming is taken to far outweigh a small probability of it doing so. Our rights trump the probability of their madness, people shouldn't have to live in fear that they're going to be someone's excuse. But, if the probability of madness was high - if men almost always went insane when women were swimming, if they were just physiologically unable to control themselves; well, I suspect that it wouldn't be the case that our right trumped their madness because the probability of harm would be so much higher.
Merely noting that something is possible is a potential beginning; somewhere to go and look up statistics and start measuring harms from if it seems probable enough to you on the basis of your prior and the actions you'd take on the basis of it being true or false to be worth looking into. If someone tells you there's an alien in their garrage the next step, if you think it probable enough to be worth looking into, is to go, 'Well, let's have a look then.' Not to start planning your response to the invasion fleet.
What the probability is matters. We can all imagine things possibly happening that are not implausible, yet in reality are not at all probable. And because our brains are not operating on floating point variables, we don't actually have a way to feel how small the probabilities behind various degrees of possible are. So, going with your feelings of shock about 'how could something possibly' is a bad call. To say something meaningful, in the sense that it ought to guide policy and action you have to use maths and numbers, not feelings. You have to use data, not instinct. You have to be able to promote an idea of how probable it is, not just note that it's possible.
#
While we're here I suppose I should note that 'Just look at life before porn... it wasn't awful.' Is not evidence for porn being bad either. It's, at best, just an argument for it not being an all surpassing good - and even there you haven't controlled for socioeconomic factors so you can't really be said to be comparing like for like. Methodologically it's not sound.
And even ignoring all that, the argument still falls down. Maybe there were some healthy relationships before porn, but the days before porn included....
Oh, you mean the days when young girls were sold off to be fucked when they had their first period?
Or perhaps you're talking about the golden era of traditional gender roles, when it was legal to rape your wife and some women were essentially prisoners in their own homes.
Or perhaps you're going more traditional, Aesop's fables:
'A woman, a spaniel and a walnut tree, The more they're beaten the better they'll be.'
Even disregarding the methodological flaws, noted above, life before porn was not good for some people. Of course there probably were some healthy relationships back then, and maybe even the majority of such relationships were healthy. Or maybe not. As I'm sure you'll agree, the numbers matter in determining quite how horrifying history is.
------------------
Aside:
Personally, I find the unequal treatment of women in the workplace and government in history to make even the definition of healthy relationships in historical terms very difficult. Were I to define a healthy relationship it would go something like 'An equal, fair, and mutually beneficial relationship that makes those involved happy....' But how can it be equal and fair when one side has the majority of the power? We, or at least women at various points in time, were deprived of access to significant power, and thus of significant agency, from a very early age.
Imagine telling someone that the most they could aspire to was to be some man's secretary and the only way they could hope to interact with most of society was through their husband. I've no doubt you could grow to largely ignore that, if you grew up with it, but then again people grow up to largely ignore being blind too. I'm unsure under that interpretation how you'd even begin to define a healthy relationship as distinct from Stockholm Syndrome.
I wouldn't be able to take that. I wouldn't want to live in that world and I'd be constantly timid and afraid of even someone I'd otherwise love if they wielded that sort of power over me.
Which isn't to say that all historical relationships were examples of such patterns. I'm just saying that even the act of definition there is going to be very difficult. You can't really talk about healthy relationships without reference to the psychology of those involved, and that also involves references to the surrounding power structures - which will vary both with time and place. You can't meaningfully abstract over large portions of history without putting in significant work to normalise your terms across contexts.
My mention of "life before porn" was not meant to be an argument that port is bad. Some comments here treat port as such a healthy, natural and helpful thing. Lets take the last 100 years of western civilization. the first without porn, the second with. What did it improve? It is hard to argue that it has benefited society as a whole, but not so hard to make an argument that it has harmed it.
The aforementioned things do not have the consensus of psychologists and other professionals in the world agreeing that the content in question can cause psychological harm to a certain percent of society (particularly children).
That is the difference. The legal guardians of those who know that the potential is higher that their children may be affected negatively by pornography should be able to have the ability to make it harder for them to access it.
I see a lot of posts here talking about parents putting filtering software on their computer. Well, there is always easy ways around those. How many kids have iPhones today with unfettered internet access? how many kids use a public library? how many kids know computers better than their parents or grandparents and can get around any filtering software that may be installed on their home computer?
I remember the uproar at the proposition that porn content be delivered over an .xxx domain. Why was there such an uproar? How was it censorship to classify content that could be dangerous to some? Are movie ratings censorship? Are 8 year old kids legally allowed to buy tickets to NC-17 movies? It seems like the precedent had already been set.
It was all about money of course. The porn industry knows that the younger a person watches porn for the first time, the more likely they are to continue watching/purchasing porn indefinitely. The porn industry WANTS minors to view the porn. They do everything they possibly can to entice them at the earliest age possible. Does anyone think that the porn industry is high on the ethical and moral hill and would never take advantage of children to make more money?
Why should anyone outside the home have the power to do this? Why do parents have such little power and so little and ineffective tools to limit their child's exposure to pornographic material?
This is no more censorship than current laws requiring that porn mags be put on shelves a certain distance from the ground in retail stores so that 8 year old kids generally cannot reach them.
I had to activate grown-up mode on my giffgaff data (to buy swimmies, which were bogusly blocked by a bad filter). Even though I'm a sleazebag, I still felt a little squeamish asking for porn mode.
...now if that comes in on the monthly bills, "Data mode: Adult", then you have to explain it to your partner...
This sounds like a lot of people don't want to come clean about viewing porn - yet they sing it's praises. Prevents rapes, promotes healthy sexuality, ETC. BS.
And you lose the ability to talk about probability in a meaningful way.
If something does create an almost unprecedentedly large response in the brain, does that make it more likely to create lasting effects in the brain and cause the formation of new neural pathways?
I don't know. You want to claim that it's highly probable but you've provided no evidence for this. I know that porn addicts brains are different, primarily in terms of the reward system in ways similar to other addictions I believe, but you'd expect that to be the case. And you've certainly not linked any probability of large responses to the probability of potential changes to the probability of any potential to harm.
If you can't put numbers on it to compare it to other things, you really have no way to talk about probability that's not just waving your hands around and going 'Look at the brain scan!' Well, so what? Even assuming that all of your premises are true, (and the probability of concurrent events is the sum of their multiples so you've lost probability at every stage whatever the actual numbers would turn out to be; complexity penalty) and these brain scans actually exist, what does that mean? Is the probability of harm five times as likely as something else, twenty? If the initial chance of harm is quite small this doesn't make much difference. Is it three orders of magnitude out?
Neurology is a complicated area of inquiry, unless you know how often a given change links up with some result, it's just a picture.
You can't forget about psychology and stats and still meaningfully make statements like 'it's not even on the same chart' you have to know where both things are to be able to talk about that sort of thing - you have to have put the work in and have the numbers.
But, I think the implementation of anything that restricts the internet before content gets to the client will take things down a bad road, which is why similar efforts keep getting struck down in the U.S. When you give the power of restricting communication to the government or even to a contractor for the government, how will that not be abused? You may as well let them open every bit of mail and every parcel and check to see what you are wearing each morning to ensure it is appropriate.
BAHAHAHA.
Ouch. My sides.
If the filters are this poor and the blocked page banner tells you how to, a large percentage of people will opt out making this an ineffective "watches porn list".
Seems like the UK has just taken the lead.
> “We do not yet have enough concrete evidence that its introduction would be effective in reducing harms associated with problem drinking, without penalising people who drink responsibly.
Where's the "concrete evidence" for this new stuff?
Not something anyone can challenge either without putting their reputation on the line.
Along with many other respected works of art and culture.
The Anglo Saxon penchant for pruderish grandstanding combined with the British desire for an overbearing nanny state is a truly disturbing combination.
Unfortunately there are a lot of sheep on the British isles (as everywhere)
Disclaimer: No I do not get money for this.
He did an interview with the BBC Radio Four programme "Woman's Hour". He sounds computer illiterate.
Some time ago all UK ISPs blocked pirate bay. Next day hundreds of pirate bay proxies appeared. This law is just another propaganda...
On another note, some mobile providers in UK (O2 for instance) already block adult content by default, and you need to prove to them that you are 18 and above to have filter removed.
Porn is just a good justification for getting a "Great Firewall of China" system implemented in the UK.
And we think we've come so far with gender equality...
Google's long rocky experience with China proves exactly that.
These declarations will only be used to shame public figures once the list is leaked.
> The possession of "extreme pornography", which includes scenes of simulated rape, is to be outlawed.
Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own. With this on the books, it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.
> The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) is to draw up a blacklist of "abhorrent" internet search terms to identify and prevent paedophiles searching for illegal material.
A single search can now land you on a government list of accused pedophiles.
Yikes.
> A single search can now land you on a government list of accused pedophiles.
Also, I foresee a sudden rise in rickrolling along the line of:
<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=kiddy+porn">Funny Cat Video!</a>Anyone googled "santorum" recently? The Wikipedia article has a nice rundown on how a US Senator's name ended up thus: 'The word santorum, as defined, has been characterized as "obscene", "unfit to print", or "vulgar".'
I eagerly await the day a Google image search for "David Cameron" starts returning furry-rape-sex pictures, and "Conservative Party" some even more "abhorrent" & "illegal material".
<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%6b%69%64%64%79%20%70%6f%72%6e">Funny Cat Video!</a>
The other day I used Google to find info about a movie called "How to Make Money Selling Drugs"[1]. As I typed the words, I thought to myself "I hope that doesn't get me on a government list." I can't imagine having to think twice before Googling "Lolita"[2].
[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276962/reference [2]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056193/reference
- Long term unemployment is at a 17 year high.
- Government debt is at 90 percent of GDP.
- Violent crimes is worst in EU.
For years Britain has feared loosing sovereignty to the European Union. To me it seems like they should maybe worry more about American influence with all the wars they fight, the spying on their citizens and now the neo puritanism.
To fix the above, or to push through moralistic laws that will keep the media busy and get positive treatment in papers like Daily Mail to draw attention away from the problems?
Rates of murder and violent crime have fallen more rapidly in the UK in the past decade than many other countries in Western Europe http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22275280
Homicide rate is less than loads of EU countries (and Canada!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Describing debt as percentage of GDP is a subjective anti-debt framing of the issue. Here's why:
Units of debt: $ (here pounds). Units of GDP: $/year. So, units of debt/GDP: years, not percent.
Since "100%" sounds like a high number, this way of framing the numbers is useful for scaring people. Putting it mathematically correct "11 months" sounds much less scary.
Why would that be Britain's problem ?
> Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own. With this on the books, it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.
Even without such an extension, aren't there plenty of Hollywood movies which include "scenes of simulated rape"?
Still, it's a handy way to tar anyone complaining about online survellience as a rape-loving pedophile.
I suspect that films (girl with the dragon tattoo springs to mind) would not be subject to it because they aren't presenting the rape as sexual; it is seen as a crime in the film, which isn't primarily a film about rape/sex (obviously I can't speak for all films.)
The grey area and line drawing are a problem with laws like this, though, as several people have pointed out - I am sure there are films (horrible ones that I haven't seen) that come close to glorifying rape, or depicting it as desirable/sexual - whether those would be part of the law would be up to either parliament to specify, or up to the courts to decide later in case law.
There are tricky cases of defensible portrayals of sex involving children, e.g. Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum (which was banned in Canada as child pornography), and narratives that document the child sex industry, but they are rare by comparison. With artistically and morally defensible portrayals of rape, the range is huge. sspiff mentions A Clockwork Orange; even Jeffrey Archer (former senior Tory politician) wrote a novel with a rape scene. I also recall that when Virginia Bottomley (another former senior Tory politician) was asked to name her favourite film, she named Hitchcock's Rear Window, which is quite voyeuristic, and Hitchcock has filmed what I would class as morally indefensible rape scenes. The idea that moral guardians go about forbidding various classes of transgressive art forms that they themselves admit to enjoying is quite ironic.
For the sake of having some sort of a list: Bandit Queen, Deliverance, and Leaving Las Vegas all have hard-to-watch, defensible, and narratively necessary rape scenes. The victim in Bandit Queen I think was supposed to be prepubescent. And didn't Slumdog Millionaire have a child rape scene?
[1] http://health.india.com/diseases-conditions/international-wo...
He knows what he's doing and there's no reason to expect him to acknowledge the "side-effects" of an evil regulation.
And the reporter is not responsible for realizing this; you are.
LOL. On my Twitter account I have a public list for porn. It used to be a private list but most of those girls are pretty cool so there's no reason to be ashamed.
I'm not a public figure of course but I think this shame toward sexuality is a generational thing. It's only taboo for older people.
It's not widely advertised because they'd like to claim such a thing is impossible, to avoid the music industry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_(content_blocking_sys...
Edit: The harm is combining such a database with broad internet surveillance. Also, since the database is only hashes, false positives are likely. YouTube, who probably has the best content matching algorithms, can't even get it right all the time.
Can we expect films such as "I Spit On Your Grave" and "Once Upon a Time in America" to become illegal also?
I'm no lawyer, but it already is, if they're in a pornographic "context": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_63_of_the_Criminal_Just...
This 2008 act outlaws possessing or publishing explicit and realistic imagery of acts that threaten life, would cause serious injury to certain genitals, etc.
So fisting, simulated murder, or simulated necrophilia.. already illegal. Rape, borderline allowable, although if I were a lawyer testing this act in court, I'd say that rape is quite clearly an act that is "likely to result" in "serious injury to a person's anus, breasts or genitals".
Actually there was a case in 2012 of someone tried under this law for having fisting videos. They weren't convicted. This is strong evidence (and precedent) that fisting per se would not fall under this law.
Which includes pretty much every action movie these days. Maybe the irony will be that Hollywood will step up with a campaign to fight this, because they see it as an eventual threat to their bottom line.
Actually it's the common person I'm more worried about. Applying to work as a teacher? They might ask you (or the Government body with the details) if you watch porn. "We can't let someone who watches porn teach 5 year olds!" will be the excuse.
> Video footage of two consenting adults, acting out a scene, will be illegal to own.
This is already the case in the UK, with violent and extreme pornography, a new law that (I don't think) has any convictions yet.
> it seems a short hop to outlaw videos of simulated murder.
Again, other way around. They made porn of that technically illegal a few years ago AFAIR,
Perhaps they could do that with blue movies :)
"If you've been fucked in the eyesocket"...
[1]: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/australian_por...
Edit: You're free to cite examples of children who "aren't that lucky" and had their upbringing maliciously altered by viewing internet pornography.
What? In what world would 90% of ANY porn be legitimate?! I want rapists using strategies found in the fake garbage you can find online, at least then they will be less effective than they could be.
`And, in a really big step forward, all the ISPs have rewired their technology so that once your filters are installed, they will cover any device connected to your home internet account. No more hassle of downloading filters for every device, just one-click protection. One click to protect your whole home and keep your children safe.`
That's fucking censorship and I THOUGHT WE ALL AGREED THAT IS A SIGN OF FASCISM. Seriously, how many bloody times can someone use `FOR THE CHILDREN` as an a valid excuse? I hope this fellow gets put out of office with no pension. He is committing widespread censorship of an entire nation. And the people appreciate that. People also appreciated that Hitler brought Austria and Germany together in anschluss as well as the fact that he returned them from 40% unemployment. Funny how short sighted the people are.
`You're the people who have worked out how to map almost every inch of the Earth from space; who have developed algorithms that make sense of vast quantities of information. Set your greatest brains to work on this. You are not separate from our society, you are part of our society, and you must play a responsible role in it`
I see, you want the people who have been working for their entire lives to better the human race to take their valued time and put that towards your endeavors of censoring anything that could potentially offend the parents of children? I'm sorry, you are what's wrong with the world.
I say we should build systems designed specifically to undermine these authoritarian measures.
I doubt the Tories have a clean house in this regard. Every time some politician or other 'moral leader' starts pontificating about moral panic, I get suspicious that they're just trying to ban their vice. Clearly if they're so vocally opposed to it, they mustn't be partaking, right?
Glenn Loury and cocaine.
Mark Foley and the exploitation of children.
Eliot Spitzer and prostitution.
John Ensign and 'family values'.
Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, countless others and homosexuality.
The Conservative Party and Back to Basics.(a) Voluntary acts between adults
(b) Fantasy
(c) Preventing the use of porn by adolescents
(d) Protecting children (and others) from horrific crimes
In my view, the reason for that "mix up" is simply old fashioned prudery and religious fanaticism. (d) is the only thing that governments should care about.
For as long as there's politicians "protect the children" will always be B.S.. As if Cameron cared..
The last thing we need is a broken Internet here. The economy is fucked enough already.
Add to that the whole is censorship right debate (it's not unless it's opt-in), the pre-crime list this generates and we're right into blatant fascism.
Where do we even start at fixing all this? I think we're helpless.
Yes, the mobile filtering in the UK is completely useless and blocks many, many sites that having nothing whatsoever to do with porn in any form, and probably fails to block the majority of the porn on the internet but that's where we are.
It didn't however happen for nearly a month after I made the selection so perhaps I'm now logged as a potential sex offender somewhere...
Certain scenes in Game of Thrones might trip this rule. More interestingly, the show is partly filmed in the UK.
I guess Martin, Benioff, and Weiss are all a bunch of criminals. But all those scenes of people stabbing, slashing, and killing each other with all kinds of blades are not a major THREAT TO CHILDREN in a country with a knife-crime problem.
can't believe that people still fall for this shtick
Usually that's when politicians concentrate on less demanding, more emotional issues.
Also, nice power-grab right there - cause you never know!
"Sorry Angela, I can't open that WikiLeaks link you told me about." "Nigel, could it be that you forgot to let your porn filter be lifted?"
This is bad and as always not only for UK citizens because politicians like to look at other countries for inspiration and validation. Clearly in Austria some pundits will applaud this.
More info: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/magazine/god-save-the-brit...
Mandatory internet Filters on every ISP as a precaution against pornography or child pornography. Same crippled laws as Turkey. Nobody is prevented reaching porn. But most of the time filters are used against so called "piracy", "extremist" political or "regional" views and these kinds of political agendas. Currently websites pro-evolution are struggling censorship.
I think we need to stop thinking of censorship as an on off switch. Total prevention of information transfer to motivated parties is not possible in this day and age. What is possible is making content more marginal, less likely to be stumbled onto, etc.. That doesn't mean it's not powerful though. It's a different type of power. You will not prevent hardcore political dissidents from learning relevant news through internet censorship. You can however influence mainstream views. You can increase the publics exposures to one view and decrease exposure to another view. You can make certain positions feel safe, mainstream. This works particularly well within the context of a "tribe" you identify with.
Censorship's influence on political opinions is similar to its influence on sexual morality. The influence is strongest near the mainstream, weakest at the extreme. If you have to call up and request access to porn, use special software, etc., it will feel like you are doing something slightly abnormal. Like walking into an adult cinema in the 70s.
My guess is that the film lobby is trying to get the government to push the cost of preventing piracy onto Internet firmshere. The end user will pay for it and have a more restricted Internet.
Don't get me wrong: People that look at children and the like should be caught and prosecuted. But really, the way to go about that isn't to ban ALL of pornography. Are we to ban butter knifes incase someone goes on a rampage with one? No, we identify the issues that cause someone to do that and go after them.
I don't see the point in spending millions of pounds blocking search engines when those millions could be spent on the core issue. If someone wants to look at illegal illicit images, I can guarantee you the majority aren't going to search for it on google using their home internet connection.
I think it's because there's still a generational divide between people who grew up with easy access to Internet (and to porn, obviously) and people who didn't (those at 40+, including our politicians).
>"You're the people who have worked out how to map almost every inch of the Earth from space; who have developed algorithms that make sense of vast quantities of information. Set your greatest brains to work on this. You are not separate from our society, you are part of our society, and you must play a responsible role in it."
Yeah, come on clever technical people. Get it sorted. We've decided you need to uninvent nuclear weapons as well please. Immediately.
What embarrassing ignorance from a major public figure.
This is about developing filters to prevent piracy. You'll see.
[1] - http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
[2] - https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2013/cameron-demands-ac...
Are there any arguments against an opt-in filter? The legislation is for an opt-out filter.
I wonder what the legal tests for that are here? Non-consensual fantasies are very popular among women who don't actually want to be victims of crimes. Will they ban romance novels?
Then next they could go after the female fandoms for Loki from the Avengers movie, yandere characters, and those girls who write love letters to serial killers. Okay, maybe the last ones could use some help.
Also, I read somewhere on the subject of child pornography that allowing those people to look at images cuts down on the act because they seem to "get their fix." I can't remember where I read this so I can't provide a source, but it seems to make sense.
Not really. They want a special kind of freedom where censorship is not allowed... unless the stuff that's getting censored is the kind of stuff that they don't like. Lots of people would enthusiastically support their moral standards being written into law.
I do wonder how many people will accept to this out of shame.
The news here is more subtle. What the internet is, was, how it works and how its changing. It no longer feels like an anarchy that no one can control. We can argue about the why and how but I don't think we can dispute that the internet is no longer unregulatable, anonymous anarchy. That is the news here.
Governments, large corporations and other traditional power sources feel they can exercise influence and control over the internet. It's within their jurisdiction and physical capabilities.
Personally I don't have huge a problem with the default filtering; most households (with or without kids) don't have the knowledge to effectively enable filtering for all their devices - giving them 'protection' by default, and allowing the option to have full access is currently what most - maybe all - mobile phone operators do in the UK anyway in 3G/GSM connections.
However, its important that the opt-out is incredibly straight forward - an online form for example (ideally during signup with a new provider) - no need for 'humiliating' phone calls where you have to explain why you want to see Super Army of Boob 2, for example.
I do wonder what this will mean when accessing sites like The Pirate Bay - which often have boobs-a-plenty in the sidebar ads. Does it mean that people who visit sites that happen to have 'pornographic' ads ALSO need the filtering off.
My bigger concern here is that these measures will very likely do nothing to stem child pornography (and I would hazard a guess sexual abuse in general); my reasoning is that I don't imagine your average paedophile just opens their vanilla browser in the morning and Googles for '[child related sex terms]' - surely this kind of activity hides behind systems such as Tor?
One other thing that springs to mind; presumably, unless there is explicit legislation against this, ISPs can now sell your filter preferences for marketing purposes; perhaps putting you in some 'boxes' you wouldn't want to be in.
> "Wow, censorship, totalitarianism and mass surveillance are great ideas. We really should implement them."
Secondly, it is impossible to filter information within a society that doesn't have North Korea like tendencies. As soon as this filter goes up, people will just rent servers overseas, and get their internet via encrypted lines that aren't subject to censorship.
Banning porn is like trying ban alcohol. Everyone knows that it's a vice, everyone still does it (isn't 20% of global internet bandwidth porn?), and banning it just puts money into the hands of organized crime.
Thirdly, won't a bunch of mainstream award-winning films that come out every single year become illegal under this act? Games too for that matter. Say good bye to crime shows and violent film in the UK.
Finally, this is just one step away the Great Firewall of China. The argument that we need to protect children from the "corrosive" aspects of society might expand to other political parties, or ideas that aren't in the interests of those already in power.
The thing with censorship is that as soon as a you do a little, it's funny how quickly that becomes a lot. You just have to think of the children now then don't you?
Really? That's just an undisputed fact?
By his descriptions of pornography seem a lot of the internet stuff arouses Mr. Cameron ... the really edgy stuff.
Now, by changing the law, the companies have a legal duty.
That is what I and others have wanted, censorship is something we are able to attack through established channels. The politicians are of the view that this wins votes, now we find out whether they are right or wrong.
In America, all this type of stuff was completely illegal until relatively recent decades (yes I know that the internet did not exist yet but what difference does that make?). Showing "pink shots" in a magazine was completely illegal until 1978 (See Larry Flynt).
Wow, what a bunch of Fascists we had running the country for the first couple of centuries. This country had no freedom at all man...
He is committing widespread censorship of an entire nation.
Is optional censorship really censorship? I know what you will say in response though - it is only optional for now right?
No! It's de facto censorship. As the game goes the "smart" choice will become agreeing to the censorship while keeping a vpn or something to route about it for fear of having your record requested during divorce proceedings or some thing like that. Maybe for fear the list would be leaked . It wouldn't look good for a teacher to be on the wrong list.
Making it illegal would be one thing but it sounds like this would damage the internet itself in the UK.
From Wikipedia: "Spitzer used this authority in his civil actions against corporations and criminal prosecutions against their officers." Damn shame.
Spitzer was going after human trafficking and prostitution as AG and Governor while he was committing Mann Act Violations on the side. I want the folks on 'my team' to have integrity so their agendas don't get derailed.
After all, that's what they want for us.
> [T]he team also found a relationship between porn use and the feeling that it wasn't necessary to have affection for people to have sex with them.
However,
> [R]esearchers can't say for sure whether access to Internet porn causes certain attitudes and behaviors.
This study:
http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2005.8.473
Showed a correlation between children who seek out porn on the internet and delinquency. However, there's no indication of causation.
> For most people, pornography use has no negative effects—and it may even deter sexual violence
So if you are to censor something, suicide descriptions would be far more morally defensible to censor than porn, as to my knowledge there's little to no evidence that increased access to porn leads to increases in harm to other people.
Yes, some people might reasonably not want their children to run across pornographic material on the internet. Here are some other things some people might reasonably not want their children to run across on the internet: Anti-religious material. Religious material. Depictions of violence. Any mention of prejudice against racial minorities, women, etc. Websites offering do-my-homework-for-me services. News about upsetting things like tens of thousands of children starving to death every day in poor parts of Africa.
I hope it's clear that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for all those things. I think it's clear, in fact, that the internet would not be improved by having opt-out filters for any of those things.
Yes, I hope my daughter will learn about sex in better ways than by stumbling across porn on the internet. And I hope she'll learn about those other things in better ways than by stumbling across them on the internet, too. It is not the government's, or my ISP's, job to make that happen by making things harder to find online; it probably won't work, and it will probably break other things (as such filters always have in the past), and it's the wrong way to solve the "problem" anyway.
And I also hope that if in the fullness of time our daughter wants to find porn on the internet, she will be able to, and she won't be (or feel) obliged to disclose the fact to her parents, and doing so without telling us won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
Having NO kids puts you in a better position to judge, because you are not emotionally attached. You should however impact the effect things have on your children.
And the only way to do that is to expose them to it ... You are not a bad parent are you?(Fallacy: Attacking the man).
The only ones remotely able to say 'think of the kids' are shrink that deals with children with issues/research.
My daughters, since they've been a couple years old, have had unrestricted access to the Internet via tablets and laptops. Quite frankly, I'm far more worried about the impact of shitty cartoons and crap Disney productions than I am them watching porn. Indeed, if I discovered my daughters were viewing such materials, I'd take it as an opportunity to discuss and find out what's going on.
[0]: Or the government censors whatever they like with their filtering infrastructure.
I fear a world where my children cannot express themselves freely FAR more I do a world where I have to explain to my children that some people are just kind of weird...
Censorship of the internet is NOT ok.
However, one of arguments for an opt-in model suggests that removing the necessity for parents to make this 'active choice' about what material their kids could be subject to online, just ignores the problem and, if anything, makes it worse because parents don't ever need to think about it. (Should I talk to my kids about the dangers of the internet/world? Oh, I don't care about that now, because the Government has decided for me)
Personally, I agree with you, I think it's a good idea to have an extra layer of filtering like this (not every parent is tech savvy enough to install and manage local filtering) but it has to be Opt-In. How hard is it to ask the question when you sign up with an ISP? (Sir, if you have young children in the household we suggest you choose our network level filtering)
Besides if you want to opt-out of porn you can already install filters on your computer or your router if you want to.
The govt has no business telling Google/Bing/Yahoo what their development targets are.
If you want an opt-in filter just search for it.
You'd have to ensure that we don't ask people what the state of their filter is. If it becomes routine for (say) politicians, teachers, nurses to be asked at job interviews/elections what the state of their filter is ("Have you opted in to the filter? No? So you watch porn then.") then you're going to be forcing lots of people to be anti-sex and anti-porn.
Don't worry about the pirate bay, it's blocked in uk
First torrent site, then pornography, then what? arbitrary political movements?
That's a really slippery slope here once the tools are in place, it's hard not to use them.
Personally I'm not against some filtering but IMHO it had to be an opt in plus made at the router level with an "offline" list that you can review and modify yourself. A list made at the ISP level is just too totalitarian
"By default the state assumes you don't want to see sexual content; if you do - thats fine by us"
Note that I'm saying this is how I see it balancing with civil liberties - there is of course the chance that it DOESN'T work out like this in practice.
A quick google search: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-bypass-uk-pirate-bay-blo...
(screenshot of the blocking page)
I believe protection against pornography has to do with education, it's more the problem of the parents than the problem of the government. "Childs" will always find a way to view some adult content, they just need to be educated about it
At 1.2 the UK still has higher murder rate than most of its neighboring countries: Germany (0.8), Denmark (0.9), Norway (0.6), the Netherlands (1.1), France (1.1). In that end of Europe, only Belgium (1.7) and Ireland (1.2) is doing worse or equally bad.
The "loads of" EU countries doing worse are mainly some of the new member states from Eastern European, which are much poorer than the UK. Only Belgium and Finland seem like countries the UK would like to compare themselves to that are actually doing worse.
If you'd like to reword your comment to "UK violent crime is worst in an ad-hoc collection of countries I've decided on" I'll withdraw my comment.
If we get that far, I'll also throw 10k towards darknet infrastructure if someone comes up with a viable project.
Most folks I know who have actually watched it think it's horrific (at least in parts). It was banned for a long time due (IIRC) to the fact that you could watch it 'straight' and see it as glorifying all sorts of stuff. Especially when you take into account that the second half of the film is about government conditioning and then un-conditioning our anti-hero, so that by the end he's once again able to commit atrocities.
These filters are just an inconvenience, and if your child is too stupid to work around them then you've got worse problems.
> Do you have kids?
Now let's imagine Britain in 18 years time when today's babies are adults who've had their sexuality suppressed by this censorship.
My son is four. He watches a lot of stuff I was never allowed to as a child. He acts out scenes of decapitations with swords, for example, while playing. When his mom and I occasionally gasp or ask him to tone it down because we think it's going a bit far he goes "it's only pretend" with a condescending voice, as if we must be the stupidest people around to not realise that these things are just fantasy.
But if we as much as raise our voices to each other, he gets upset, tells us off and demands an explanation and wants to know who is angry at whom and why. Once we had an argument before his bedtime, and I left the room. The following night he wanted assurances from me that we were not going to argue again before I was allowed to sit down by his bed. He also understands well enough that so much as raising a hand at someone is unacceptable to the extent that when he is really upset, he has experimented with using the threat of it to try to get a reaction out of us (e.g. sitting on the sofa and calmly saying "I am going to hit you"). None of the stuff he's seeing in movies or his cartoons etc. has ever "crossed over" to non-play/fantasy situations.
I don't worry about movies. I worry about advertising. He can tell movies are fantasy because of how it is portrayed, but advertising makes claims intended to be believed, and from what I see it's effect is far stronger. Thankfully he's learned to detest advertising, and now get upset if we watch live TV because he wants to fast forward past it...
Commonly used hash algorithms are too rigid. A detection system shouldn't be bypassed just when a single bit gets flipped in a large file. The algorithm need to be fault tolerant, give few hash collision, and be proven by the passage of time. This of course a contradiction in terms.
It also need to be maintained and safe guarded against abuse. Who will watch the watchers, and how do we control what gets defined as offending images if there is no public reviews?
How is legal rights handled? How should appeals be handled, and peoples right to face ones accuser.
How do we control scope creep so "unwanted" political competition don't get suppressed under anti-propaganda laws? How is the slippery slope argument handled?
And last... but far from least, is the classical argument of 20th century political environment: Practicality. What does the cost-benefit analyses say about such filters and databases. Is the maintenance that those databases require cost more than they provide to society? What other options has been thought of, and how does the databases compare in efficiency and cost?
So if we think about it, maybe the harms are not that well hidden.
[1]https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120806/11053019945/curio...
https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges#RunningABridge
Honestly though, "Tor user" will probably remain an interesting / valuable (by their standards) enough heuristic for a long time to come.
That law is pointless. You're supposed to use Internet searches as bait as long as it works, not force criminals to create a new language immediately! There were paedophiles before the Internet! And I question the idea that porn makes children go paedophiles to begin with, which I understand this "Think of the children" argument builds on.
You know, when 20% of the population of Canada elects a Majority government that can do whatever it wants for 4 years because of voter apathy, I'm wary of the trust that should be placed in the people. But where the hell is it supposed to go?!
In the snow! Both ways!
Darn kids these days have it easy... (grumble grumble)
That it even made it to court meant there was a case to answer but the actual outcomes seem to be more sane and based on the context than the law itself.
I believe the crux was that the law said it was illegal to have porn that showed damage to the anus, so does fisting fall into that category or not? The outcome was no, fisting doesn't count as damage to the anus. The "stupid law" wasn't ignored, it wasn't a case of "people using their own moral compasses", it was a jury & judge interpreting a law, like normal.
That it even made it to court meant there was a case to answer
The cynic is me notices that the accused was a lawyer who helped prosecute corrupt police officers.
It begins with porn, of course, but it's essentially creating the apparatus to censor at will.
Interesting point. People want to look at porn, yet keep it a secret. Why? If there is nothing wrong with it then why should someone care?
Are teachers not allowed to look at porn? Why not? Can porn use be used against a husband in a divorce case? How?
You are making is sound like porn can be something unhealthy or negative? If it was not unhealthy and nothing negative was caused by it - then why these examples?
It almost sounds like you are making a case of why people should have a tool to keep it out of their homes. Why should people have to hide the fact that they want to look at porn?
Everyone of course already knows the answer. Porn can and does have negative consequences (of varying degrees) for most. Therefore, it is taboo in society. Everyone knows that the porn industry exploits women. It uses and abuses them. It is derogatory toward them. You see things like "barely legal" posted all over porn ads. So many men view porn, and they all try to come up with reasons that it is good and healthy - but everyone knows deep down that it is not. The pathetic industry will fight tooth and nail against any kind of legislation opposing it. They will cite freedom of speech and every other possible interpretation of anything they can get their hands on but these losers really just are all about money. They don't care about the lives they ruin. Men are still in power and ultimately give the industry the nod - not because they are doing the right thing, but because they are hooked and guilty themselves so they allow the false justifications to continue.
Porn is a devil - Everyone knows it at some level.
I mostly agree with your penultimate paragraph. But in answer to the why people should want to hide their porn habits: it is enough that other people would judge a person for porn, or any other habit, to discourage open sharing. For instance, I smoke weed very infrequently and think this is okay but it's not something I would be okay being open about.
> won't require her to seek out dubious illegal channels which are likely to be full of stuff much "worse" than she'd easily have found without all the censorship.
This is one of my biggest fears.
As an analogy (and a true story); they banned selling knives on ebay[1]. Now I have to go to specialist knife-selling websites to buy my knives (I am a collector). Those websites have a much better range and promote knives much better than ebay did.
So if you wanted just "mainstream" porn, you'd get that from places with prominent displays of all kinds of fetishes many of us would never have even heard of otherwise.
Then came the BBS's, and the same was the case - normal mainstream stuff in between every fetish imaginable.
Now I don't necessarily see that as a problem, but it does mean that by adding these kind of restrictions, they are effectively losing all control. They are also likely to massively hasten the move towards technologies to better anonymous, encrypted browsing.
If anything drives "darknets" and systems like Tor to the next level, it will be more extensive porn filtering even more so than piracy, especially because of the amount of money in porn that is legally manufactured and distributed, but that is or may become illegal in large potential markets.
We'll have to see for sure, but it seems to suggest that the legislation only applies to videos that couldn't even get R18 (sex-shop only) rated - but I would have thought possession of those was illegal anyway.
There are a ton of films, legally classified as 18 in the UK, that have scenes that graphically depict simulated rape, torture, murder, and so on.
> Leda and the Swan is a story and subject in art from Greek mythology in which the god Zeus, in the form of a swan, seduces, or rapes, Leda. According to later Greek mythology, Leda bore Helen and Polydeuces, children of Zeus, while at the same time bearing Castor and Clytemnestra, children of her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta.
> Putting it mathematically correct "11 months" sounds much less scary.
Yes, and for exactly this reason it's dishonest: It implies that you could, if you wanted, repay the debt in 11 months - which is impossible.
Anyway, 90% debt is only scary if we decide that there is a threshold below 90% that is un-scary. If the threshold was 150%, then Greece is scary but UK isn't. If it's 10% then everywhere is scary.
Personally, I'm more scared and/or outraged by the way the money is wasted than by the exact size of the debt.
Now, I'm not really replying to you as such, but I don't quite understand the alarmism over, say, a debt of 100% of GDP.
UK tax revenues are 39% of GDP (so, very naïvely, the government's "income") and with a debt of 90% of GDP, that's 2.3x income. Or a typical £25k earner having a long term debt, like a mortgage, of £57.5k.
I confess this is an extremely naïve analysis since personal and government budgets are chalk and cheese, but it doesn't strike me, as a taxpayer, as being a number to get alarmed over. Or am I totally missing something?
It does not imply that. It's simply the mathematical truth of the units. I'm arguing that using percent is factually _false_, with as aim scaring people. I prefer truthful facts with explanation. Feel free to use a different thing than debt/GDP, but don't use something that's equivalent to claiming that 1+1=3.
When you put debt as a percentage of GDP, it is understood to mean the "size" of the debt, with the implied "size" of 100% being bad (whether this is true or not, i m not sure).
While I agree with the rest of your comment, this is a frustrating attitude to take to any studies which may have been done. Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence!
(1) You know (or can tell) what content your kids are exposed to on the internet. Most kids I know are quite adept at keeping what they are upto hidden from their parents and that isnt unique to the current generation.
(2) Parents have a much better sense of content, kids are exposed to on TV (where content is regulated and rated for the most part) than on the internet.
(3)Even if you are an involved parent with the ability to discuss things with your daughter, you both arent living in isolation from society. There are easily more parents and kids that don't have such a relationship than the number that do. So if boys as young as 8-10, growing up in highly unsupervised environments, are constantly exposed to extreme porn, what do you think their expectations of women are going to be?
(4)Addiction. Everyone has weaknesses. And porn sites are getting better and better at keeping people hooked. Kids are the most susceptible.
Freedom has always come at a cost. And the main cost is equality. If all kids are born equal and all families are created equal sure give them all the freedoms they want. But that is unfortunately not the world we live in today nor is it getting any more equal any time soon.
Now, people working in the games industry are a different story... (Note: I'm not anti-games. But the games industry does consider addiction.)
> answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6082643
Furthermore, you posted this exceedingly stupid "Do you have kids?" one-liner at least four times in this thread, simultaneously managing to portray yourself as accusatory, lazy, superior, and spammy at the same time.
This thread has degraded in quality due to your participation, both in form as well as in content. You mastered the invoking of the infamous "won't someone think of the children" rationale and somehow topped it by assuming only people with children should have a voice in these censorship discussions and this voice would somehow automatically be bound to agree with you. While I find your opinion personally disagreeable it's really your (to use the term broadly) discussion style and tactics that are offensive in the extreme.
If it offends your sensibilities censorship is always an option :)
If you really require me to be explicit, I can spell it out for you:
* Each person has an individual responsibility to realize such things for their self via critical thinking.
* A reporter has no legal responsibility to uphold journalistic principals.
* A reporter should have an ethical responsibility to uphold journalistic principals.
This, to me, is the equivalent of victim-blaming:
You walk past a dark alley and see someone being
assaulted. You are under no legal obligation to
help the person, therefore you do not help the
person. The person has no right to be angry at
you because they should have been responsible
for *their own* safety and shouldn't rely on
anyone else. The person being assaulted is the
person that is *really* at fault because they
failed to protect their own personal safety.Win votes. That's the definition of success in politics.
They're not ignorant to the outcome here - it's exactly what they want and has been planned that way.
This is a serious fucking power grab.
> This is a serious fucking power grab.
* They realize it could be used for bad in the future, but they have delusions of, "bad things couldn't happen here." [ Sort of like the idea in America that, "Fascism could never happen here." ]
* They are more comfortable with creating said power because they are currently in control of it, and are short-sighted enough to not realize that this won't always be the case (i.e. the 'government' will control it, but they aren't guaranteed to be a part of the government).
The next step will be court sanctioned page blocks against the terrorists followed by the usual propaganda in the shite rags...
Probably in the same fantasy land where the parent described "every outcome" of the law, instead of just a few. If you wanna employ "hilarious" and "snark" better first get what the other guy said right.
I'm not even sure what your snark is supposed to be based on.
For one, nobody above claimed they can predict "every outcome" of a law.
Second, of course we can we can predict SOME outcomes of a law before it gets issued. Often times, we can even tell that a law is good or bad before it gets issued.
Predicting the outcome of laws is what the legislation process itself is based on: in the idea that the legislators draft laws in the way that they _predict_ will bring upon a possitive outcome. They don't draft random statements and see what sticks.
Now, because a lot of stuff can hamper the legislators (e.g private interests, appeal to get votes, ideology and partisan politics, fad moral opinions etc), a lot of times the public can tell a law is crap even before it gets issued.
Of course I have seen such ads - when I was searching for porn.
One place where the internet turns into a push medium might be specific services, like online chats. That is of course a valid concern, but porn filters wouldn't help with that.
That should instantly disqualify them from a career in politics!
Look at his behavior in this thread and tell me it's perfectly fine. I mean this seriously, you're a user with gigantic amounts of karma, certainly more than I'll ever have. If you think it's OK, I'll cede that I clearly had the wrong idea about how this place should work, and I'll apologize for overstepping.
[1] Couldn't think of a better way of putting it. I'm not saying that you're stating that sentiment directly.
It's easy to blame the reader when what you read is "too good to be true" or "so obvious that it's not", but when a fabrication makes its way into a rather respected journal, or when a more or less respected author gets something unusually wrong (which you're not clever enough to spot because it's not your expertise), then one can't be blamed to have believed it in the first place.